Extremely low framerate

I'm posting on behalf of my girlfriend here. She has an ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 SERIES display adapter and SL just won't run at all for her in any way that would come close to "playable". When she first logs in she starts at 45 fps which instantly plummets to 1.8. After updating DirectX and setting ALL SL graphics settings to the bare minimum she gets a whopping 3 FPS. She's on a good DSL line, she has 1024 MB of DDRAM and has a 2.2GHZ processor, so it can't be that.

I'm currently trying to get her to upgrade her drivers though I don't hold out much hope that it will fix the problem. Could anyone give any advice at all as to what might be causing this? It's driving us both insane.

EDIT: And might I just add here that the support wiki is completely and utterly useless on this issue? For gods sake, listing a few random brand names isn't going to solve people's problems. >_<

EDIT2: Well updated the video drivers to one of june (because ATI's page is on crack and won't load for me to give her the most recent drivers), well she's now running at 4 FPS on a machine that should be getting 4 times that on bare minimum settings.

ATI is notoriously problematic in their OpenGL implementation as used by SL. The common wisdom here is that this is truly ATI's fault and that they have been not amazingly cooperative with LL on fixing the matter. I believe the "Omega" series drivers are supposed to be considerably better, but I am really not well versed in the ATI/SL issue.

From reading the specs of the chipset, I cannot tell if it uses shared primary RAM or its own depending on implementation. In a laptop or as a on-board adapter it may well use shared system RAM which is often a death-knell to SL playabilty.

She isn't incidentally getting these problems elsewhere.

She isn't on a laptop or notebook either. So chances of it being shared RAM are low? (I'm kinda sorta techy but I have no clue what that means)

So what's the fix? Buying a new bloody graphics card? Also these Omega drivers, can she download and use them or are they incompatible with her card?

EDIT: I am a software engineer and not marvelous with hardware, and I bloody hate these product overview pages. I can't even tell if this card -is- in fact an on board card and if it is if it has this Shared Primary RAM thing. If someone could shed some light on this for the not so hardware savvy that'd be great.

It should be noted that I don't get ANY FPS issues in any other games I have.

:-/

SL seems to be the only one that this occurs in. As well as being incredibly frustrating, it's cruel in a way, given what we planned to use SL for.

>_<

Well I found some obscure note on google somewhere telling mac users using ATI cards to turn off the Avatar Vertex thing in the preferences. The minute Helen did that her FPS shot up to 15 or so. We might still try the Omega drivers if they truly work better, and if someone can tell us if they're compatible.

Anyway, problem solved. Blah. If I'd known ticking off one option that is supposed to make things go faster would do it...

It is also the received wisdom that SL uses the ATI drivers in ways that no other widely known game does. Very few games use OpenGL (they prefer DirectX, which alas is Microsoft propietary) and none use it as "hard" as SL.

I have yet to see any diffrence with vertex/on/off, but im kinda sure it has to do with using your vid card hardware to do it instead of your cpu , so if you tick that on , load on cpu should be lower. ( shoot in if you know what it actually do?)

I think when that got [x] Avatar vertex , the card would try its best but not to powerfull, so disabling it let the cpu do the work and the current one she has is more powerfull then the vid card, sooo it runs smoother with it off letting the cpu do it.

Tick it off/on see if it drops instant, (might be a addon to wiki help about Vertex thingie?)

It is indeed the problem. I personally have a GeForce FX 5200, and have it checked on. Both cards are 128mb but like I said I'm not hardware savvy so that's all I have to go on to compare how good they are. Having it checked runs fine on SL for me so it seems that it's an ATI problem.

And yes, I will be adding this to the wiki. Sorry about getting a bit flustered/flaily in this thread, I really hate these kind of problems.

EDIT: Added to the relevant section of the technical FAQ in the wiki, as well as the "performance issues" section.

big difference here.. the shadowing on your Av look a hundred times better with it unclicked, maybe you need a certain sheder like 1.4 or over but I aint sure..

I ment fps not look tho (45fps compared to 45fps with it on - currently anyway) but it seems to skip alot more over the place with it off + way not - fps tho

Anyway i took a screenshot of my human with vertex on/off, (funny nose).
Ok i got 2 very diffrent screenshot depending on where i look tho, /blame SL's LL