What should I expect?

Hi!

I have been a citizen in Second Life for a bit over a year now.
When I first entered the virtual reality of Second Lfie I enjoyed it immensely.
But unfortunately I used and still use an ATI graphics card.
When I started to play around in Second Life I was made aware of the severe performance issues SL had with ATI graphics cards.

For this reason, during the year I have this account, I have only been a very short time in SL.

I think I am using a rather powerful computer right now,
an AMD 64 3800+ with 1GB RAM and (maybe unfortunately it seems) a Radeon X800 with 256MB.

With this computer I can still not enjoy SL in all its glory, even on the default settings it runs slow and choppy.

I believe if I had an NVIDIA card I would be able to crank up the graphics with this computer, wouldn't I?


Or am I doing something wrong, an option to be changed to increase the performance?

I still can't select agp support for my card in the preferences.

Does one of you know what settings I should enable/set to to be able to play SL smoothly?
Is there any way at all for me to get it to work faster than one picture a second with my computer?

Thanks,

Dalea

The first thing you may want to try is going to http://www.omegadrivers.net/

Omega gets their drivers from ATI to tweak and play with before ATI does a driver release then they are allowed to put out a tweaked version of the same drivers. I've never had a problem with graphics in SL and people I have sent to theis site have had fewer or no problems after downloading the appropriate Omega driver. Give it a shot it could work for you too.

I went from a ATI 8500, to an NVidea 6800. Its better but .. I gained some speed but lost some quality . I gained aprox 20% speed increase. ~ 3.0 Ghz P4

Your , 256 RAM allows you to cache more textures though.

Here is a help on changing Prefernces.

https://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Changing+Preferences+for+best+performance

Your mileage may vary.. depending on your sim...

You should be able to get 15~20FPS just standing in your Sim..

Define "slow and choppy". What's your framerate? (Ctrl-Shift-1) What's your draw distance? Do you have local lighting turned on? Shadows? FSAA? Anisotropic filtering? These can all affect SL beyond a usable level.

With the parts you have, you should have fairly good performance. You may need to look at your internet connection or other factors. ATI cards have really good quality, especially the higher end cards like the X800. ATI's problem has been stability with SL, crashes and the like but not quality. From what I understand the newer ATI cards have far fewer problems with SL than older ones. Keep in mind though, no computer available right now( available to mere mortals anyway) will play SL without occasional freezes and slowdowns due to high prim counts, lots of scripts and heavy avatar traffic.

I'll just state my observations on ATI vs. SL:

From June to mid-December, I experienced regular crashes, minutes apart.
From mid-December through today I have only crashed about four times, 3 of which I triggered myself in trying to find a way to repeat a crash-bug in 1.6.

I run at a 1152x648 resolution on a 16x9 HDTV monitor. I have the draw distance set somewhere around 320m, and very little fog.

My ATI card is a very old 9600pro with only 128mb RAM and standard ATI driver (non-Omega.)

The setting that seems to have made the difference: I disabled fast-write in the ATI video settings. However, I did this while downloading an SL update mid-December... so I'm not sure if my change solved my crash problems, or if the new SL version solved them.

Hi Pepplar,
Thanks for this info. Accoridng to this Wiki, "Texture Cache Size: Set to Small to improve performance. " I seemed to misunderstand about this cache. I try.

This is an interesting one...When I first came here, I dropped $300 at the time on a new video card. Radeon 7200 just didn't cut it. Being the impatient bastard that I am, I just ran to my local Best Buy and dropped 300 on a Radeon 9700. Worked great for SL, still does. This isn't your normal, OMG I have the latest why can't I get 3428973298 FPS type of game...most is bandwidth dependant...and not on your side. Midline video cards seem to perform just as well as high end here.

I have an ATI 9600 XT (128 MB RAM) + AMD Athlon 2600 XP processor but I use it in 1024x760 and I set my drawing distance to 160 meters (or else it becomes TOOO slow). Though i'm only on a 512kbit ADSL link, maybe that could cause problems, too.

But I wish SL could be more enjoyable on this hardware. Though I've learned, there's no such computer in the world that's good enough for SL

I have DSL , its 1500kbits fast I think.

The odd thing is, I am currently running SL in a window and am standing in the island sandbox.

With all settings set to their maximum values it runs very smooth right now.

But as soon as I get into an area populated with lots of buildings etc. and have my settings on the default values it starts running very choppy.

So, the buildings seem to tax my system the most, but there is a huge performance difference from the sandbox to the normal area.


Dalea