0-5 Fps

Hello

I run a P4 3.0GHZ PC, with 1024mb ram and a Geforce 6800GT 128mb card.

However, I have never seen more than 10 frames per second while playing SL. SL is alays a gigantic blur full of half loaded buildings that take up to 10 minutes to load. If I want to walk, it is delayed nearly 30 seconds, and then I'll end up hodling the forward key down - and 30 seconds later I'm miles away. This is very frusterating, considering my computer is top of the line - and I have read about people with much lower performance computers who have SL run fine for them. I've changed every graphics setting possible - In SL and in my hardware settings, and I've tried a few drivers.

SL is still a laggy low fps mess.

Is anyone having the same problem - and has anyone had it and managed to fix it?

Thanks in advance!

Sounds to me like a bad connection. Your symptoms sound exactly like when I tried running SL on dialup. What sort of connection and speeds are you seeing in your broadband connection? Are you using a wireless connection?

I have also seen severe slowdowns when using duel screens on a single card too.

I'm using DSL, connected through a modem that is not wireless.

As for my speeds - I'm not sure exactly but after taking a test via http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/ it told my my bandwidth was 2.5 Megabits per second.

I had a 512kbps adsl connection and even that didn't seem enough (from Australia) so I've upped it to 1.5Mb and now it's more satisfactory, but not perfect.

I just wish iiNet would install a DSLAM in my area so I can get up to 12Mbps down and 1Mbps up!

PS: I have AMD 2500+ with 1Gb RAM & nVidia ti4200 128Mb with not many probs besides avatars randomly disappearing.

See if your ISP has an FTP server and ftp a largish file down from there. My ISP has 5 test files of various sizes called 'adsltest' 'adsltest1' 'adsltest2' etc
That way, I can run a graphical ftp application and read what the speed is.

Try tracerouting to SL to make sure there's no problems on the way.

How would I go about tracerouting?

Start>Run>CMD

!Ping www.MyIsp.com?

Assuming you are getting broadband speeds, have you tried turning your bandwidth down to 300 or so? Is your draw distance around 128? Turned off your firewall and anything Norton's to see if it makes any difference?

I have a 2.3Ghz computer with 1024 RAM, a GeForce 6800GT card and a 1mb DSL connection. Generally speaking 5 fps is not bad for me. But I notice that while the bandwidth and the ping results are pretty consistent, the fps tends to swing wildly. I get periods when it constantly oscillates, from say 30 to 5 fps.

It's when it drops below 1 fps that the game becomes almost unplayable. This seems to be happening more and more lately. I have had periods where the frame rate has dropped as low as 0.4, which means freezing on the spot and not being able to do anything until the situation improves.

This has always been a problem, but in recent months it does seem to be getting worse.

A few comments:

1. You will experience a significant drop in framerates anywhere there is a gathering of other Avatars (15 or more). The more there are, the worse it gets.

2. Your draw distance has a direct impact on your framerates. If you spend time indoors, I reccomend a draw distance of 64m. Outdoors, I don't go over 128m myself.

3. Particles kill framerates. Turn them off if you don't care about them.

4. Hit ctrl-shift-1 to open up the Stats window. Check to see if you have any packetloss (It should always be 0.0%). If you do, try reducing your bandwidth in your Preferences=Network until the packet loss goes away.

5. Don't trust your ISP on what they tell you your bandwidth is. Go to www.dslreports.com/speedtest and run a test against your line to see if it matches what you expect. If it doesn't, contact your ISP's tech support department.

6. Turn off local lighting. It ain't ready for prime time yet.

Hope this helps!

Travis,

Your comments were general, so I will answer them insofar as they refer to my problems.

1. I haven't checked the number of avatars in relation to my frame rates, but I would have to say that I haven't noticed a significant correlation between the number in the sim and my frame rates.

2. My draw distance is, on a good day, set to 128, but lately I have had at times to lower it to 64 just to be able to move about.

3. I have a waterfall and a fountain on my property, and some smoke coming from a chimney. I think that's about all, and I do rather like them.

4. It's a while since I have checked packet loss. Certainly, when I have checked it, it's been zero most of the time, although when the freezing gets really bad sometimes it starts returning positive numbers.

5. I have checked my bandwidth, and my average speed seems to be round the 980kbps mark.

6. Local lighting is turned off and has been for a long time, although I miss it very much.

It's all getting a bit worrying. When I started playing second life I had a Geforce 4 card and 512 RAM, and framerates were generally a lot better. If they get much worse than they are now, the game will literally become unplayable.

Check your programs, some programs kind of mess up a little with SL running.
As I stated on anther post, java seems to dislike SL, tried running azureus while SL was running, SL crashed down had to restart the program and leave azureus off.

Can't think of anything else that might cause SL to lag down so bad, even on sims where i have seen 30 AV's or so the lag was bad but not that bad, could still move around.

Some programs attempt to use your bandwidth without your consent, keep track of them, zone alarm i great to stop pesting pograms to do that kind of actions.

Hope this helps a little.

I'm stumped as well. Typically, my framerates are between 7-15 FPS, and I spend most of my time indoors. Its not uncommon for my numbers to drop as low as 2 FPS when I'm attending a busy event.

Selador - I should have prefaced my comments with a nod towards Dustin. My apologies if I was pointing out the obvious (or inapplicable).

Overall, I have noticed a drop in client framerates since 1.6 was released. When I'm referring to avatars in a particular area, I'm referring to a group of avatars within your draw distance setting.

Prior to 1.6, it seemed that I could be nearby up to 30 avatars without significant lag issues. Lately, that figure seems to be closer to 15. I admit, these observations could be purely psychological, but I agree it sure seems as if SL overall is providing lower client framerates than before.

My specs are:

Athlon 2600+
1.5 GB RAM
GeForce FX 5500 256MB Video Card
3000/768 DSL Connection

Frame rates are very dependant on what is built around you and the number of active scripts and such. If you are in a sim that has a gazillion builds on it and 1400 active scripts then you are going to be lucky to even move. Try a new empty sim and see if your frame rates jump up significantly.

Thank-you all for the help.

I deffinately do not think my internet connection is the problem, I've taken about 3 different tests and my connection has topped all of the comparison charts

I've gotten results from 2.4 Megabits per second/2400 kbps to 2.6 Megabits per second /2500mpbs


Last night I uninstalled SL, cleared the cache (Thank-you to the invidual who wrote the batch file, it helps!), uninstalled my graphics drivers, and installed new ones.

SL seems to run amazing now - and I hope it stays this way.

But maybe it is just because my cache is empty... I'll wait a bit and find out.

I'll let you know what happens!

Once again - thanks for the help!

I run SL on two different PC's:

Main PC:
Athlon 3200+
Geforce 6800GT
1GIG DDR 400 RAM

Secondary:
Athlon 2600+
Geforce 3 DDR
1GIG DDR 266 RAM

I get the same frame rates on both PC's. I have tried changing every option I can but still cannot get decent frames in most situations. When I am alone on my land, the majority of the time I get 20+ FPS unless I start to look around. If I look around, I get drops below 5 FPS and then it stabilizes until I move or look around again. As soon as other people come on the screen, that's when everything drops very low in FPS. Going to the Frogg Marlowe show, I am looking more at a screen shot then a moving picture but there are usually 40 or so AV's on screen. Considering the performance is the same on both PC's, I highly doubt upgrading my hardware would make a difference. It seems to be more of a technological limitation server side or with the code. Every other game on my PC can run 60+ FPS with 4xAA and 4xAF enabled. Maybe this will change when Havok 2 is implimented but for now I just "live with it" and realize I am not the only one in this boat.

I also have a T1 line so bandwidth is not a factor.

Im experiencing some lag too... i should be able to put SL at its top of the line specs and still run fine. I also play World of Warcraft a much more graphically demanding game and get 95 fps, then irun this and must get 5 fps...I think possibly the problem isn't to do with the users, but the main server, there are far too many users for one server, so it rather needs to be beefed up or split up into a couple servers or something.

I run an Athlon 64 3400+
1025mb DDR ram
ATI X800 XT platinum 256mb graphics
im running windows dedicated off a 30gb 10,000 rpm hard drive and SL is running off a 80gb 7200 rpm drive but is pretty much the only thing running.

Im not at home right now, so im going to try some things mentioned in this forum to see if that works... but i don't wanna dwarf my graphics to make it so i can play with a decent enough frame rate after putting so much money into a computer that can run the Half Life 2 engine flawlessly.

World of Warcraft - a more demanding game then SL? ummm no

SL contains millions of textures, scripts , polygons compared to WoW, besides if you had everything stored on your drive (wich wow has) offcourse SL would be faster if you didnt have to stream everything down/up and render.

Same with Halflife 2,, please stop comparing games with SL , its way diffrent how they operate.

People in SL can wear so many things they will make 3dmax rendering look lightwork, ( kinda) there isnt any game that has so many details as SL sometimes has in view -period-

1 Pile of cluster of torus can be more detailed then a entire HL2 map (tho the map will sure look nicer then the cluster), sure it looks like a ball of wierdness but the rendering power needed to draw them is massive, hense the immense slowdown in rendering.

And yes fps is pretty low in SL sometimes, im not dffrent in fps, idling at 10-25fps, 40-60+ in empty sims, and drops to easy 5 at heavy places.

Thili is right, SL is a wld west sort of place with little restriction on what can be built or what textures are used. Look around most any built up sim and you will find countless textures, some huge and file sizes in the meg range or more.

THat huge texture has to be downloaded, stored, rendered on a prim. One isn't a problem but 100 of them on top of everything else jostling around to get processed really slows things down.

I have a 4400+ x2 duel core AMD
6800 Ultra w/512m
2 gig memory

While standing in Furnation Alpha my frame rates vary between 70-80 looking at the empty end of the sim to 15 fps looking toward the heavily built up end and 25- 40 everywhere else. In my home sim of Uba, which is old, built up and has around 800 scripts I am lucky to do 15 fps, usually lower most times.