fps very low pls help

hi i just downloaded second life and i am trying it out. the fps is like 3-8 and i have it on basic settings. i have a good computer with a radeon x850 platnum edition i have 1 gb of ram and i have no idea why its laggy pls help

Common answer:

Make sure Local Lighting is OFF (local lighting is completely CPU bound and requires alot of processing power and has pretty much been broken since ver1.7.0).

Set draw distance to 64.

Lower particle count (I have mine set to 1024, some have a bit more others less)

Set fog ratio to 3.0

lower outfit composit limit.

Enabling Shiny Objects and Ansitropic Filter doesn't really hurt the frame rate much (maybe 2 frames at best) so its ok to leave those on.

Your card should be able to handle ripple water without a performance hit (then again I dunno much about ATI). This one is iffy, maybe an ATI guy can clerify that one.

Shadows are usually slower because like local lighting its CPU bound.

If you have a newer PC with a HyperThreaded CPU, Dual CPU, or Dual Core CPU then set SL's affinity to one of your CPU cores (HyperThreaded CPUs are virtual dual cores). SL can't handle multipul CPUs/Cores as its designed for a single 32bit processor. Hopefully future versions will fix that.

And finally, keep in mind that SL will NEVER run like World of War Craft, EverQuest2, Quake4, Unreal, etc etc. Reason is SL doesn't keep static meshes of everything stored on your hard drive. Everything, piece by piece, is dynamicly created in real time and streamed to you in real time. That and SL is more like a 3D rendering program like Lightwave or Maya then a game engine like Quake4. What does this all mean you ask? Simple, SL will never reach a FPS of 80 - 120+ even with 2 PCI-e cards in SLI mode (partially because SL doesn't support SLI).

EDIT: forgot to mension if you don't already you should try out a 3rd party ATI driver like the Omega Drivers. Many ATI users have had success with those.