Framerate & CPU Usage ideas

Hi All,

I just installed Second Life today, and I'm pretty impressed with the client. I love good support for windowed mode, since I hardly ever run games full screen. However, a game in windowed mode is forced to play well with others.

For example, right this second, SL is running at 60 fps and its pegging my processor at 100% though it doesn’t even have the focus. It would be nice to have a maximum desired frame rate setting that would apply to windowed mode only. When the frame rate goes above this setting, SL could sleep the main thread a few cycles, since right now the whole system is bogged whenever SL is running. I'd much rather run at 30 fps with lower CPU usage. At a bare minimum, it should try to avoid rendering at a frame rate higher than the video mode’s refresh rate. It’s easy to get this info from DirectX, and I’m pretty sure there is D3D method for yielding CPU time based on the VSync.

Being a noob, I find myself constantly reading SL web pages in IE while SL runs so I can cut and paste data back and forth. I’m usually listening to music and sending the occasional IM as well, so teaching SL to play nice would really help.

alot of ppl have insanly low framerate (cough im looking at you older P4's) so i have a feeling that the call for this might be thin

im actually plesently suprised for a framerate topout request, i just cant figure out the general picture of ppl with Hyperthreaded Intels DDR3 and Geforce 7's (for example) repoorting FPS in the 1-15 range, when obiously their machine stomps the living crap out of mine (amd xp2200+ with a gf6600gt constantly in the 60+fps)

Kinda makes me wonder what LL is missing (memory addressing difference or whatever)

back on track, you can minimise SL and it will only eat 50% of your CPU power, if you close the im windows it will blink on the taskbar when a new one arives, maby that will free up some resources

Yeah, I had the same framerate problem when I first installed SL (FX-55, 2GB ram, ATI X800), and maybe this is old hat, but setting "Drop Draw Distance if FPS <" fixed my problems right away. That setting should probably default to something tolerable like 15, since the default disables the feature.

I have a suspicion that some of the lag was caused by the fact that I didn't have anything cached locally, though, does that make sense?

While I'm listing pet peeves, I really hate to see the 2D widget render and the 3D scene render locked together, making the UI unusable when the fps gets really low. Even if the 3D pipeline drops to a few FPS, it should still be possible to render the 2D UI at a higher rate in a different thread. I hate to fault SL for this, though, since most games do the same (is it me, or are games in general a little late to the multi-threaded party?)

Sorry if I sound like Complainy McWhine Mayor of Gripeville on my first day

no go ahead theres a whole mountain of "problems" with sl you could go into

I think the reason is because SL is a single threaded 32bit app and they're trying to run it on a 64bit Hyperthreaded/Multicore/Mulitprocessor setup wich SL is not made to run on.

Not sure about that, Ron. Single threaded code is a tiny bit slower on Multicore procs, but it wouldn't bog the system down to a few fps. And 32 vs 64 bit doesn't really matter, since the OS treats them all like 32 bit.