Less Graphics Card Memory = More FPS ??!?!

Ok,

Like many folks, I have been experiencing more lag since the 1.10 patch. Which has honestly stumped me because my system kicks.

WD Sata HD
1 Gig DDR Ram
6600gt Nvidia
3.2 P4 w/HT (obviously)

Mine may not be the best out there but its pretty damn nice....Anyways - check this out because I want others to test this .... perhaps there is some sort of memory leak with the new patch.

The other day I was logging in and once again noticed my system was perfectly fine for about 2 minutes. All textures and objects were rezzed. After the couple minute mark, my FPS dropped to around 10. I went to my settings, and was confused since I had previously turned all over the settled to low and turned off the shaders.

For the hell of it I turned down my graphics card memory from 128 to 64. I know it makes no sense, but I was figuring "eh, why not" since I had tried everything else.

I hit Apply

HMM - NO LAG, FPS GOES BACK TO NORMAL!

Its been good every since.

Others who have FPS issues.... Give it a try and if it works..... report it here or to Bug report or whomever so it can get fixed.

Just to answer before others ask:

1) Yes, new drivers.

2) I can play Battlefield 2 on high.

I hope this helps people

-Johnny Mann

Hey peeps,

This worked on my friends card (who has nVidia)

Is did the opposite (lowered the FPS) of my other friends who has ATI.

Interesting

Eh, lowering the ram from a graphics card and things being better can only mean one of 3 things....your SL settings are hosed...your Vid card settings/drivers are hosed..or SL is hosed. You pick.

Laptop:
I tried going from 32 MB vid-RAM and noticed no difference. ~16-18 to ~16-18 (average).
However, the range was tighter on the lower settings (that is fewer really fast frams and few really slow frames, so instead of 11-23 it was 14-20).
Using an ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility.

it had no effect for me and I'm running a 6600GT as well.

+0.2 fps diffrence , 6800gt/7800gt , both at 1600x1200 wasnt big wooo tho.

I think mine reset themselves after I did a system restore, and my fps is up in the 30s to 40s now.

Like I said I play BF2 on high.

I was thinking my card may be Borked somehow, but how can I play other games like BF2.

Well it worked for me, who knows why.

SL does not fully install on your drive, therefore unlike bf2, doom 3, (you name it) it does not have the advantages that does game do as it pretains to your videocard. Nothing you actually see on sl is stored locally (your hd) so you have to ask the server for it, download the info and your gfx card had to draw it all in from the bottom up. Bf2, etc has all its textures, models etc installed, just a matter of chosing them accordding to your settings (low, med, W00T etc) much faster and less strain to get all that from your hd where its ready to go then to download the bascis, draw it, apply the resolution etc.

Not exactly accurate. You do download the data from the servers routinely but you also have a temporary cache of recently used data entries so that you are not redownloading the exact same texture repeatedly when its visible on 20 prims in range. You download it once and as long as that texture remains in cache you dont download it again. Same with certain other aspects of the game. There are networking ineffeciencies in how SL has the client recieve updated info, mostly in the fact that it will go ahead and request the full stats on prims even when they havent moved and are inactive. These issues will improve with time.

Thank you for the added info Seronis.

I still recommend people give it a shot. I have had a few sucess stories from friends.

Sounds like settings files are causing SL to lie to you about what you're set to, like it's down at 32mb even though it says 256mb or something. If you set it back to maximum again, does it go up even further, or does it get worse again?

I'd open the Statistics menu and see how much GL texture memory is being used.

The average scene in SL can easily have 128MB of textures in it, and many have far more. (This is a major aspect that differentiates us from actual games.) If the memory space of textures you see exceeds your texture memory, you start using system memory instead, which is a great degree slower.

There's a possibility that lowering the texture memory system made SL use lower-rez textures, lowering its overall memory usage and speeding things up. It could also be that your system (by the graphics card's memory bandwidth, bad motherboard drivers, or one of several other factors) can't handle swapping texture memory in and out rapidly. (This would be why BF2 is a bad comparison; it loads the texures for a level and then doesn't swap anything out until the game is done. This is, once again, why comparing SL to games simply doesn't work.)

I was giving an example of the stability of my system, but I know what you are saying. The interesting thing is when I set my card back to 128 (its maxium) it works fine for around 2-3 minutes, but then extreme lagging takes place. The card's memory is low though, I will admit I would love to have 256-512.

I guess to me what doesn't make sense is why 64 MBs work so perfect to me, no lag what-so-ever.

Yes the Edge is basically Lagless.

This just confused me altogether, thanks.

I'm guessing, if your card is a 128MB RAM 6600GT ( oh and sorry to burst your bubble but gaming wise your system is poor ) it's possible there's a slight overflow to system RAM or some other system ram sharing causing the slowdown as it keep swapping to system RAM.

WOW! Getting closer to understanding what's wrong now...

On my 7900GTX 512Mb, which is stuck at half (or less) the fps I used to get in 1.9, I can crank the Graphics Card Memory down to 16Mb ('apply' each time...) with NO EFFECT at all on fps!

Is that screwed up or what?

Clean install SL/Clean install all board and graphics drivers/rebooted connection/checked firewall/etc/etc

Only - what NOW?

Gaming-wise my system kicks.

And hell no I'm not going to go get Dual SLI to play SL...

And I'm not going to go RAID dual Raptors for fast HD loading, thats a waste of my money.... I don't have enough zits or MD Code Red to do that and I actually have relations with real women.

The only thing that needs improvements is my Vid Card, which I am not going to do if it plays SL , along with every game out there right now, on high.

I just wanted to post something that works for me and hopefully give useful advice.

Did you just post this on an alt? Because if Bobby isn't Johnny then I'm confused.