Setting a standard benchmark for SL performance ?

Hey,

This will be a long post but bear with me if you are trying to figure out SL performance as I have been. I have read the forum for a month on anything related to video and performance and here is what I have found.

It appears like the Nvidia 6600 is the sweet spot for performance in SL. I know some people have gone to 512 meg PCI express cards and gotten reduced performance !? I myself upgraded to an Nvidia 7800GS AGP and got NO performance increase. When I go to “Bad Girls” I still sit at 4PFS.

Even more irritating is that I run SL from work on a very busy machine with an Intel onboard graphics video card on my second monitor and although I don’t get the same performance as I do at home I get acceptable performance. How can that be? Both are Intel 2.66 CPUs but one has an onboard $30 video card and one has a $300 dollar video and they play similar !?

From what I read I hear the combination of CPU, GPU (video), motherboard (chipset) and RAM is somewhat random. Some people get stellar performance and a particular combination while others get poor performance on similar rigs. And I do understand all about the bandwidth issue and the variable amount of prims. I am talking about AFTER everything has rezzed and in an environment that is generally stable (night club with minimal people coming and going). There is no way that you can tell me I should be getting 4PFS on my hardware when I was getting 4FPS on my previous 6600. I also understand the performance issues related to linden labs backend, etc. I am not talking about sever problems I am talking about two people in the same room, one with good FPS and one with bad - why !?

My thought is this. If everyone just starts spurting our their hardware and frame rate we will really not get to the bottom of anything as that has been done on the forums many times. What I would like to see is a static test environment created that closely resembles common places in SL, a nightclub or closed shopping area. Would it be possible to create a building in a sandbox and fill it with gyrating “bots” covered in bling with lots of crap on the wall, moving lights, video, advertisements, etc, etc, etc. That way we could have people enter it, wait for everything to rez and then record their frame rate via FRAPS. Obviously an open area test would be good too but there is no way to control an open area. With this “fake” nightclub filled with nothing but one person testing their framerate we stand the best chance to get a feel for what hardware is doing what, since this is clearly a random mystery in SL.

Soooo, I am still a bit of a newbie in SL and have only been here a month but am pretty surprised at the lack of ability to nail down ideal hardware. So I cant really build yet and my time in SL in limited since I now find myself to be a busy family man. (Preciously I was always the geek that tested hardware in games, but alas, I cant on this one.) If someone sees the value in this and wants to take it on I am sure myself and many others would appreciate it.

Possibly people could contribute some old bling if we need to set up an environment with “flashy stuff” to drag down framerate. Or perhaps someone has some other thought on how to set some standard for determining performance in SL? Some thing that could be reproducable so we can narrow down ideal hardware for good performance

If you respond please post the following:

CPU:
Video:
RAM:
(If known) MB:

Also, you can determine your framerate by clicking CTRL-SHIFT-1 at the same time and looking at the upper right.

Thanks ahead !

Scott

Mine:
CPU:Intel 2.66
Video: Nvidia 7800GS 256 megs
RAM: PC2700 1 GIG
(If known) MB: Asus with an Intel Chipset

PS. Another thought. If you have a very specific example of increasing your performance please post it. IE, added another gig of RAM and had a noticeable performance increase, etc.

Benchmarking for SL is kinda hard since avatars is the sole reason you can get <1 fps, ok so texture sizes/amount on prims do their work to, but rendering some of the avatars really kills your cpu.

SL right now is most dependant in this order;

Cpu
higher the better , why cause most of the things you see in SL is rendered on spot not so much for vid cards yet.

Tho local light finally work nice \o/

Memory
1 gig ram+, nuff said lower youll be caching and grinding your harddrive alot since a sim can easy take 500mb ram then toss in avatars boom

Vid Card
Secondlife page says this, but its more like this;
· Video/Graphics Card**:

1. nVidia GeForce FX 5600, GeForce 6600, or better
   
2. OR ATI Radeon 9600, X600, or better
   
3. (i added pref 256mb vid card + : p )
   
   

Sure you can have lower, be prepared to take a hit if youre near alot of client side rendering tho, like particles,

Higher vid cards wont do much yet, theres not that much eye candy in SL,yeh i dont use ati anymore, so dont have a clue about them now, the fiddling with their drivers where to annoying.

Bandwidth
eh what can i say, 1mb or higher for normal SL use , if you watch video in SL better have alot more \o

Got several pc's not much diffrence from the lowest vid card to best i got, cpu on other hand, does alot.

These pcs pretty much the same performance fps wise , but eh to hard it varies when people are near it drops, but can play usually fine without any slowdowns

amd64-3500+
2gig ram
6800gt

amd64-3500+
4gig ram
6800gt

x2-4200
2gig ram
6800gt

x2-4800
4gig ram
7800gt

There no fps diffrence noticiable from any of these pcs.

yeah i abrely felt a performance boost between:

-athlon xp 2600+ with 1.5Gig of ram and ati radeon 9800pro SE
-athlon X2 4200+ with 4Go of ram (/3Gb switch active) and nvidia geforce 7900GTX

i am more thinking the SL 3D engine on top of not being a rolls of performances is hitting it's limits with the prim crazy avatars of today

probably time to rewrite it? probably.
also the second biggest problem of poor performances in sl is poorly optimized creations in SL.

Great posts thanks.

In particular the second post is concerning:

>-athlon xp 2600+ with 1.5Gig of ram and ati radeon 9800pro SE
>-athlon X2 4200+ with 4Go of ram (/3Gb switch active) and nvidia geforce 7900GTX

When you say there was barely a performance gain that is concerning, but its also what I am talking about. Now in my case I may be playing for the first time a game that is CPU centric as opposed to GPU centric. (the only other game on the market right now that prefers a CPU more then a CPU is Obvlivion). So my wimpy Intell 2.66 is the bottleneck. In any other game my CPU/GPU combination is adequate. When I upgraded to my 7800 I had $300 to spend. Its likely if I had gone with my first choice, an X2 3800 and stayed with my 6600 I would be better off right now.

But we are still back to finding a "magical" individual combination. I just got through IMing a guy getting 60 FPS with an Nvidia 7800 GT and an X2 3800. He did the same kind of test I wanted. He had 4 PCs all with varied configurations. He did a frame rate test on a static spot on his island and got low frames rates (on low hardware) all the way up to 60 FPS. (see $500 SL PC post).

Thanks, all of this helps. I likely will have to wait but the X2 3800 is calling my name

Scott

What is "X2 3800"? sorry i'm not good with abbreviations.

It's not abbreviated. It's the AMD X2 3800.

Ok, here is a good example of what I am talking about. At work they gave me a laptop after waiting for two years and the specs were stellar. But it has an M200 video card with shared ram video. Everything else was fantastic, crap video card. SL was unplayable. So I traded someone who had gotten an earlier one. His was a DELL D610 with an X300 video card with 64 megs dedicated. When I turn down SL settings I get 6-10 FPS in very busy night clubs and 20-30 frames in less busy areas. Although its not ideal I can live with it when I am on the road. But I barely get that on my $300 video on my main machine !!!! I have determined it must be the Intel chipset on my MB, so that has to go (more $$ 0h joy!)

Thanks

Scott

Yes, found it on pricewatch for $229, AMD X2 3800 with motherboard.

http://www.cpusolutions.com/8004744CPU/Customkititems.asp?kc=BIOSTARMBC3

Click the drop down and select 3800. That is a hard price to resist, so I dont eat for awhile