Huge change in FPS for no apparent reason

Good to hear it's back to normal for you. Mine's back to normal as well...but then it is still shooting down to 1 fps every 30 seconds. And I again KNOW it's SL because my CPU doesn't shoot up to 100% in ANYTHING else BUT SL. SL is making my computer do that.

God, I want to fly to LL's offices, walk right up to one of the developers and say "why?" strait to his/her face and see what their answer is.

It boggles my mind. My mind is boggled.

It was gone, then came back for no reason.

I'm sitting there playing with flexi curtains and without moving my camera, I watch as it goes from a lovely 17 FPS to 1 fps...then stays there for 10 seconds, then just shoots back up and loops.

Stop it, Second Life. You're not funny. :-\


In one last desperate attempt at getting this piece of crap software to work, I'm reformatting my computer AGAIN when I get off work tonight, which will take hours to do so and then set everything back up. Thanks.

edit: same thing is happening. I'm honestly ready to give up. It was fine, then SL decides to do this. SL Is a piece of crap and all the Lindens need their oversized heads kicked in for making such a glitchy incompatible "game".

I've had this issue too Tor, needless to say I'm on a sufficient machine that meets the requirements.

I average about 50 FPS in high prim areas, and about 20-30 FPS with multiple avatars on the screen (like 10-20+ is when i take a performance hit)

I'll be idling sometimes up at my house and I'll notice my FPS go from 50 to 0.5 - 3... then it will spike back up to 50 FPS, and do it again. Mind you this is with nothing but SL running on my system. Antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-anti, and the anti-anti-anti, all disabled. AIM, MSN, Yahoo, everything turned off. My first thought was that maybe it was one of those having a memory leak issue but no, it was SL.

I've noticed from time to time SL will actually spring a leak and start munching away at system resources. At one point it was using 1500 meg of my system memory. Fun stuff... but I don't know if that's a related issue or not.

Edit: It should be noted though in the latest release candidate this issue seems to have been resolved, but I am still watching. >.>

It is fair to say that the Client is responsible for doing a lot of work, especially rendering. When FirstLook was first released, it has increased graphical pipelines which resulted in greater increase in rendering textures, objects and media. At that time FlyCam was introduced and I could zoom about sims taking raw/uncompressed footage at around 45fps without a hitch.

There is a balance that people expect from the client, so the graphical pipelines have been subdued in favour of script and animations. I would welcome a range of either clients and or settings that would give me what I need from the client, rather than something that tries to be a jack of all.

I loaded FirstLook_Windlight yesterday after suffering for long enough with the 'Jack of all' standard client, and even the bugged Candidate version. Despite having everything set on 'Ultra' the experiece was much better than the other two offerings.

I wonder how long it will be before this gets 'tuned down' to become the standard release? I love the useability of the FirstLook client, but at the cost of it being 'more buggier', I noticed you cannot select your profile etc by r/h clicking your name tag (I deleted the floors a few times trying LOL). For my money, reduce the bugs in FirstLook and leave it as a seperate choice of client.

I run an Intel Core2 Quad. 2.4GHz on each of four cores with a 1066MHz FSB, 4GB of DDR2 800MHz dual-channel RAM, an overclocked nVidia GeForce 8800GTS with 640MB video memory (game is set to use 512MB of video memory), 6.4Mbps download speed and 440kbps upload speed on a cable internet connection (SL is set for 1.5Mbps download and 128kbps upload), and a 150GB 10,000rpm Serial ATA 150MB/sec harddrive which has SL on it. The in-game performance stats show me hovering around 25fps most of the time, which is pathetic compared to the other games I run (I average 85fps in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and around 70fps in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter). The 8800GTS is overclocked to a speed of 630MHz core clock and 925MHz VRAM Clock (1.8GHz effective). If I set the video card for maximum quality, the framerate drops to around 8 to 10 frames per second, but if I set it for "Let 3D Application Choose Settings" I average about 25fps. I sometimes get enough lag to drop the framerate to less than 10fps, but that usually only happens if I'm moving around or there's a lot of avatars nearby. Even at 25fps, though, it is still noticably laggy compared to the games where I average more than 3 times the framerates. If I set the video card graphics for "maximum performance", that is when I get around 35 to 40 frames per second, at the expense of everything in-game being bland and boring. I really would like to see SL's performance on par with more intense games like WoW, FarCry, or even Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

I have been experiencing these huge sudden FPS drops as well, nothing has changed on my end either.

Well the low FPS is back for me, dropped to half usual agian on Friday.

I don’t see the sudden FPS drops you mention its just a lot lower than normal.

It might be worth you looking at Client Debug Settings:
CTRL + ALT + D > Client > Rendering > Rendering Tests
There are some radomize FPS options there, nothing should be checked with an X

Couple of articles I found might be of interest.
Cant post a link cause you need to login and sessions expire!!

Go to support.secondlife.com and access the Knowledge Base.
Search for the following article ID's, "4004" and "4207" & "4287"

4004 is "Statistics Bar Guide"
4207 is "I have a lot of lag. How do I stop it?"
4287 is "Typical Frame Rate Performance by Graphics Card/GPU"

What I found interesting is in the Statistics bar guide article, everything appears ok except for where it states :-
"Agent Updates/Sec - The rate at which agents on this simulator are being updated. Normally 20 updates a second, this will decrease if the simulator has a large number of agents on it."

On my referance Sims which are virtually empty and I'm the only Agent, Agent updates are <10.

I'm not sure about this but to me this implies LL that are controlling the rate that the Sims update, which will have an effect on what FPS you recieve.