Processor upgrade required?

Hi there. I'm a SL newbie and I'm very excited about the potential SL has to revolutionize the web as we know it, but enough about that.

I have an AMD 2000XP running at around 1.5Ghz. I have about 700MB ram and I've recently upgraded from a Radeon 7500 to a 256MB Sapphire Radeon X1600 (8x AGP). I've read the SL system requirements and it appears that I'm no only within the mimimum system requirements, but also just within the preferred.

I have a Bband connection (advertised as up to 8MBit but getting just around 2MBit)

SL still appears to be quite sluggish. Sluggish at loading, sluggish at moving around etc.... and I've been kicked out more times than I can mention. I've played around with the graphics settings, but there doesn't appear to be that much difference between the high settings and the low settings.

I've ran the usual virus/spyware checks, cleaned my registry and made sure that only the essential services and progs are running in the background and my display drivers are at their most recent versions.

Half-life and Doom 3 run perfectly at the high settings.

Am I doing something wrong or is this normal for SL?


Genefreak Meek

Welcome Genefreak!

The low frame rate isn't indicative of a problem on your end. The framerate of SL is low by the standard set by most games. I get 30+ FPS playing World of Warcraft (and that's through Wine on Linux), while in SL I get in the low teens.

The reasons are many, but include

1. The whole world loads dynamically onto your computer. This means that at the same time as your computer is working hard to render the world, it's also managing the downloading and assembly of the next great thing to throw at the screen. Compare to a lot of medern games (MMOs included) which hold the entire game world lives on your hard drive, ready for fast access.

2. Minimal use of graphics horsepower in the graphics engine (compared to games like the ones you mention) The SL render path is very heavily CPU limited. We only recently (relatively speaking) got OpenGL accelerated niceness like shiny prims. The engine itself needs badly to shift some of the workload towards the GPU. (Go open source SL client!) This is why changing the graphics settings doesn't seem to affect your system very much. Since I've got a Nvidia Geforce 6600, I just crank AA and Aniso up to 4x or more. Framerate drop is nearly nonexistant, because the CPU is what's limiting my FPS.

3. We the SL residents build a very polygon heavy world. To get the detail we all like, we use many many more polygons than a premade game would stuff into their world for the same level of detail. This isn't to say that we're any less talented.. merely that the generality and flexibility of the SL build system extracts its toll in higher poly count for equivalent detail.

Your experience should be decent (but not outstanding) on a Athlon 2000XP. I only recently got off of my 2400XP with a few newegg purchases.

As was mentioned, SL is designed to work at low frame rate relatively speaking. If you are consistently running around 10 -15 FPS you are golden. You should go into Preferences and turn down your Draw Distance and see if that helps. 128 meters is what I run at and I have a 4400+ AMD X2 and I usually run around 25 FPS or so on average.

700mb of ram is on the high side of barely playable. Believe me I know, because I went from 512mb to 2gb and the performance gain was incredible.

Many users on this tech forum have confirmed that 1gb is probably the minimum for smooth playing and 2gb is even better. But evidently, going beyond 2gb will not add significant gain, so any spare $$ beyond that would be better spent on a better graphics card.

If you can afford it, and your system can handle it, I highly recommend a RAM upgrade if you want to lose that sluggish response.

My XP box usually uses about 300-400MB when idle. When in SL, I've seen it up over 1.6GB..

Depending on how much you use when idle, moving up to 1.5GB will probably make SL much happier. Going to 2.0GB will probably make it a little happer still. Going over 2GB, unless you're already running lots of stuff, probably won't make a lot of difference..

If you're at 1GB and can't afford going to 2GB (or your box doesn't support it) I'd even take going to 1.5GB and losing DDR over staying at 1GB with DDR.

As others have said, more RAM will help a lot.

You can also try the Omega Drivers for your ATI card. Many ATI users have had better SL performance with them.

http://www.omegadrivers.net

Thank you for everyone's helpful replies. I switched to Omega drivers last night but it made no difference... well not any that I noticed. I understand that I would never get the framerate of a game installed on my HD, but other online worlds (albeit not as functional) run alot better. I guess I will have to wait till I get a better machine before continuing my Second Life..... even though I've read recently that other people are having serious issues - such as packet loss and crashing.... Maybe the technology is not quite there yet.

Just one more question. The highest speed processor that I can use on my motherboard (ASROCK K7VM2) is 2.6GHz. Will there be noticable increase in stability and framerate if I upgrade my 1.5Ghz to one of these?

Gene.