Insanely low FPS

My average FPS is like 9.0 on here, for some reason.
I have a GeForce FX 5500 and 700-ish ram.
I put all the settings to their lowest, and it's around 14 fps when not walking, and 9 fps while walking. I put everything on the highest settings and it's 8 when not walking, and 4-7 while walking.

14 is still very low, compared to other games and programs I use. Any suggestions?

I've moved your post to Technical Issues where it can be discussed further, as SL Answers isn't the right place. You can also contact support for help.

I should also add, Yiffy--what you are describing sounds normal, because SL doesn't use preoptimization tricks that many games do. And it actually doesn't behave like a game in this respect. One of the settings that makes the biggest difference is Draw Distance--if you set that to 64 m.

SL is very CPU bound, so the fastest CPU on a well-balanced system you can get makes a big difference. You may wish to do some forum searches about this same topic.

Also, there are more improvements to framerate in the works, as well as additions which will make more use of your graphics card. We're always hoping to make the Second Life experience a better one.

Never heard of a FX 5500 with "700ish" megs of ram. At most an old card like that probably has 128megs of ram. The largest ram size you can get is 512megs, but 1gig cards are almost hitting the market, but again nVidia wouldn't be doing that to an old video chipset like the FX series. Besides I don't think SL uses that much texture memory anyway.

Anyhow, I posted this idea in a different thread.

Go into Options, and click the Adv. Graphics tab.

Remove the check that says "Avatar Vertex Program (faster)"

This may actually run faster if this is unchecked from what I've read on the SL-Wiki, though it's said to work for ATI based cards. Your mileage may vary.

At most I'd suggest uninstalling SL, and reinstall your video card drivers, your chipset drivers, and perhaps sound drivers. You may also want to double check and make sure you not running any weird apps in the background that's making SL sluggish, like a virus scan, or some distributed network project like Bit Torrent, folding at home, etc. Lastly always check for spyware, and viruses.

OH and one last thing could be your connection to the internet might be screwy. Power cycle your cable/DSL modem and see if that helps. Try to change your IP if possible that often helps clear out a lot of network congestion problems.

My GeForceFX 5500 has 256mb and many that are out there nowadays are 256mb. I think he ment his system has 700ish RAM (probly 76.

Anyways here is my recomendations:

1) Download the latest drivers for your videocard (for nVidia cards I recomend the NGO Optimized Drivers found at NGOHq.com)

2) Download Driver Cleaner Pro 1.4, uninstall the old nVidia drivers, clean out the left overs and your CABs with DCP by following the instructions in the readme file.

3) Install the new drivers.

4) Run SL and make the following mods to your settings:

-network: move the slider to 900. Cache should be 500 or 1000 though you may notice better performance at 200 or even purging it each time SL starts. Cache performance varies from PC to PC.

-Graphics: from my experience enabling Shiny Objects and Ansitropic Filtering don't hurt performance so you can turn these on. Keep off shadows, local lighting, and ripple water. Optionally you can turn off Disable Far Clip.

-Advanced Graphics: Draw distance to 64, fog ratio to 3.0 or higher, particle count to 1024 or less, Outfit composit limit to 0. If you turned off Disable Far Clip in the Graphics tab you can set drop draw distance to 5 (if your FPS drops below 5 it will start droping the draw distance to stablize you at 5 fps or better).

On my computer with these settings I average about 18 fps standing and 13 walking. Now remember, everything in SL is streamed and can't be converted to mesh form (at least not now anyways) so SL will never run at or over 30fps unless you got top notch system specs. SL is more comparable to a 3D rendering program like Lightwave instead of games like World of Warcraft or Doom, so don't expect it to run at 100fps becuase its graphics appear simple.

Thanx for helping, HUGSaLOT and Ron.