Slow NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500

I've got an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 in my P4-2.4 computer and SL is just slow. I'm only getting 5-6 frames per second and have most of the fancy stuff (bump, shiny, etc.) turned off. I took a look at the timers window and SL is spending 20-30 ms per frame doing "alpha". I thought that this card did all the alpha blending in hardware, am I missing something? Is SL not getting all of the cards capabilities and falling back to software?

Thanks,
Merv

I have the same card with a AMD Sempron 2500+ and 512megs Ram on a Abit NF8 mobo. Game runs smooth unless the sim I am in is laggy. Might be your internet conection? Make sure "Local Lighting" is turned off also. That seems to kill things.

I have a GeForce 5500 256MB AGP card myself (wich I also overclocked). What you're experiencing is normal even for me. Even with my card overclocked (far more then those crappy pre-overclocked cards) I still get at most 12FPS and thats only in low detail sims with only a handful of avies roaming about. It really has to do with where you're at and who's/whats around you.

That's expected performance for those graphics cards. Even with an extremely fast graphics card like an Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX, it won't use all the tasty power inside, and you need a superfast CPU paired with that, as well as top-notch RAM, AND a fat Internet connexion with as little packet loss and latency as possible, and you'll still get serious hits in framerate.

That's just the way it is with SL. Think of it like this... a lot of games have prerendered or preloaded environments. So, they can get planned ahead of time and streamed into memory. But in Second Life, you have so much control over the environment, which means you can suddenly throw out a wall full of 1024 x 1024 textures and it'll crawl the place down.

Having it this way ultimately makes it very unpredictable, performancewise. The big tradeoff is how customizable things are. So in this respect, SL has more of the system requirements of a 3D modelling app than any "game" (which it's not confined to, either).

I know Resis on very highend computers and they have the same problems.

I've just upgraded the pc to an athalon 3000 with 1g memory, but still use a gforce 5200 PCI card and get 5 fps.. was wondering if might get an improvment with PCIE card.. but it sounds like that isnt going be a guaranteed fix.... i'm on a slowish 500k network too... just dont know where to throw some cash for an improvement!

If you are using an AGP vid card, you most likely cannot use a PCIe card. As far as I know, there might be only one motherboard that supports both AGP and PCIe cards and Athlon processors. For SL, your best bet may be a GeForce 6600 AGP card.

Edit: You mentioned a PCI card. PCI and PCIe are not the same. If your computer has an AGP slot, the 6600 would be your best bet.

Hi, just joined and was looking for info on this same topic.

I've found something interesting. After testing the game with an ATIx800 and a 7800GT, the ATI card has much better performance with this game. I have been to the same places, with lots of people around and it doesn't slow to a crawl like the 7800GT (mind me, it still can be slow, just not as severe as with the Nvidia card). Weird...

Things got better after some tweaking (disabling almost every effect), but it all seems to point to some SL and the way it does rendering. True, the world might be fluid, but I find odd that things like our avatars' textures sometimes seem to get out of sync (a low res texture being display on the body out of the blue).

That's fascinating... you tested both in the same computer, i.e. swapping them in and out?

What's the rest of your setup like?

Multiple SL Instances

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Recently upgraded the wife and my desktops (configs below) and have tested multiple SL instances on both, with a fair degree of success; First the wife's system:

AMD Sempron 64/3100+ CPU
1MB of OCZ PC3200 DRAM
AsRock K8NF4G-SATA2 Motherboard
80 GB SATA2 harddisk
Nvidia 6600/256MB Video Card
350W PSU
Win 2000 Pro

Two instances run acceptably in a quiet sim

my system:

AMD 64/3000 "Venice" Ver E CPU
AsRock 939DUAL-SATA2 Motherboard
2GB of GEIL PC3200 Dual Channel DRAM
120GB SATA2 Harddisk
ATI X800GTO 256MB Video Card
450W PSU
Win 2000 Pro

Four instances will run, in a quiet sim.

Both systems are slightly overclocked, with stock cooling.

I consider the Sempron configuration to be a very good value system for SL.

Comments are most welcome!

PS: Will post some FPS readings soon.

Sorry.. I inherited the GEForce 5200 PCI card from my previous PC, when i upgraded the motherboard to a WinFast NF4UK8AC running the Athalon cpu. This board hasnt an AGP slot, but has PCIE-16 support.
Funny enough the GeForce 6600 is also available as PCIE as well, but i really need to feel i've some chance of geting some improvement before spending £80 on a card that might or might not make much difference!

kk this might get a bit windy but I just got a new vid card at someone's recommendation. I was gonna replace my motherboard & processor but the person insisted my vid card so I did.

What I 'm running....
1.3 gig athlon amd on winXP
512 mb memory on it
6200 Nvidia Geforce with 256mem

Cox.net cable connection

I can't believe how much replacing the video card helped. With my old card
*ducks* Nvidia GeForce 440 mmx SSE 64memory I was lagged out everywhere it was getting so bad that I'd look for empty Sims just to change clothes. I could go to an event IF
I didn't have to move( walk)...just dance or sit or stand. This was a very old video card. LOL It was recommended that I get Nvidia because that's what I had and my drivers would already (most likely) be the most recent available and would cause little to no
problems once installed or getting installed. The recommendation was correct. I plugged it in and voila! Now.... in a lag free sim I get an fps of 20 -30 ( sometimes 40). In a lagged out sim I get no lower than 4-5 and that's really lagged out.... you know, the places that are ALWAYS lagged out. Anyhow... we got the best we could afford and this one cost us less than 90 $. Is not top of the line but hey it kicks Butt compared to what I had

Toss in a faster processor and another 512mb ram and you'll see another big jump. MX series cards are low budget crap and aren't really good for gaming if you want some kind of performance. So yeah, going from a MX to a GT will yield big results. I gaurantee if you switch to the fastest processor your mobo can handle and up the ram you're GT card will run even faster since it won't be as bottlenecked.

I seriously doubt it.

Game load time aside, pretty much any slowdown is caused by the lack of horse power in the video card department.

I have a desktop built from my old AMD Turion64 laptop processor. 25 watts max, 1.6ghz. I locked it at 800mhz, and run it with a 6600GT video card, the frame rates are exactly the same as on my regular desktop (Dual Opteron, 4 gig ram, hardware raid, etc).


The underlying issue with SL is that the graphics engine isn't well optimized.

Example: I was underwater at the edge of a sim. I was facing a wall. If I faced away from the land, I got 60+ FPS. If I faced the wall - which should be nothing to render - I got under 20 FPS. The reason is that the graphics engine renders objects even if you don't see it. It's a huge waste of resources.

That is one of the first things that should be optimized when you create a graphics engine. So if that isn't done - there is no telling what else is lacking.


Disclaimer: This post wasn't meant to bash SL - I enjoy the game, but I think there's some polishing to be done on the graphics engine, camera control (flying through solid objects), as well as collision detection.

Actually having more ram reduces the overall bottleneck on your system. The only way you won't notice a difference is if SL is the only program running.

You're assuming he's swapping. I would assume he isn't. If he's having issues, the first thing he did was kill off the internet explorer that was sucking up 250 megs of ram

ANY PCIe card will run SL noticably faster than a plain PCI card. Put simply, PCI vid cards are a step down from AGP cards, which are being replaced by PCIe cards. I can honestly say that going to PCIe will be a big step forward. Just shop carefully. There are bargains to be had with the 6600s.

I paid $110 for my 6600GT from newegg (was $130 with $20 mail in rebate). Best card for the buck. There are faster, but not at this price point, and the 6600GT is quite a bit faster than those under it.

accroding to SL I am running

CPU: Not supported (3192 Mhz)
Memory: 511 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
OpenGL Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL Renderer: GeForce FX 5950 Ultra/AGP/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 1.4.1

It is actually a P4 CPU that is supposed to be Dual threaded (think that is what it is called)

IN the average sim I get 25-35 FPS
at home on Dragon Isle 75-100 FPS
In a laggy sim 15FPS
if its real bad 3-5 FPS
I have local lighting, shadows and Ripple water turned off

I gotta say this particular VIdeo card although an older one now has performed like a trooper and SL is fantastically playable for me even with only 512 MB of DDR

Ultra cards are pretty much the best of the best nVidia, that is until the 7x00 series came out. Now the best is like the GTX series or something like that.

Your cpu does alot of the work for you in SL, why youd get nice performance with a 2.8+ ghz pc.

GF FX 5500's and 5200 are extremely underpowered but they support a lot of features. The supporting a lot of features is not necessarily a good thing as it can give your video card more to do even though it has less power. I have a GF4 ti4400 and a GF3 ti500 that both will outperform an FX 5500 though they don't support all the features of directx 9, opengl, and programmable shaders.

FX sounds cool and 5000 might be a big number but it's all marketting. SL does depend a lot on cpu power, however the video card still has to render all the polygons on screen so a slow video card can hurt you. When people say a fast video card won't help you what they mean is all the new features on top end video cards won't do you any good. It's all down to the GPU speed and the video memory speed which can help you.

For people wanting decent performance in sl and most other games at a good price I recommend a GF 6600GT, which you should be able to get for about 125$ or less. Check newegg.com. it should be roughly 3x as fast.

A 64-bit processor with about 1Ghz FSB clocking about 3Ghz and something in and around 512Mb of RAM and almost any higher tiered nVidia card will make trees in the game look like they are in a storm constantly, something about the animation is based on frame and not seconds. I got tired to messing with the settings and just upgraded and I am very happy now with my performance almost anywhere I got.

Except the texture loading problems, WTF is up with that? Takes forever to rez stuff these days even at 300Kb/sec!

the 64bit proc with 1gig fsb is great, but 512mb is pretty low, I wouldn't use less than 1gig of memory and that's absolute minimum. 1.5-2gig is much better.

300kiloBytes/sec or 300kilobits/sec? If it's the former, I'd be very surprised because I've never seen SL's download rate jump that high. Inworld, press, CTRL-SHIFT-1 to call up the stats and look on the right. It shows the transfer rate in kbps, or kilobits per second.