Performance Tips

I have an eMachine T6524 with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB RAM but only the onboard video (PCIe ATI Radeon XPress 200) and I'm getting pretty slow performance. How do I determine my frames-per-second?
Also, what are some good settings to get better performance. I'm probably going to upgrade my video card soon but I'm afraid I'll have to upgrade the power supply as well (it's only 300W).

Thanks for any suggestions.

To get the Frames Per Second (FPS), you go to View --> Statistics Bar on the menu. Or you could type Ctrl + Shift + 1.

To find out which settings give you the best frame rates, go to Edit --> Preferences on the menu, and then experiment with the "Graphics" and "Adv. Graphics" settings. (Most settings tell you what causes slower or faster frame rates.)

I'm only getting around 4-7 FPS when other people are around. Even with all the details turned down and the vertex turned off.

Honestly, you're better off just finding a better video card. I've been trying to get the best SL experience off the same cards and specs (only 768 Megs of RAM instead of 1024), without much of an improvement. All I can suggest is using the Omega drivers at www.omegadrivers.com in replacement for the official drivers. They tend to work better. Other than that, there's the generic windows optimizations such as defragging, clearing out some space on the HD, closing down unnecessary background apps, that kind of thing.

P.S. My recommendation for your new card: Something that can actually run through OpenGL ^.^

ATI cards also have issues in SL. You may also want to adjust your graphics settings in the graphics and advanced graphics tabs. Also for those cards its recomended to turn off Avitar Vertex Program.

I don't think the problem is that it's an ATI card, I think the problem is the specific model.

I just finished testing 3 very similar machines, with the graphics cards being the only variables.

ATI 9250/128MB ($35): typically 20 fps
nVidia 6200/256MB ($50): typically 23 fps
nVidia 6600GT/128MB ($100): typically 25 fps
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M/128MB: typically 2 fps with the Omega driver, 1.7 without

So he should be able to run out and buy a $35-$50 card and expect a huge improvement in graphics speed. Don't ask my why the Xpress 200s are such utter dogs in SL, but they are.

With the Radeon Xpress its also known if you disable the avitar vertext program you gain like 5 - 7 fps as well. But yeah that card in perticular is a bad card. Its like getting a Geforce 6100.

I'd recomend an nVidia Geforce 6600GT though, that $100 will las ya a bit.