SL runs a slow as hell-pls help!

Hi All,

Ive just registered an account and download SL. I have a very reliable 1mb connection that i regularly get 100kbps download sppeds with and my system specs easily beat the minimum required. But when i start up SL it takes a while to how the menu - im just looking at a black screen for a while. Then once it is on it takes me ages to do ANYTHING i click on the preferences button for example and im literally waiting minutes be it displays- it is painfully slow.

I haven't even got to try to play this game inworld yet and really want to while i have my 7day trial. I've search thru the Support Wiki and cant find anything that helps.

Btw i have a router but the firewalling section is disabled as it used to cause huge download problems with torrents, etc.

If anyone could provide any help it would be much apreciated.

Thank you.

Sounds like it might bt your hardware. What system are you running?

Well here are the minimum on the SL website:

System Requirements

PC/Windows:

* Computer: Pentium III 800MHZ or higher, with 256MB RAM or more
* Operating System: OS: Windows XP (sp2) / 2000 (sp4)
* Video Card: nVidia Geforce 2 (32MB RAM) or higher, or ATI Radeon 8500 (32MB RAM) or higher
* Internet Connection: DSL, cable modem or LAN (256kbps downstream or higher)


and mine are:
P4 1.7Ghz (i know it aint super but its mile better then P3 800mhz
512mb+256Mb Ram
Win XP Pro
ATI 9800Pro 128mb
Cable modem 1mb (soon to be 4mb)

Surely it must be a software issue on my PC? (btw i have DirectX 9.0c if that makes a difference)

Hmm, more than good enough then. The interface can be a little slow sometimes but nothing like what you're describing.

It certainly sounds like a software issue, I take it other games and stuff is working alright? Are you running anything else at the same time? You could try updating your drivers or defragging your drive, maybe reinstalling SL.

EDIT: How tech savy are you? Not sure what level I should be talking on here.

you can get as technical as you want with me - hopefully ill understand you. i should since im the IT nerd at work (lol). But not an expert at gaming techy stuff but know the basics.

Fair point about trying to reinstall - my pc had been running for a few days when i installed SL - but i did a reboot before actually running it for the first time.

Since rebooting i've closed all unecessary programs and processes. i have fairly recent ATI driver but am dling the latest ones as we speak.

Ill let you know how i get on with both of those things.

If in the mean time you have any techy stuff to suggest - please be my guest.

To be honest, I was half hoping you wouldn't be techy and there'd be a simple solution.

When you say you've killed the unecessary processes etc. does that include any virus/spyware scanners? I've heard of Norton in particular being a pain in the ass.

Try reducing some video settings. Lowering draw distance to 160 or 128 and/or reduce particles etc. That often helps a bit.

As I understand it Alien hasn't even got logged in properly yet. Am I right there?

Heh as far as this goes

PC/Windows:

* Computer: Pentium III 800MHZ or higher, with 256MB RAM or more
* Operating System: OS: Windows XP (sp2) / 2000 (sp4)
* Video Card: nVidia Geforce 2 (32MB RAM) or higher, or ATI Radeon 8500 (32MB RAM) or higher
* Internet Connection: DSL, cable modem or LAN (256kbps downstream or higher)

I was going to post awhile back thats no way in hell decent enough for SL to run on, not even close.

first
: 800mhz, more like 2500+
: ram ? 256 hah... try 1024 min
: video card... holy.. i mean who use 32mb vid card in SL can it even do squat?, min gforce 5+ 128-256 ram
(dont ask me about ati equalent)
: Dsl/cable 1 mbit min,

Ok try this in SL, bring up this menu : ctrl-shift-1
look at basic fps,
you will be at somewhere by range of 1-9 with that pc in heavy areas,
10-15 in light,
15+ in empty/staring at ocean , i guess about there (wild guess )


Things to help with speed in SL for you tho;
Preference / graphics

Anistropic Filtering : off
Local lightning : off (this is a really heavy thing)
Shadows : off
Disable far clip : off
Shiney Objects : On (not thaaat heavy, pretty^^)

Avatar Rendering : Normal
Terrain Detail : None

Preference / Adv. graphics
Performance options : tick off (ati cant use SL's agp graphic thingie anyway)
Texture Cache size : 512 )=
Video Card Memory : 128 ?
Object Detail : middle slider
Tree Detail : bottom
Avatar Detail : middle / bottom

Avatar Vertex program : dunno if you can use it, toggle it

Draw Distance : 64 to 96 (over 128 is heavy for your comp)
Fog Distance : eh i dont like fog so mine is 4.0
Drop Draw distance if FPS : 0
Bumpiness Draw Distance : 0
Max Particle Count : err... dunno these are heavy if you got a ton, 512?
Outfit COmposite Limit : 0


Just some tip, dont run... torrents when you have SL up, unless you chocke their upload, i had another machine running once and SL went soooo slow,, durr, i forgot to set a upload limit speed, and it was killing me. (cable one, not the oc3 ;_

Sorry Thili, gotta say I don't quite agree with you on that.

I'm currently running on a laptop with:

1.6GHz
1GB RAM
9600mobility (64MB video memory)

and most of the time SL is quite happy running with these differences to your described settings:

far clip disabled
terrain detail on full
tree detail on middle
avatar detail on full
draw distance at 256
and max. particle count at 4096.

I'm getting frame rates at least as good as the ones you stated, often twice that or more, and that's running windowed at 1400x1050.

Honestly, I don't think I could survive with a draw distance of 96; but then I rarely go to parties so don't have to deal with too much hoochie hair.

I run with 256mb of RAM without any major problems.. Altho I have to admit I want to upgrade it

Hardware Overview:

Machine Model: PowerBook G4 12"
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (1.1)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 512 MB
Bus Speed: 133 MHz

GeForce FX Go5200 32MB:

Type: display
Bus: AGP
VRAM (Total): 32 MB

Yeah, it does squat Sure, I have draw distance down to 64m for Tringo etc., but I can go up to 256m for taking photos as long as I'm not flying around at the same time!

I am running slow as hell on a 1.7 centrino with 512Mb ram and a built in mobility radeon 9700. my question is, what frame rates should I expect? what does everyone else get?
At times, my laptop slows down to 1fps.

Depends what you're doing, my frame rate varies roughly between 3 and 30 depending what's going on.

I find the biggest factors in performance are the server and the network.

I usually get about 2-3 fps (see above for my tech specs).

And no, I don't go dancing a lot! I've had up to about 7 fps on private islands, and at that level, dancing does approach a realistic feel.

Don't expect a lot out of a Centrino, period. The biggest thing that can help is to make sure all your driveres, including the motherboard are up to date.

I have a 3800+ AMD Athlon 64 CPU/128 RAM video card, full gig RAM and I go to parties and am lagged so badly I can't even move. I turned all the settings down suggested by two friends, nothing.

Even out of parties movement is pretty choppy no matter where I am. This is the only game that runs like this for me. I play other online games that run smooth as silk. Any other suggestions?

What are you running specifiaclly? What is your internet speed? What video card do you have? Integrated video is going to suck no matter how fast the cpu. Have you updated all the drivers including the motherboard and video? Then again, what are yur frame rates? No one gets good performance with crowds.

Well, it's a laptop so the video card is sort of a permanent fixture, regardless. It's an ATI 200. The whole vertex/pixel shading and 128 video ram. It's not shared with the regular RAM, it's dedicated.
My internet speed is cable but the connection I'm not entirely sure of.
Frame rates, I haven't checked. Is there a way in-game to tell? All I can say is movement ws completely impossible. I literally couldn't move anywhere as I was lagging so badly. It wasn't even 'mediochre' performance, it was NO performance.
All my drivers are updated, as well.

You are using an ATI 200 motherboard chipset with integrated video derrived from the X300 video card. This set up is likely not going to perform worth beans on SL in my opinion. ATI tries to pull the wool over it's customer's eyes by advertising "Hyper-memory" and says it has 128m of video memory but that is not true, these cards usually only have 16m natively on the card, the rest is provided by system memory through the PCIe bus. This is slow, very slow compared to onboard memory.

My advice is to turn down all your settings to minimum and perhaps try the Omega drivers instead of the ATI for the video if you are sure you have the latest drivers for everything else. You also need to verify you are getting the internet speed you are supposd to be getting by using an online speed tester like Toast.net.

You can check framerates by going to View>Statistics Bar and you will see the framerate at the top of the pop up window.

So what you're saying is it's a shared video card, even though it's said that it isn't? Uh... EQII and SWG run just fine on it, smooth as glass without video lag over whatsoever and they require much heftier video requirements than SL advertises to require.

This is the video card the laptop's running if you can glean anything off of it. http://www.ati.com/products/radeonxpress200m/index.html

Since I don't have your exact specs in front of me, all I can tell you is what I suspect you have. From the link you provided look at the 3rd paragraph down;

"The Radeon® Xpress 200M offers a Radeon® graphics core, that is a derivative of Radeon® X300 PCI Express technology designed for DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL compatible games."


This is quoted from a Tom's Hardware Guide article, the undesputed oracle of computer component knowlege


ATI X300 with Hyper Memory waiting in the wings

February 14, 2005 - 10:33 EST

ATI calls it "Hyper Memory" and its X300 chips are capable of supporting this marchitecture. It's not so big a deal for the noisy high end market, but all OEMs and system integrators just adore it. It gives them the power and right to say that a graphic card actually has 128MB of memory, even if the real graphic card has only 16MB or real dedicated graphic RAM.



Now, as far as other games working fine, here is the deal. SL works very different from other games. EQII and most all other games have preloaded, highly optomized textures (pictures placed on the surface of a prim) that are super small, super fast. The texture pallet of those games don't change therefore they can be loaded when the game loads. The memory these textures use is small and can be handled by the shared memory pretty well or may even just depend on the small onboard memory.

SL on the other hand has no texture opimizatin and it all changes on the fly. You can quite possible by surrounded with very big textures uploaded by the players that can be 1024x1024, 2 meg pictures and it can be in a scripted slideshow prim and change every 10 seconds. High end, high dollar video cards have lot of problem dealing wih that.

I've talked to quite a few people who were drawn to SL by the promotional videos and were quite unpleasantly surprised when the actual play doesn't live up to those by a factor of ten or more in performance. Even prior to the advent of major bling, a way overtaxed asset server, and an in-game population ten times the size of 2003's, 15-20 FPS was usually considered to be teh roxx0rz.

*sighs* Does this mean that my RAM isn't as high as it should be given the potential of shared video? And if this is the case, what can I do from a laptop perspective to help performance? More RAM? or will that even make a difference?

You have plenty of ram and adding more won't make a lot of difference. You have a smoking laptop that is good for just about anything you throw at it... except SL. Even so, you should still be seeing 15-25 fps in a modertly built up sim with a couple of avatars. Unfortunatly SL has a long history of not getting along with ATI products.

Try the Omega drivers, I have seen huge improvements using them over ATI standard drivers and they are great for laptops. The other thing to try is turn down your card memory in SL preferences to 32m and see if things improve, try 64m and see if there is a significant slowdown, if there is back it back down to 32.

There isn't much you can do with a laptop really, other than make darn sure the chipset drivers, video and all the other drivers are updated.