First Timer...

Gday all, hope you find yourselves to be twice as well as I find myself today...

Well I popped into game last night and had a bit of a look around in the newbie zone... First thing I have to say is that the lag was stupeifying, I've never encountered such a shocking degree of lag for quite a while... Can anyone tell me what PCI stands for? The main reason for my concern over the lag factor is that there didn't seem to be many people around.

The map I saw certainly looks interesting and I was most impressed with the detail involved in creating the avatar. I can see the learning curve for this 'game' is quite steep. i downloaded all the extra accessories I could see but i couldn't figure out how it was supposed to be imported into the avatar interface...

I'll be having a more thorough look around over the weekend, so you can expect to see me online again in around 24hours...

Respects in advance... yobbo.

Can you please post your internet connection and PC specs so we can maybe get to the cause of your lag? Also, what was the region name (in right hand corner) when you were getting this lag?

Have fun in your SL!

welcome cousin yobbo!

Well I was in the welcome area when i was poking my nose about... I have a spanky ADSL connection so there should be an issue there... as i said above I'm not sure what this PCI business is about but i do intend to pursue it further over the weekend, I'll also be trying to lower the screen resolution, etc...

I can't remember the specs to my machine right now, but I know its reasonably chunky (I work on a Mac at work and as I spend most of my time there I've committed those details to memory rather than my home PC's specs)... But I'll post them tomorrow.

At a guess i think my fps would have been around 2 or 3. It was pretty bad in the orientation before entering Second Life it would've been around 9 or 11.

Salutations Dragon, mell met, Salaam Alekium. Is there any significance to having the second name? I didn't want one so I assume there must be a point to having it...

By PCI I think your meaning the window that pops up on first launch of the Client software...

This means that you have a pci video card. Most likely if this is the case, a majority of your lag is due to this.

I have owned a G2mx (PCI), G3 Ti200 (AGP), and a G4 Ti4200 128mb (AGP).

And I now come to the conclusion that anything less than a G3 will get you bad lag.

I recently did a experiment (not by choice), I have a 300mhz P2 that allows the usage of a G4, and I have a 1400mhz Athlon that wont take the G4 so I use a G2mx on it.
(previous board failed so I had to use the 300mhz for a time)

The conclusion was that the 300mhz with the G4 out performed visually than the 1400mhz with the G2.

Rendering was cleaner and faster on the 300mhz except for ares that had alot of activity (many people, scripted objects, movement, etc...)

The populated areas were the only place where the 1400 with G4 out performed the 300mhz as actrive areas require more cpu power.

FPS comparisons:

nonpopulated areas little activity:
300mhz - 8 to 15 FPS
1400mhz - 5 to 10 FPS

Populated areas moderate to heavy activity:
300mhz - 4 to 12 FPS (but choppy performance and irregular client crashings)

1400mhz - 1 to 8 FPS (extremly lagged, delayed responce to chat and movement, also the client was slow in responce to menu clicks and window toggle.)

Also both systems have 512mb ram

Hope this helps out

So to sum it up you need a good to great video card and a decient cpu to perform well in Second Life.

There's also a message that "Your AGP video card is running in PCI mode" that a lot of people get. I know I did with both my Athlon 1200mhz with GeForce2MX and with my Athlon 1800+XP with Geforce4Ti4400. Both were severely jumpy (I don't want to use "lag" since that usually implies the network connection is latent, or there is an obvious difference between when someone performs an action and when you actually see it).

In the case of the 1100mhz machine, upgrading my motherboard drivers and nVidia drivers worked great. Speed picked up by 2-3x. I never did resolve the situation with the other machine (it bit the big one recently when the power supply died). I moved the Geforce4 into the slower machine and I'm getting between 8-25fps depending on where I am now.

Joe

That does sound like a card problem.

There is a post in the help section about the AGP/PCI video card issue which may help you.

And, by the way, Welcome!

While the learning curve is a little on the steep side, you'll be happy to know that there are regularly scheduled classes held in game for everything from building, texturing, scripting, to avatar customizing. They're free and they're a big help in giving you a jump start Welcome to SL!