Since the latest update...

... I've noticed something odd about personal fps.

As it happens, I was actually monitoring personal fps on my estate immediately before the grid shut down, so I know exactly what it was then.

On login, immediately after the 'maintenance/update', as one does, I ran through the usual checks - what does the sky look like, which builds/features have gone missing, why is the water THAT color, does voice still work, is the sim lagging, what's my personal fps like... AK!

Why is my personal fps around 40% less than previously???

Spent an hour or so trying to find a cause, with nothing evident. Chatted to others. Then I decided, for the hell of it, to do a mini-grid tour.

I have to observe that, to me anyway, and others I've talked to, there has been a flattening of client rendering performance across the grid. Ancient mainland lag pits seem to be producing better fps than they have for years. While shiny new Class 5 islands are not doing greatly better.
So, where the fps range was, say, 5-50, it's now become 15-25!

I'd call it good news for the grid generally - but it's bad news for anyone who thought they'd get better performance by shelling out for a class 5 island...
In fact it's not very good news for anyone with an island, new or old - you simply aren't going to get the client fps you used to. The real gains seem to be the old mainland sims.

Why?
How?
And, bearing in mind the touted Class 5 performance bonus has largely evaporated, how can Class 5 server prices now be justified?

I am not sure what you mean with "personal" fps, I assume it is the fps you get on your own computer. I have my statistics window always open (the basic part), and I did not notice any slower performance on my class 5 sim, or any other sim.... Meni

I have notice exactly the same thing, my fps is around 50% of what it used to be before the last maintenance period no matter what sim I'm in. WTF?

Interesting....

So, someone says - no difference noted.
And another says ALL sims give -50%

Neither of which was what I noticed

I just seem to have a 'glass ceiling' at around 25fps - but the really slow old mainland sims seem better at around 15 fps. As I said, a sort of flattening effect, the slow got faster and the fast got slower.

It's a mystery to me. But it's very real I can assure you.

Oh, and Meni, by 'personal fps' I meant the 'basic' fps, which I believe reflects the client rendering performance. If the sim fps were performing these antics I'd be really worried!

I never paid attention much because my FPS was so bad (5-13), but I'll check next time I log in.

I've not noticed a FPS difference--however, my framerate is dastardly shameful like Draco's: 3-15 fps

I'm on a dualie P3 1ghz.

I am on a laptop with 512 MB ram and a 3 year old CPU (1.6 Ghz).

Maybe they snuck this in.. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_Frame_Sync

I too have experienced a drastic fps drop. For example, on my 300m build platform I was getting an fps of between 50 & 80 ~ peaking under ideal conditions at around 125. Now I get slightly over half these values ~ peaking at the previously lower band value of 50fps.

In more congested areas like Clubs, whereas I would previously expect between 20 to 30fps, I am now getting a peak of 15, averaging 10.

((These value are for Class5 private islands ~ I have no comparison figures for mainland or Class IV))

However, one positive is that I am no longer experiencing the notorious texture "rainbow flashing" even with VBO enabled.

ASUS Extreme Striker motherboard
3 x Nvidia PCI-E 7900GT OC 256Mb
E6600 Dual-core
3Gb RAM
Vista Ultimate

Small update.

There are indications of network communication issues:
Lots of ghosts - AVs and objects.
Several existing objects have vanished and reappeared over 100m away.
Failed item transfers.
Failed texture uploads.
Slow terrain/object rezing.

This is all on an estate of two sims - dunno about the rest of the grid because TP isn't working.

I've also discovered that you can get a HUGE increase in fps (around 60%) by disabling character rendering in debug. A lot more than I would have expected, more than I have seen in the past while playing about.

After playing with this for a bit I noticed that disabling character rendering also causes flex objects to vanish, including any prims they are linked to.
This surprised me somewhat as I thought characters were AVs and flex-prims were prims. As in very different types of 'object'.

I don't know if this apparent sharing of a single render channel is new, or if it's always been the case. Can anyone enlighten me on this please?

Meanwhile it looks as though the fps loss I, and others, are seeing is not being caused by a single issue, but may be the result of a number of apparently unrelated compounded issues.

Oh, and for what it's worth: 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo, Nvidia 7900 GTX si2, 2Gb Ram, running 1.18.2

Ah, so it's not just me? I been doing a lot of can't walk then suddenly zipping over the landscape.

My good computer gets well over 100 fps still so there has been no new glass ceiling put in place. Fps above 45 isn't very useful anyway because that is the max speed of the physics, but it can be smoother on the eyes if you have a good monitor. I can tell you though that many updates have hurt fps on some computers and not others. That 100 fps doesn't include the fact that the last update often has 20 second freezes.

/drools over other citizen's FPS counts

I've also noticed that any prim/object an avatar is sitting on, as well as HUD items flicker when avatar rendering is disabled. A very odd flicker too, when it was slow enough (a whole second no-there) I did an "edit" on it and noticed that the outline glow would move or change size at the times when the prim would turn invisible.

Recently my HUD prims flicker at a faster rate (same time rendered (second to two), but about 1 frame at a time worth of unrendered)
.

I had been running SL for the longest time on an old HP Pavilion... 5 years old to be exact. I was getting at that time about 5-20 fps, the rise mainly because of using Omegadrivers to boost my video cards abilities. It had a Pentium 4 2.4 ghz processor, a ATI Diamond Stealth 9550 (I think) 256mb video card and a functional motherboard.

Now I have a custom built system with an nVidia motherboard and video card (both top of the line), 4 GB if 800 mhz RAM, a Pentuim Dual core 2.4 ghz Processor, and a nice HD and connection to the internet. Granted I'm going wireless right now, which probably has something to do with the signal, but... I'm now getting 5-25 fps. I've also become prone to crashes randomly, as lag and dropped packets dominate my systems attempts to function.

As was stated by the eon who started the thread, this came mainly after two things: the new update, and the horrible crash of the SL stock market.

I'm not normally one to complain but... Did people quit/get fired who would normally be maintaining the grid or something? SL is performing far below what it should at this point in time, with no visible or stated reason.

On another interesting note: SL made the source code open source in order to allow people to engineer new ways to use and enjoy SL. One of the things I've heard of was something called "Shooplife", a access that griefers use to log in anonymously to the servers each time. Of course, this isn't something that LL wants allowed. My question is this.

Shooplife also supposedly changed the way that the clients accessed the server by instead of requesting permissions from the server for everything the client did, only requesting permission from the server on those things that might be offlimits. For example, the client has to request permission to load textures, and to rez prims and play ambient sounds. All of these things are givens... it's unlikely SL is going to refuse someone the ability to rez prims and textures. With the immense decrease in requests for permission, this new program is supposed to allow for much quicker, cleaner access to the SL servers and sims.

Now... even if a griefer was the one who developed it... why isn't LL just picking it apart to see how it works, and after removing the anonymous part, USING it? It would make SL into a much more efficient place. If SL ran better, they could not only draw back people who have left due to the slowness (perhaps), but draw in those big business deals they crave, since they would be able to give a much better overall performance.

Has anyone heard of this, or does anyone know why it's not being used?

Would you be willing to list the specs on your computer to pull 100fps? I'm curious as to how you could get such performance out of a desktop, unless it was monstrously expensive or "overqualified".

Not sure what you mean by "monstrously expensive or "overqualified"" but, yes, the PC's that I use that produce 100+ fps are pretty good spec. This is for RL work reasons, not purely SL.

The spec for my main PC is listed here. Prior to the drastic drop in fps being discussed in this thread, it would produce 125 fps under ideal conditions and 50 to 80fps under general SL conditions.

ASUS Extreme Striker motherboard 1068Mhz FSB
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4Ghz 1066Mhz FSB 4Mb L2 cache
3x 1Gb CORSAIR 800Mhz DDR2 RAM
3x BFG Tech nVidia GeForce GT 7900 OC 256Mb DDR3 (2 for SLi; 1 for 2nd monitor)
2x 19inch 8ms flat screen LCD monitors using DVI cables (both set to 32bit 1024 x 76
2x 340Gb MAXTOR 7200rpm SATA hard drives with 16Mb cache each
32bit Vista Ultimate
8Mb broadband connection, generally running at between 5 and 6.5Mb

Second Life client being run at 1280 x 1024 resolution in a full screen window on the primary monitor:
~ draw distance 192
~ all four types of shaders enabled
~ bump mapped & cloth
~ nearby lights
~ terrain high
~ object, flexible & avatar mesh 100%
~ tree mesh 75%
~ anisotropic filtering disabled
~ VBO enabled (expect when experiencing the notorious "rainbow-flashing"
~ fog ratio 2.0
~ max. particle count 8192
~ outfit composite 5
~ upload rate of 96kbs or 128kbs but reduced to 32kbs since last update (choppy music)

Hope this is the info you wanted

My machine is virtually the same spec as yours (but I have a GF 7900GTO which is slightly better) and my framerate is normally around 20-50, I don't think I've -ever- seen 100.

But yes, in line with this thread since a short time ago my FPS has taken as massive hit. In the world I normally spend most of my time my FPS is now normally around 2-15. It's completely unusable. The worst thing is that settings don't seem to effect it.

I'm going to try the pre-voice client and see if that helps. Something else I've also had since switching to the voice client is that SL would lock up for a few seconds (between say 5 and 30 seconds) but when it unlocked it seems that my avatar continued doing whatever I was doing before hand, so if I was walking forward when it locked up I would have still been walking forward the whole time it was locked. Originally I thought RAM usage had gone mad and the machine was swapping hard or something, but when it locks up there is only very rare HD usage, SL was only using 450MB of my 2GB RAM too (I don't have anything else open in the background and no resident programs other than the system services).

So the question is what the hell is going on?

Ahhh, that is a little different I think. It was happening to me yesterday and I noticed it was happening every couple of minutes at peak. I just walked around the estate, observing stats carefully. Every time I rubberbanded and/or sunk into the landscape I noticed a huge script time spike. All other parameters were good, just script time spiked for anything up to 5 seconds. Peak spike observed was, and this isn't a typo, over 4800ms!

Disabling physics stopped it, until I re-enabled physics. Disabling scripts also stopped it, and. after re-enabling scripts it stopped happening... Best guess is that a script somewhere in the estate had gone dementoid and switching scripts off, then on after a few minutes caused the offending script to reset?

Funny, because I'd normally have put that one down to network issues. You live and learn.

And.... after a LOT more messing about, including discovering how to make some completely insane prims by misusing flex I finally found that the issue that's been occurring on the estate in question, Lyonesse/Isle of Mists, seems to be caused by large (10x10 NOT 'hyper prims' ) flex prims - or more precisely, rendering them.

60 10x10 flex prims in the sim cause an appreciable loss of fps - when you 'look' at them. That equates to 20 'simple' flex trees btw. This hasn't been a problem previously.

The extent of the problem can be gauged by the fact that turning off Character rendering in debug - which currently ALSO disables rendering of flex prims AND all the prims in any linkset they are part of... - with only a single AV present causes cpu usage by Second Life.exe to drop from the 'normal' 50% to 25%. Draw your own conclusions.
I'm concerned that the linkset behaviour MAY indicate that the client is treating the non-flex prims in the linkset as flex prims for rendering purposes, thus exacerbating the problem.

I've also noted that having a large number of large flex prims present in the NEXT sim and none in the sim you are in causes a significant fps loss, which increases steadily as you approach the border with the sim 'next door', the loss peaking at the border.

This effect decreases as the flex prim size is reduced, which explains why flex hair/skirts/etc aren't proving a problem. Yes, they do cause a drop, they always did, but nothing like 10x10 flex prims.

At this point one has to ask, who'd be a flex tree maker in SL right now? A friend is and she's noticed her estate is suffering the same problems. Problems which have only surfaced recently.

As an aside, this has little to do with the textures applied to the flex prims, my test prims were default texture/colour - floppy sheets of plywood

Very similar spec to mine, except I only have 2Gb (SL doesn't seem to 'see' over 2Gb anyway) of somewhat faster RAM, a faster graphics card, 24mbps connection, a DFI LanPartyUltra ICFX3200 T2R, and slightly higher graphics settings, with the graphics card handling anisotropic filtering and anti-ailasing...

100fps is exceptional, even at 600m!
In fact, during recent testing I visited an empty 'auction sim' and only got 60fps - I'd have expected at least 75-80 from previous experience.
Still, it's good to hear of someone getting such exceptional performance, regardless. Congratulations.

@ Darena: Yes, it has 4 graphics cards and is water-cooled overclocked etc etc. On a clean sim it can even approach 200 fps. With many avs around though it can drop under 100 still with all settings such as view distance at or near max. It really isn't overly useful to get over 45 fps. If you can get at least 45 fps on a crouded sim, it isn't worth the money to make it faster than that. I make games in SL so I need to be able to see how they flow from very low range to very high range computers.

i've noticed the same thing.

in areas where i typically get 20+ fps i'm lucky to get past 7-8

it's kinda infuriating, espescially seeing i recent upgraded from a total heap of a computer. and am now getting not much better than i used to on said machine :/

Not wanting to obscure the spec-flexing, and not wanting to completely divert the convo, but......I have a non-techie's question about frame rates as they apply to our beloved U/I.

I recall from a film class I took eons ago that the standard cinematic frame rate for film-based movies is/was 24fps. I also seem to remember being told that this is just beyond the maximum (or was it minimum?) rate at which the human eye/brain will perceive sequential frames as non-animation (i.e. upper threshold for frame-rate 'flicker').

Am I way off the beaten here? So, if I got that part right, why is it that we still perceive 'flicker' when we are getting client-end frame rates above 24fps? Also, what is the benefit of having a 100fps rate, if we aren't visually/cognitively able to distinguish the difference between 24fps and 100fps?