It really did not use to be this bad. Ever since the last major update (which had object occlusion) the framerate has gotten so much slower on my computer. ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB VRAM, 1.5 GB RAM PowerBook G4 1.67GHZ, OSX 10.4.9. Even at minimal settings, SL is barely usable. In an area with many avatars, 10-20+, it is sometimes less than 1 FPS, and a lot of avatars in busy areas do not even rez after 5 or 10 minutes (though finally appear, eventually).
Is it just time to upgrade? It seems like LL is making SL not for computers that regular mortals have. But for top-of-the-line, brand-new hardware. Is it just me, or do they almost require a gaming rig, despite the low quality of the graphics?
Also why does the SL server-side run one-two sims per physical machine, instead of just having a giant mainframe running lots of scalable virtual machine servers? So when one sim went down to zero people, its virtual machine would take almost no processor power, whereas sims that had 50 avs in them could get assigned that much more processor power?
Is this something that the Second Life team is considering?
-=GE=-