Client Efficiency

When I run Second Life, the first thing that I notice is that it immediately takes up all my machien cycles. Task manager shows it as pegged at around 100%. When I have followed all the suggestions I got concerning lag, such as reducing my bandwidth, and my draws turned down to 64 and removing the water effect and bump and so forth... What I find is that when things are going really well for me, I am getting about 4-5 FPS.

Occasionally when I TP to a sim that seems all dark and black and not very useful I have gotten upwards of 19, but for the most part I do not ever see that.

If I go, let's say to The Shelter on any given evening, I will be well off to see 4, with more lilely somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 FPS.

My machine, is not the greatest, but it is ok. I have 768 MB ram, and it is a P3 at around 800 mhz and I have a 1G cache and I am on DSL that the speed test shows as being around 800, I have an FX5200 with 250 of ram on it. I also pretty much stop everything else running on the machine while I am on.

I have to be doing something wrong, because I can't imagine this being as successful as it is if too many people are getting this kind of response.

Can someone please help me, or point me in the right direction to tell what it going wrong? Or fix it or diagnose it... ?

I am way open to suggestions.

Your machine is sorely lacking in power to run SL well.

Basically all your major components are in need or an upgrade to run SL well. Your processor is 4-5 years old? Your graphics card is about 3 years old. Even your DSL speed is kinda slow. Sorry to say all of these things combined is what is ruining your SL experience.

As for your CPU running at 100%, thats normal. SL is taking all it can from your processor to run as fast as it can, any 3D game I have ever played does the same thing.

I have to agree. My SL experience improved tremendously when I upgraded my machine. Well not upgraded, replaced really, and what I replaced had much better specs already than what I'm seeing in the original posting.

While the SL viewer may not be the most optimized 3D application you can get at the moment, software like this has always required and will always require powerful hardware to handle it properly.

I think SL will run decently on "previous generation" hardware though. At the moment, this probably means a P4 @ >=3GHz and a GeForce 7600GT. Also, SL can develop a huge memory footprint, but with >= 1GB you should generally be fine.

Ok, so short of buying a new computer, which is not really in the cards at present, what other things should I be looking at?

So the other 5 million people have better machine that I do

Perhaps I will try the laptop tonight, it has less memory though but a faster processor.

lower your settings to the absolute minimum.

Theres no where near 5 million people in Second Life.

Id be willing to bet theres not even 1 million.

Short of buying a new computer? Probably nothing. I would personally say your major bottleneck is your processor, which you aren't going to be able to upgrade without replaceing the rest. 800Mhz is horribly slow by today's standards. A new vid card may help but probably not a lot, and you would kinda be throwing good money after bad, better off saving the money you would spend on the video card and put it toward a future new computer.

Good luck on the laptop, hopefully it has compatable video.

If you're low on cash but are pretty geeky, you might try running Linux instead of Windows.

Also, any machine that's not dual-core will probably show 100% in task manager - don't worry about that.

You can still improve your current PC. The main issues are the CPU, Graphics and RAM.

CPU you can't really do much about as it's a obsolete design.

Graphics - you CAN do something about. Something like a Nvidia 7600 will give a noticeable improvement.

RAM - this is a must, you NEED at least 1gig, preferably 2gig of ram to run SecondLife comfortably.

Get the Graphics and Ram upgraded and whilst you won't have a modern low end system you will have something that ought to run SL more comfortably.

Oh and for comparison. A LOW END gaming system these days would have a CPU at least 4 times as powerfull as yours, graphics probably more than 4 times better and 1-2gig of RAM. Many residents are trying to run inferior graphics even to yours (usually on laptops) but the CPU will almost allways be better than yours as your CPU is WAY out of day I'm afraid.

try the "better processor with lower memory"... I run two systems.. a 1ghz P3 with 7XX megs of ram, and a 2ghz P4 with only 5XX megs of ram. The same video card moved between them, I do see a performance increase on the P4.

That said, with a lesser video card on the P3, and all the graphics settings turned down to nil, I get nearly "live videocamera feed" framerates.. clearly more than 30/second.

Want to improve performance quick? disable clouds, and particles.

Before I upgraded my system, disabling clouds gave me a great boost in frame rate. I would also run at 64 meter view distance and turn the Avatar and object detail sliders down.