Questions about performance

Seems like most times I cannot ever see what I'm wearing. I can tell that I'm wearing clothes but they are always the color of my skin. I usually always bald also. Do others view me as such? I'm pretty sure my system exceeds the requirements to run SL. They are as follows:

AMD Anthlon 64 Processor 3500+
2.21 GHz, 1.00 GB RAM
Radeon X1300 Video Card
512MB GDDR-2 Memory at 533 MHz

Does anyone have any advice on how to tweak SL so I can get good performance?

Oh yeah and I'd say most people I look at I can't see what there wearing. Like I said b4 I've read the system requirements and I far exceed them. Am I doing something wrong.

I'm not too experienced with technical issues in SL, but it almost sounds like the stuff you can't see just hasn't been downloaded yet. I could be wrong, though, as textures that are waiting to be downloaded are usually gray, not skin-colour. What kind of connection do you have? And how much of it is SL allowed to use? This is a setting that can be modified in the preferences menu (not sure which one, sorry).

You could also try clearing the cache, and/or increasing its allowed size. Perhaps something got screwed up and the textures in your cache aren't appearing as they should.

Your video card isn't a Nvidia....

I think the video card should work................I had an ATI video card in my old computer and it worked fine. Just make sure you have the latest drivers for it. You might be real close on RAM though. My old computer had 512 megs ram and struggled a little during peak usage times.

When you get in game try lowering your draw distance to about 96 and put the other sliders about midrange and see if that helps.

And most likely others see your clothing just fine.........it's only you that doesn't see them correctly at your end. Sometimes if you right click on items that have not rezzed or don't look right and go to edit and then get back out of edit it forces them to rezz for you. Give those things a shot and I hope it helps.

I have an ATI, it works great. But what I've done is, I've uninstalled the standard ATI drivers and replaced them by the Omega ones.
http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati.php

Try installing these drivers, and see if that helps.
What you can also do (by tweaking SL preferences):
- limit your bandwith; I've set mine to 300 Mb
- decrease all your graphic settings, and increase them one by one until it's right.

Also, what is your internet connection like? This could also be a bottleneck.


ETA: oh and yeah, Gaybot is right. Try it in a quiet sim!

I check in on SL early UK evenings briefly, and then again very early UK mornings (9pm-12am time across the US)

By about 8pm UK time, SL is basically hopeless, and unusable. I lost a whole load of stuff last night, stuff wouldn't rez, textures took forever, clothes kept rebaking or not showing. That's probably more influence on clothing problems than the computer you have.

True, I tried rp but had to log off due to lag and when the whole sim crashed I had enough. Hopefully LL can keep up with the number of ppl joining everyday. Seems your comp is allright to me.

Mandy C

A lot of rebaking here too. My Radeon 9550 works perfectly with the latest genuine drivers most of the time.

I made this post sometime ago, hoping it would become 'sticky', it is not a one off solution and given the permutations of the the PC configurations, some will get different results than others... but every little helps and this should be considered only a baseline:

Click /111/1f/106305/2.html#post1373895

Hope it helps some.

I did make further posts regarding contention ratios, thats one subject you won't see reported by many ISP's. Basically, just because you have a 8mb connection, doesn't mean its your exclusively. Each ISP (for the most part) give you access to a server node capable of that bandwidth, which you share with upto 50 other people/users. If you divide your connection speed by 50, thats the minimum you can expect. If you are in a busy city, you can expect these much lower connection speeds at peak times.
Personally, I chose a 'Business connection' which has a contention ratio of 20:1, but as most business's are closed before 6pm, when I start using the internet, I get better bandwidth. Some providers offer exclusive IP (Internet Ports) which is perfect for gaming, but are not cheap.
The downside:.... we are all subject to contention ratios beyond our ISP's servers, irrespective of their contention rations, with the one advantage of once you reach the backbone highway, you enjoy greater speeds, until that is, you reach your destination, then you are back to their contention ratios.

Imagine travelling to a destination using waterways, you leave by navigating from your own small brook, through rivers to the open sea, then upon reaching the shoreline of the destination, you have to navigate back up rivers and small brooks to the destination. How many swimmers share your route, is your contention ratio .
Packet loss through bottlenecks in the system can account for a lot of lag, whereby your system, and that of the system you are connected to, rely on your precious data packet arriving safetly, intact and on time (each has a lifespan), being processed and a return data packet making the journey back within the same parameters, is a wonder it happens at all! Each packet that fails, has to be resent in both directions, so the system will either drop that packet (packet loss), or wait until it is received before continuing.

Thanks for all the replies. Will go over all of them and mess with SL tonight when I get home from the office.

I read in a post or two that my ATI Radeon video card won't work with SL. I read the system requirements again and it lists Radeon video cards of X900 or better. I have a X1300.

Also someone in here also said I'm borderline on Video memory with 512MB. I don't understand this. I bought this video card less than a year ago and 512MB was the most memory you could get in a video card. The only thing I can think of is if the poster got my video card memory confused with my system memory wich is 1 GB.

As far as my internet connection I have cable. I understand this could be some of my problem. I live in the 13th largest city in the United States so there could be some bandwith issues with my ISP during certain peak times.

Your fine on your vid card, I have the same one. X1300 with 512 mb of ram.

My system is actually very similar, AMD 3700 2.2 GHZ, with 2 gigs of ram. My performance
is pretty good most of the time, however there are certain things that I do.
I think that your overall experience of SL is always a combination of factors.

I think that the reference to your ram was about your system ram rather than your vid ram, as 512 is pretty hefty for the average user.

While 1 gig of system ram has quickly become pretty basic in terms of SL demands.

I also avoid peak usage times, in addition ever since the last update I have kept my last
first look client on hand and resort to it whenever the regular client acts strange.

Also having a certain amount of system ram does not always mean that much will be available. It is good to trim the amount of programs that run in the background on startup.

Also I used to have a number of large folders on my desktop which chews up ram as well.
I have since moved all of those onto my slave drive.

Okay well from what I've been reading everyone seems to say that the Omega drivers will fix a lot of my problems. My question is how do I uninstall the drivers I have now? Call me stupid but if I uninstall my drivers won't my video card stop working??

EDIT: I figured out how to uninstall my driver but the question still stands if this will cause my ATI card to cease working until I install the Omega drivers.

Okay I'm full of questions today.....I forgot to mention b4 that I have dual video cards. The other one I have (I'm not sure what it is) is onboard and came with the tower. When I had the PC built they never disabled the onboard video card. I actually use it to have a second monitor up and running. I never really realized it until now but I'm starting to think that my performance is being effected also by having this second monitor on while I'm running SL.

Oh and someone asked if I had Norton on my PC. The answer is yes. I always turn the firewall and autoprotect off before I run SL.

Hi Lestat, the order of things would be to uninstall the ATI in the same session as you download the new drivers. Read the info for installing, it may be a self-contained install, it may be drivers Windows itself installs. Either way, they are probably Zipped for compactness and need to be un-zipped somewhere.
If you want to try disabling your motherboard graphics you should find an option in your BIOS setup. When booting, press 'delete' or whatever you are prompted to on-screen depending on whose BIOS you have. There will be a page like 'Advanced Settings' where there should be a toggle for 'on-board graphics'.
Good luck

Yeah I tried to install the Omega drivers. When I did my screen went black on boot up. I read that this might happen. I think maybe because my chipset isn't capatible. We to quickly fix the problem I went into safe mode, unistalled the Omega drivers, went on the ATI website and downloaded the latest ATI drivers. So what happened next? Well my graphics became very unstable. I had to revert back to the old drivers that came with my video card. Guess I'm going to have to live with crappy graphics on SL with my $1400 brand new system. Go figure.

I have a new computer with lots of new hardware and a fast connection. I still have the same issues of slow clothing and hair. It just comes with SL. Just from chatting with friends, though, it seems that SL runs on my computer comparatively better than many of them. Perhaps that's a comfort.

Second Life is just insanely intensive when it comes to graphics. The fact that almost all the content is user-provided, that's expected. Not only does SL have to download almost everything on the fly, but most users who make the content are not experienced enough to know how to make it as efficient as possible to reduce strain on your computer.

I still tweak to improve performance every chance I get. I'm glad to see a few new ideas on this thread I hadn't tried yet.