Best system specs

[ndocds]

I dunno if this is the right place but i hope so.

 

im new to SL and i want to know the best possible specs for a computer? i run 2 viewers at once and i don't want any lag.

Thanks!

btw just the very best and why?

does SL take advantage of SLI?

[Marigold Devin]

Welcome to Second Life Forums, ndocds.

You'll always get some lag, but to minimise it there are things you can do.

System specs:

http://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/

Also there is a video tutorial here about minimising lag.







[ndocds]

thanks for the reply!

i know the min requirements but i wanna know what the top dogs are using!

is SLI a big FPS increase?

should i be worried about DX11?

basiclly what i want is my computer not to be a bottleneck. 

[Nyll Bergbahn]

CPU: Intel 2600K

Motherboard: Asus Maximus IV Extreme

Memory: Corsair Dominator GT CMGTX7 memory (much as you like but 4MB will be fine for SL)

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3

GPU: SL is very poor on SLI or Crossfire support so go for the best single card you can afford. A MSI N580GTX Lightning Extreme should be fairly handy :smileywink:

 

[ndocds]

thank you very much!

[Nyll Bergbahn]

Obviously you can make a few compromises in that :smileyvery-happy: but as the Intel 2600K is the best processor around at the moment, it would be a good choice if you're buying new. On the GPU side, a MSI N560GTX Twin Frozr II or a Zotac GTX560 AMP! Edition would be a lot cheaper and still great in SL!

[Marigold Devin]

I only half want to know what the top dogs are using. If I knew what the Linden people were using (let alone the more geeky and more-money-than-sense "regular" residents), I would undoubtedly fall off my chair in a dead faint. :matte-motes-big-grin-squint::matte-motes-shocked::matte-motes-sick:

Vo.oV

[Marigold Devin]

Thanks, Nyll.

I'm writing my letter to Santa right now :smileyhappy:

[Nyll Bergbahn]

lol Marigold! Well, I hope the recession hasn't hit the North Pole yet if you're wishing for those specs :smileyvery-happy: but ndocds did ask for the best system specs!

I'm not sure what various Lindens use. I think Torley was using a Nvidia 480 GTX GPU last time I heard but he may have upgraded to a 580 by now. I'm sure he'd be happy to tell you if you asked.

 

[Jennifer Boyle]

I have been asking the same question for years, and I have spent a lot of money hoping for improvement in SL performance that did not happen.  I think that different people may have different experiences because network delays and capacity are probably not the same everywhere.  Also, past experience may not be applicable to future viewers, which will probably need more resources as features are added.

I am certainly NOT an expert or a reliable source of advice about hardware for running SL (or anything else), so keep that in mind when reading this.  I would love to have comments from experts on what I say.  

Within the last year and a half, I got the following upgrades one at a time with the results noted:

Upgrading the CPU from 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo to 3.0 GHz Core 2 Quad, RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB, and connection from 6 Mbps to 18 Mbps had no appreciable effect.  Upgrading the graphics card from an 8800 GTX to a GTX 470 resulted in modest improvement.

Over the years I have read that SLI doesn't help SL, and I have read first-person accounts from from people who said it helped them, so I don't know.  I wish someone would post an account of their own experience with trying it with current viewers.

If I were getting a new machine for SL and my budget was unlimited, I would go for top-of-the-line:  Core i7 990X, at least 12 GB RAM (so I could put a large cache on a RAMdisc), three or four 580 GTXs, appropriate motherboard, case, and power supplies, and one SSD for OS and program files, and another for SL data files.  Undoubtedly, this would be massive overkill and there would be very little bang for several thousands of bucks, but if the budget is unlimited, why not go for it?

If the budget were limited but fairly large, I would want a GTX 580 and case and motherboard that would allow me to add more in the future.  I'd get a Core i7 970, 6 GB RAM, and an SSD large enough for the OS and SL program files.  If I could afford to do more, I would get two 580 GTXs so I could see if two were better than one; if not, I would sell the second one on ebay.   If the budget were too limited for this, I would get a GTX 580, a Core i7 960, 6 GB RAM, no SSD, and smaller case and power supply.  My reason for holding out for a GTX 580 is that upgrading the graphics card is the one change that made a difference for me.

[Deej Kasshiki]

The SL client isn't multi-threaded so it won't fully take advantage of multicore processors. It doesn't take advantage of multiple video cards so SLI is not a factor either (even though some people anecdotally claim otherwise). It uses OpenGL so DX11 makes no difference either. Basically SL is very dependent on the power of your video card moreso than your processor so, pretty much any modern chip architecture and 2-4 GB of RAM will be fine. Just make sure to get the best vid card you can afford, especially if you want to enable shadows and all the other shiny stuff.

[Zeist Koba]

Well actually SL viewers DO take advantage of a multicore cpu, though the main process is not multitreaded viewers can run secondary process and treads on several core. The improvement is not epic but tangible.

As been told in countless other posts any multi gpu/card solution, sli or crossfire, doesn't offer any real benefit, for some reason historically viewer hated SLI solutions and it seems things are not going to change. Advantages will be nonexistent at best, it will cause total instability and crashes in worst cases.

My advice for a cool SL system.

A modern quad core cpu, nothing extreme you don't need it.

A good single gpu card, more powerful the better.

A fast hard disk will help too, sl rely a lot on local cache, ssd would be ideal.

Then it depends on what kind of experience you seek in SL, anyway, if you are running two viewers on the same monitor this will not impact processing power for a single session will be on foreground every time. In this case memory become the only critical point, both vga card memory and system ram memory (though six/eight gigabyte of ram will allow you to run almost everything).

P.S.

DX11 support is totally irrelevant. SL have nothing to do with Microsoft DirectX technlogy, it's based on openGL (luckly for me or it would not run under linux).