Low Performance

[Nemanja Miliandrovic]

Hello. i am using MSI notebook with this spec.

CPU: Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo P8400  @ 2.7GHz

RAM: 4,00 GB DR2 @ 332MHz

Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670

Monitor: 21" viewsonic

Connection:

Cable DL: 8MBps / UPL: 320kbps Ethernet connection

Pingtest.net: Package loss: 0% Ping: 20ms Grade A

OS: Windows 7 32bit

I have very big problem with performance and lag. SL works normal only on some empty sandboxsesand and there I have 30fps also if i move fps drop very fast to even 4fps. So basicly i have very bad performance when moving driving or flying.IF place is even little crowded textures load extremnly slow and I experience low performance (like clubs).

Changing graphics from Low-Mid also doesn't have any effect. I read some advices to set preferences but still game run very bad to 2012 standards. Also even my graphics card have 512MB memory SL always detect from ~200MB ~300MB.

Also for me games like GTA4, Skyrim, Just Cause 2 or some other MMORPG runs perfectly on medium or even high settings.

So whats the problem here ?

 

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I couple of things that are not helping:

"Cable DL: 8MBps / UPL: 320kbps Ethernet connection"

Your download is fine, but that upload is mighty low.  For the most part a slow upload is not going to cause you much trouble but with a speed that low (less than a 1/2 meg) I suspect you might have some issue either with your ISP or your home network.  With 8 down and .3 up something doesn't seem right.......I would expect something closer to 750 KBps upload with an 8MBps download.

The other thing is your system memory speed at 333Mhz and DDR2.  Not only is that slow but it's old memory (DDR2 was state of the art about 5 years ago......DDR 3 is now and it'a about to go "old school".  Plus you are using a 32 bit operating system which is capable of only recognizing 3.5 gigs or memory at the absolute maximum......the real memory recognized is much closer to 3 gigs (and for some systems that's iffy).

Do an indepentant speed test for what you are really getting instead of what your ISP advertises that you are getting at your subscribed speed.  http://www.speedtest.net/

Do a couple tests at the recommended test site (the one selected by Speed Test) to see if you are close to the speed you are paying for.......if not call your ISP to find out why not.  Then do 2 or 3 tests each to both San Francisco, CA and Dallas, TX and  take the average of all four tests to get a good idea of what you can expect when in SL.  In your viewer preferences go to the tab that shows your bandwidth for SL (it varies from viewer to viewer so I'm not even going to try to tell you which tab.........just search around).  Set your bandwidth to about 75-80% of that average speed you tested.

 

 

 

[Poenald Palen]

What is happening is constant downoading and a large amount of checks done to see what is happening and all this is constantly going on in the SL client and over the network.

Other games can preload levels or world parts much easier and come on DVD's or require GB's of downloads. SL far less than even one gigabyte, I mena...it is less than 200mb's I think. BUT, SL downloads everything.

Not only that, but it does not preload a sim then run it all as a static place. It loads stuff while it tries to check tonnes of stuff to see who is saying what, doing what, sounding what, and rezing what and where all of that is moving. This huge amount of tasks uses up the CPU, it will run 99%-100% all the time and your pipeline gets stuck with the 333mhz RAM and system bus.

Plus, your GPU might be running on AGP (out of date and not even put into motherboards these days) and shares the DDR2 ram, which is slow to get all of the stuff in and also let you walk around. Other games load this stuff, as mentioned. So, the DDR2 is sort of slow for other games, but they preload levels ect. and have ways of getting stuff ready to load because the sort of know whre 90% of everything will be. SL does NOT know what it will encounter and has to check for everything you see and then tries to get it all loading while you are trying to move and chat!! This is way to much, but they assume you will wait as you would with a level loading OR be a wealthy person and just spend the extra to use SL more smoothly. Hey, it is over almost a car payments worth of money for a poorer american, the cost of a sim taht is, each month to get the full SL experience. Really, most of thier paying customers may not be wealthy but using the car example...well, it can be costly to socialize and commercial business store rents are more than a sim and many new companies fail! SO, some choose to take a shot here instead of a costlier business failure in real life! lol. So, ll makes millions! They like it this way so never changed to include static sims that just send a date of change to indicate nothing on the sim changed, so 'just load it all up from cache mr. client program' and then your client program, the viewer, simply loads up the same old sim land and buildings ect. Only avatars would download....nope, they don't do this. So, we lag but they make millions...they like this, so what the heck! Let them lag, and we will enjoy much cake sort of thing!

 

 

[Nemanja Miliandrovic]

@ Peggy Paperdoll

yes i done speedtest already. and its Download: 7.97Mbps Upload: 0.36Mbps and ping 11ms. My ISP works fine my internet package include low upload 380kbps. The most important thing about internet for games is PING thats why i don't use wireless even I have it.

Well my speedtest for Dallas, San Francisko sucks ping 196ms Download 4Mbps upload: 340kbps. Ping is too high I am from Europe give me some Europe servers. Maybe thats part of problem i remember having problem with one MMO Black Prophecy only because i connected on USA server and not Europe when I changed game to Europe server everything started working perfectly. I cannot find SL server list so can you tell me where is SL europe server or how I could set it manualy to connect to it? 

yes DDR2 is not state of the art but I never seen MMO game that is optimised only for state of the art because than it woudn't been (MMO) Massive Multiplayer Online but only (MO) Multiplayer online because point is to enjoy as much ppl as possible. There can be many problems with software or hardware on pc that is slowing it down thats why I said that i have no problems with some other MMO or newer games.

 

@Poenald Palen

My GPU running on PCI-E 2.0 x16 and supports DirectX 10.1 shader and OpenGL 2.0.

It is not integrated graphics on notebook it has its own 512MB GDDR 3 ram.

"Not only that, but it does not preload a sim then run it all as a static place. It loads stuff while it tries to check tonnes of stuff to see who is saying what, doing what, sounding what, and rezing what and where all of that is moving. This huge amount of tasks uses up the CPU, it will run 99%-100% all the time... ... SL does NOT know what it will encounter and has to check for everything you see and then tries to get it all loading while you are trying to move and chat!! This is way to much, but they assume you will wait as you would with a level loading OR be a wealthy person and just spend the extra to use SL more smoothly."

Wow if SL is running as you explained thats very CPU,GPU,RAM,HDD and network demanding isnt it possible to change the way it works? So if i install SL on my friends desktop pc who is more suitable for high end games: intel i5 3.1Ghz, 4GB DDR3 ram, Radeon HD6870 1GB GDDR5 than I can expect that when I am skydiving, shooting zombies, or walk in some club with 30 ppl in it i will never get below 24fps?

[Peggy Paperdoll]

"

@ Peggy Paperdoll

yes i done speedtest already. and its Download: 7.97Mbps Upload: 0.36Mbps and ping 11ms. My ISP works fine my internet package include low upload 380kbps. The most important thing about internet for games is PING thats why i don't use wireless even I have it.

Well my speedtest for Dallas, San Francisko sucks ping 196ms Download 4Mbps upload: 340kbps. Ping is too high I am from Europe give me some Europe servers. Maybe thats part of problem i remember having problem with one MMO Black Prophecy only because i connected on USA server and not Europe when I changed game to Europe server everything started working perfectly. I cannot find SL server list so can you tell me where is SL europe server or how I could set it manualy to connect to it?

yes DDR2 is not state of the art but I never seen MMO game that is optimised only for state of the art because than it woudn't been (MMO) Massive Multiplayer Online but only (MO) Multiplayer online because point is to enjoy as much ppl as possible. There can be many problems with software or hardware on pc that is slowing it down thats why I said that i have no problems with some other MMO or newer games."

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Considering that you are in Europe your ping is not bad at all........there's nothing you can do about it anyway (except maybe move to the US and on the west coast....I'm joking, BTW).  But it does introduce a delay in both sending and recieving information to the LL servers.  Normally, thats not a big issue but there is going to be some noticable lag.  It becomes a huge problem if there is any packet loss what-so-ever though.  If you have a good ping (like double digits) your connection can handle a little bit of packet loss without problems.....say up to about 2%.  Your ping is close to 200 and that packet loss will noticably degrade your performance......it may even cause you to lose the connection entirely.  But there's only so much you can do about packet loss too......if it's in your network or hardware then you can fix it.  If it's with your ISP then they can fix it.  If it's in LL's network then LL can fix it.  But if it's in the Internet backbone you'll just have to rely of the backbone maintenance folks to fix it (you can't notify them but your ISP can....a phone call to them would be order).  There are no European servers farms for SL.....just the two at San Francisco and Dallas (there is a server farm in Phoenix, AZ but that's nothing to do with assets that the users need in world).

I think I said that the upload is not terribly important for SL.  Your upload is probably just fine.  I only mentioned it because it looked very slow slow compared to your download......if thats what your ISP is charging you for and that's what you are getting, then that's great.  The upload should be fine.........but, again, the latency is a factor and if any packet loss is involved it's going to possibly be a major issue.

Your CPU clock speed is not a factor at all.  Any CPU with a speed of about 1.5 MHz or faster is more than enough for SL.  I'm sure benchmarks will be better with a faster CPU over slower one........but you won't see the difference (CPU speed for SL is a red herring.....a decent, modern CPU will run SL with litte effort).  But your system RAM is very important..........next to graphics it's about the most important.  You said you are running 4 gigs of RAM.  But you are running that 4 gigs of RAM on a 32 bit system........and a 32 bit system can only recognize (meaning use) about 3.5 under ideal setup conditions.  Most 32 bit systems will only recognize about 3 gigs (you're throwing away a gig of RAM because your system cannot and will not use any more that it can recognize).  Then there's that speed of your RAM.  Being slow your really don't realize the benefits of 3 gigs of RAM as opposed to faster RAM.  System RAM improves system performance across the board.......not just for SL.  The more system RAM you have the better your system will run everything........and, for high demand programs like SL, it's a significant improvement.  Don't forget that any video RAM your graphics is lacking your system RAM has to make up the difference.  More RAM and faster RAM will help any system.......and you will see a big performance increase if you changed from DDR2 333MHz to DDR3 1333 MHz (you'll think you got a new computer).  Only issue may be is that your motherboard has to support DDR3 and the bus speed.

And finally.  Your comparison to MMO's is so far off base it's laughable.  Graphics are graphics no matter how your GPU gets the information.  It will process the graphics the same.  Your online games are housed on your computer.....very little of the information for your graphics card to process comes from anywhere except your local hard drive.  It's there for the snatching and rendering as needed.  All the items, objects, and textures are right there on that drive.  A fairly low end machine will have little difficulty producing a good graphical picture for you to play with.  Now for the difference......and it's a huge difference and very significant.  Nothing about the SL world is housed on your computer (I'm not counting caches which are temporarily stored on your hard drive).  Everything you see and experience in SL is first requested by your viewer (that involves the upload speed you tested), then the LL servers find whatever it is your viewer requested and sends ti back to your viewer so that your CPU and GPU can make the requested items appear on your monitor.  That's a ton of information being sent to your computer......and your system has to process every bit of it for you to see it.  Those items, objects and textures in SL are amateur made (user content......very few of the users are even aware of optimising textures, items, scripts, objects or anything else we all build and upload to SL).  Your system works very hard to present the world to you......especially the graphical information.  None of that happens in your online games.....it's all right there on your computer and your systems grabs it and processes it as it needs it.  It's not avalancing in on it.....that's where system RAM plays an important role in your performance.  You can't make the comparison......it's compariing a skate board to a motorcycle.  They both have wheels..........and that's about the end of the similarities.

There's little can do about the latency or packet loss (unless it's in your network).  You can improve your RAM speed.  You can improve your RAM recognition by going to a 64 bit operating system.  And you can understand that SL is not an online game and not expect it to perform like one.......that helps in the frustration area.

[Baloo Uriza]

What graphics settings are you on?  I've had better luck with a very similar machine on 64-bit Linux than I have on 32-bit Windows (where my machine just plain hates SL).

[Poenald Palen]

You ask about a better computer and I will say, yes it will most likely work better if your network plays nice. I say this because I can improve performance by turning off  textures and keeping most of SL blurry and grey!

Why is this? My system bus is slow, so less textures being uploaded (and blurred and loaded again...why, this is crazy but my avatat does this and the rest is occluded, so that is when I turn my back on something it rightfully is taken our of memory...great if you are in a game with one direction and all that but in SL you stand around and turn around for whatever reason. The software has no chance to guess and preload lol, so you make it roll it's eyes and go grab that stuff again...ok, it has no eyes...but you know what I mean. The avatar textures blurring  and loading from cache again? I have no clue, I think I read something but draw a blank right now.

But, yes, you may even wish to try the 'Disable Textures' option in the Develope>rendering menu list! Just click it and a check mark is put beside it, and then wait a bit.

Another trick is to disable water. For some GPu's this works very well, but is a bit strange looking. Simply go to the advanced menu and find it in the rendering types menu. Just click water and it will turn it off, do the same to turn it back on!

Both of hese menu's are not enabled as standard, so you might have to enable them. But there are settings in there that are sort of odd and can change stuff and waste a bit of time..so, clumbsy clickers may not wish to enable these all the time lol. You can enable them via World>show>Advanced menu. Once that one is enabled, then you go to Advanced and then click the Show Develope Menu at the bottom there. Viola, you can now play with options and make SL ugly, but faster lol.

 

Oh, another quick tip is to turn down the screen resolution and also (before you turn down screen resolution!!!) go to the preferences menu (ctrl+p) and set the UI slider to the smallest (below 1.0, to like .75 or even less) and I think SL runs at 800x600 alright enough, but some things are annoying ot use and the UI slider is usually a requirement to use SL because the buttons do NOT shrink with the window lol.

Another one, which works for me, is to turn down the netwrok speed. The faster things load, the more issues and freezes I get. This seems to be mostly just me and a few others, most benifit from it being turned up as high as it goes. In fact, you might like it better if you turn it up. But, slow system buses...well, that is the suspected lag inducer and faster downloads seem to choke the PC and GPU up.

You GPU sounds good, so I assume it is the the ram and all that...sad, I thought a CPU upgrade might help mine. I am learning old DDR2 based systems are a bit to sluggish for Sl, as I suspected. Glad I didn't buy a faster one!!

But, yeah, a faster PC would work out a bit better. I have seen some videos of car races made and I always wonder if they use 2 pc's to record and use a second monitor or video out and a video capture device on the second. Recording and running SL is hard to do and reduces FPS a lot for me. But, they seem to and one persons specs where just a beter PC with a faster GPU card...so, yeah...seems you can have a better experience but they said things still hiccup because of the way SL servers and clients all work out...sometimes it is the server or network adn nothing can be done.

[Nemanja Miliandrovic]

@Peggy Paperdoll

Like I said my network is already tested and optimised and i don't have problem with ISP. My package loss in home network is 0% and in SL statistic is always 0% rarly during sim loading I get like 0.042% or something but mostly is 0%.

For real time online games ping is very important so it's very strange to me that for world popular game like SL there isn't any servers outside USA especialy Europe because i think at least 30% are Europe players. There isn't another option to have low ping, thats why most popular MMO have servers around world. I guess Linden decided to have servers only in USA because technology limitation so we can all be on the same "grid" or patriotic thing to produce jobs only in USA.

When comes to my RAM it is DDR2 800 but it is impossible to upgrade it to DDR3 coz than I would have to change motherboard and that's impossible for notebook. So only what I can do is to switch to 64bit system so I can use all 4GB of RAM.

"And finally.  Your comparison to MMO's is so far off base it's laughable." I know the differents between games housed on computer, browser games etc. I noticed tricks what game creators use so game looks good even it maybe doesn't have high detailed textures or models but what's good graphics without good gameplay? I think it is not laughable that in 2012 on lets say high-end pc I have a possibilty to dance in some club, fly plane or shoot zombies without lag in SL. Message of SL isn't you can design anything and admire with friends how it looks but you can create anything and DO anything.

You are right in this case " Graphics are graphics no matter how your GPU gets the information." And I think technology SL use to produce graphics in 2012 is just bad comparing to other solutions. Everything hosted and loaded online type used now by SL is definitely revolutionary and it is the future like cloud OS etc. but limited performance of it seen today isn't because limited user PCs but because big network demands and expencive costs and pcs unoptimised to be used in that way. In theory it is possible that most users have low ping and that Linden servers upload sim with all avatar-animation data to user with steady speed of 10Mbps+ in couple of sec but in reality how fast linden server upload sim to user, sometimes faster sometimes slower and how much servers Linden have over the world and how much pc can handle to always check for everything?

 

I think currently SL have 2 big problems to have decent (in non chat activity) fps performance: 1) To much network traffic 2) Unoptimised user created content.

Possible solutions:

• 1) Create possibility that some SIMs can be housed on computer with maybe also animations and avatar look special for that event or sim. That would made possible to use much more advance graphics and detailed sims because it would be easer for pc to render it and also would relive of load network trafic so finaly low lag action gameplay will be possible what would create totaly new market for games and other real time action demanding events.
• 2) Options to turn off scripts and rezzing by Land Admins are great but still it would be good that we can have maybe cathegories for scripts so all dont have to be turned off. Or even much better if there are some public optmisation categories for designers when creating skin,clothing or accessories for avatars so thair creations can be used in any type of event. Admin would have possibility to turn on rule that the land is available for that cathegory only. Like LOW cathegory simple detailed low textures avatars can join crowded events or clubs when nobody dosen't care when someone have special skin with jovenails and detailed hair under arm. And some really detailed stuff would be HIGH categhory what would be used in high detailed Sims (housed on computer) or rp sims with restricted number of av and ULTRA would be the best SL graphics has to offer for lets say SL machinists.

 

@Poenald Palen

I tryed with turing of fog, foot shadows and some options like that but turning water, sky etc it just doesn't feel right for me thats to much.

Thx for advice

@Baloo Uriza

I am using

Shaders: Transparent Water, Bump mapping,Local lights, Basic shader (or more optimised only basic shader)

Draw Distance: 96 (normal) 160 (driving something)

Max particle: 2048

Other settings: on Mid

Avatar Rendering: Avatar impostors and I found out that if i turn off option Hardware skinning SL works better because with HS  turned on it often happens to me that SL crash with message "Display driver AMD has stopped responding and has recovered"

[Rhys Goode]

My old 32-bit machine started running pretty slow with the introduction of V3 viewers and mesh.  It turned out that the computer was spending a lot of time doing read/write to disk.  When the machine was busy swapping data from RAM to the hard drive, the frame rate would go way down.

Two things helped me a lot:  Disable voice, and lowering the size of the graphics cache from 512 M to 256 M.  In each case, I could clearly see the reducion in disk I/O using the windows Resource Monitor, and in each case, the FPS went up.  I still don't know why voice was having such a big effect, even when it was just idle in the background, but thats what Resource Monitor showed on my machine. 

[Nemanja Miliandrovic]

I don't know how lowering the size of the graphics cache can help but I will try that. I don't know in your case but my graphics ram (cache) in game is always detected from 230 -330 never 512MB  so even i change it to 512MB it doesn't remember it. I will try to see does it save preferences if I put it to 256MB.

Also will try if turning voice down changes everything.

[Xantis Enderfield]

Hello all some stats, using Fiber 500 Mbit Up and 500 Mbit down, location south region of the netherlands, avr speed test inside the netherlands  502 Mbit Up and 493 Mbit down sym. speed test to area where Linden Labs is located  12 Mbit Up and 38 Mbit down sym. (pipe effect), meaning if you have a big pipe and it runs in between to a real small one  then thats your max speed. General performance on SL = Low, ping test shows  3% Loss.

Ping test.

Target www.secondlife.com

Ping statistics for 208.73.211.177:
Packets: Sent = 300, Received = 291, Lost = 9 (3% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 133ms, Maximum = 159ms, Average = 145ms

Count set to 300 times, Size set to 512 Bytes.

Note the Approximate round trip time from Average = 145ms, a windowsize from 64 KB would be bad in this scenario (1500 MTU), and keep in mind that no viewer was used (clean ping test).

With 1 KB or 1024 Bytes Hex = 1000 it looks like this:

Ping statistics for 208.73.211.179:
Packets: Sent = 300, Received = 293, Lost = 7 (2% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 130ms, Maximum = 147ms, Average = 140ms

If am not worried about the Approximate round trip times but about the 3% and 2% Loss, keep in mind that the packet size was set to 1024 Bytes that would  be 8192 Bits or 8 kilobits and we did sent 300 but received 293. And that will get worse if a viewer connects to the Grid and from there to some Simulator , anyway this was just a avr. test. 

With respect,

Frans Lupschen