EXTREME lag - please help

[Yoddi]

Oh great tech wizards of the internet, please hear my plea!

Second Life is lagging like crazy on my computer. The FPS average is *2*. I've checked and double-checked my network connection, and it's working fine - no speed problems. How can this be? I can't even walk, much less participate in anything! Please help me!

[Echo Hermit]

Welcome to Second Life forums, Yoddi.

I'm not a great tech wizard, but the great tech wizards of the Second Life forums would surely love to see your computer specifications so they can advise you on this.

All I know is that your network connection can seem fine, your internet service provider can lie say you have megatons of fassssst speeeeed, but if you're sharing your service with a ton of other people, it will dilute your bandwith and leave you short-changed.

That sensation of lagging can also be caused by a low-spec graphics card, or graphics within SL being set far too high, another reason we'd find it really useful to have a glance at your system specs.

[Yoddi]

My computer is a Dell, Intel Quad-core, w/ Q800 @ 2.33 GHz, 8.00 Gb RAM, and an ATI Radeon HD 3400 series graphics card. It's about 5 years old, but it runs like a charm, I tried out both World of Warcraft and Rift and they ran fine, no lag at all. I tried using a few 3rd party viewers as well, that didn't help either. I'm super-excited to get involved in Second Life, so as you can imagine, this is driving me up the wall.

[Nalates Urriah]

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need.  To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

Also see: System Requirements | Second Life.

You need to look at several things before we can start to diagnose what the problem may be.

Read through Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection whether you think you connection is good or not. The article tells you how to tell if it is you or the region server that is a problem. The short take on what you'll learn there is:

Look at the Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1) and check Time Dilation and Physics FPS. They should be near 1.0 and 45.

Look farther down to Network Time. The closer to 0 the better.

Get a free program named GPU-Z. Look to see what your GPU load is. My nVidia GTX560 usually tops out at 40 to 50% with SL. If yours is hitting 100% or sitting at 0% then something is wrong in your computer settings.

You can use System Explorer, another free program, to see what your computer is doing. It will show a high Page Fault rate if you are short on memory. If the CPU's are being overloaded that will show. If your CPU speed is down and percent of load high it may be cooling problem.

SpeedFans is another free program that will read all the temperature sensors in the system. Good temps are in the 30 to 50C range. 50 to 70C is common. Above 70C check the manufactures specs. If you computer is dusty it may need to be cleaned to restore cooling efficiency. 

 

[Orca Flotta]

ATI Radeon HD 3400

... do I see a problem here already?

 

World of Warcraft and Rift

Not very fair to compare computer games with a monster hog like SL. WoW and Rift have ready-made worlds with optimized textures, while in SL everything (and I mean EVERY FOCKING THING!) you see was created by residents, ppl like you and me. Many of those residents are amazingly talented artists but still amateurs, and the textures they are working with are often overkill.

 

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Your ATI Radeon HD 3400 simply is too slow for Second Life.  You could get a decentish graphics card to plug in for not too many dollars - but make sure you can run it on your motherboard.  If you want to see what is decent look at the gpu_table.txt in the official viewer directory and get one listed as at least a class 3 (your current one is class 1).

[Theresa Tennyson]

Go into "Preferences" - "Graphics/Advanced" - "Hardware" and turn off "Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects." That's a setting that traditionally causes problems with older ATI video.

[Yoddi]

I have ordered a better graphics card and in the meantime am implementing some of your other suggestions. Thanks for everyone's help, hopefully I'll see you in SL sometime :matte-motes-grin:

[Echo Hermit]

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Yoddi wrote:

I have ordered a better graphics card and in the meantime am implementing some of your other suggestions. Thanks for everyone's help, hopefully I'll see you in SL sometime :matte-motes-grin:

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Thanks for the update, Yoddi.

Check also you've got plenty of free RAM too, remove any excess programs, disk cleanup and defragment. (I recently added more RAM to this computer, and it's honestly never worked as well, not since it was new).

 

[Nyll Bergbahn]

There is absolutely no way an ATI Radeon HD 3400 should only give a fps of 2 in Second Life. Something else is going on here. Contrary to what has been said, the HD 3400 is a class 2 card in the gpu table not Class 1 and as such should default to HIgh. Medium however, may be a more confortable setting in busy sims and clubs for example or even overall.

1ATI Radeon HD 3400    .*ATI.*Radeon HD *34..      2 

Theresa is right, VBO could be the cause of your problem. What you may be experiencing is what happened to me and some other residents earlier this year with the official viewer only and not my main viewer, Niran's, and that is VBO (vertical buffer objects) suddenly began to decimate frames per second. My fps was down from 40/50 + to as little as 5 with my ATI Radeon HD 5850. I could barely walk or do anything. Some residents I came across on Answers and inworld were down to as little as 2. Took me a few days to figure out the reason (caused maybe by some OpenGL change LL implemented) and disabling VBO was an instant fix. Far as I can recall, a driver update later fixed the issue as I don't think LL actually did anything to fix it, If you are still using an old graphics card driver, it is possible this is the reason for your low fps.

So, first thing I would do is disable VBO in Preferences > Graphics > Hardware. If VBO is the issue, you should see an instant rise in FPS.

Next, update your graphics card driver. the 34* series is now legacy drivers only so 12.6 will be the latest

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx