Help Improving Graphics.

[Jinx Requiem]

Alright, this is mainly a question regarding what I can do to view Second Life a bit better.

I have to run Firestorm on the lowest quality of settings because using anything remotely desirable,

(shaders, bump mapping, local light, etc)

makes my experience extremely laggy.

 

I'm wondering, is this a problem regarding the quality of my graphics card, or the viewer that I use?

I'm not exactly tech savvy, so any advice would help.

 

(I was told to buy an Nvidia card and get it installed for my laptop, but I want to be sure it is needed before I do so.)

[Echo Hermit]

Greetings,

It would help enormously if you'd post your computer's full specifications here.

Lag can be caused by several things; if your broadband is shared by many other people on your internet service, a low-spec graphics card, settings inworld on too high, and having too little spare RAM will also slow you down.

You are absolutely right not to go buying a new nvidia card until you can make an informed choice.

[Qie Niangao]

---

(I was told to buy an Nvidia card and get it installed

for my laptop

, but I want to be sure it is needed before I do so.)

---

[emphasis mine] I haven't opened a laptop for a very long time, but unless things have changed dramatically, laptops generally have no means of upgrading their graphics. So, yeah, before you do anything like that, let's find out that it's even possible.

[Jennifer Boyle]

In Firestorm, click on Help, then on About, then on Copy to Clipboard.  Then paste the contents of the clipboard into a post here.  That will give people the information that they need to help you.

[VRprofessor]

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

---

(I was told to buy an Nvidia card and get it installed

for my laptop

, but I want to be sure it is needed before I do so.)

---

[emphasis mine] I haven't opened a laptop for a very long time, but unless things have changed dramatically, laptops generally have no means of upgrading their graphics. So, yeah, before you do anything like that, let's find out that it's even

possible

.

---

I did a quick search of Newegg and found no discrete laptop graphics cards.  (not that I was surprised--it is my understanding that such things do not exist, but I wanted to check before adding my caution to Qie's)

[TristanMercer]

Your run of the mill laptops generally are not very powerful for gaming, and most are barely usable for SL because of having integrated graphics, even if they are combined with the processor such as those in the i3 line of processors. You could have 2gb of video memory on one of those and it will still be slow with terrible framerates because everything is routed through the processor.

If you wanted/needed a good laptop, you will need to buy a gaming laptop. Alienware is a well known brand that has been purchased by Dell. There is also the XPS line from Dell.  This is a steep cost as you will likely be dropping $2000 or more for such a system that has a minimum 15" screen. An 11" screen is not feasible at all, so just steer clear of those.

If that is not an option then you will more than likely need a desktop that you can upgrade the PSU, graphics card, RAM on.

 

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

Two things that can improve your graphics without impacting much:

In debug settings (Advanced - Show Debug Settings) change "rendervolumeLODfactor" to a number over 4.

Change meshmaxConcurrentRequests to about 100.

 

Two others that will have a minor impact, but light enough you may or may not notice:

In Advanced, turn off HTTP Textures, or if its off, turn it on. For different people, one setting or the other is best...

In Graphics - Hardware, turn off Texture Compression, or if its off, turn it on. Same thing - helps some hurts others.

 

And try the official viewer, might not be as heavy of a burden on your system. Again, seems one works better for some, the other works better for others. Compare.

 

[honerken]

---

TristanMercer wrote:

Your run of the mill laptops generally are not very powerful for gaming, and most are barely usable for SL because of having integrated graphics, even if they are combined with the processor such as those in the i3 line of processors. You could have 2gb of video memory on one of those and it will still be slow with terrible framerates because everything is routed through the processor.

If you wanted/needed a good laptop, you will need to buy a gaming laptop. Alienware is a well known brand that has been purchased by Dell. There is also the XPS line from Dell.  This is a steep cost as you will likely be dropping $2000 or more for such a system that has a minimum 15" screen. An 11" screen is not feasible at all, so just steer clear of those.

If that is not an option then you will more than likely need a desktop that you can upgrade the PSU, graphics card, RAM on.

 

 

 

 

 

---

I don't think gaming laptops are worth it just for SL.  Honestly, any $400-$600 laptop should be able to run SL fine on lower settings.  Unless you want to use shadows or see long distances, then I generally think the higher garphic settings for SL aren't worth blowing that much money for.

[Phil Deakins]

Bump to scroll the spam down.

[solstyse]

If you want to upgrade hardware, you'll need to buy a desktop. Laptop ram can be upgraded, but graphics cards cannot.. SL is becoming more and more intense on graphics cards. But then again, so has everything else our computers do.

Right now, I'm on a laptop just like the OP. And I'm having he same issue. But since we've been getting told that V! viewers are being phased out for over a year now, I've just learned to deal with the lagginess of Firestorm (compared to Phoenix.) When I open my resource monitor, I can see that CPU usage is consistantly over 90%. When I was at 4gb of ram, that was way up there too. Upgrading to 6gb of ram helped a little, but the cpu spike is due to the integrated graphics. It's just the nature of laptops.

Interestingly, Photoshop performs better on a decade old desktop that I have than it does on my laptop, despite every single specification on the lappy being better. This is all because the old desktop has a video card. So why not use the desktop? Well, the motherboard is too old for me to buy any modern upgrades for. Buying a new computer would be cheaper than upgrading.