Getting a new computer...question about graphics/performance.

[Jaysonxd]

Hi, everyone.

So I'm upgrading from a 13in Macbook with an Intel i3 processor, 2GB RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (256MB) to a 17in Sager NP6175 with an Intel i7 processor, 8GB RAM, and an NVIDIA GT 650M (1024MB) graphics card running Win7.

I know I can expect better performance based off of the processor and RAM, but I'm not too sure about graphics. Right now I have to play on Very Low settings and I get FPS ranging from 1-15 when I'm standing still in a sim that is pretty plain and pretty empty. I've heard that Second Life doesn't work well with 650M's though, so this is where I'm turning, I guess.

What can I expect performance/graphics-wise with my new laptop?

[zero Dewoitine]

Hi, jaysonxd  

try Exodus viewer it will improve ur graphics if u want , and try this tips too its working in all viewers ,, in preferences tool choose graphices then in quality and performance choose high option then under this choose hardware options  ,  u will see option antialiasing then choose (( 4x    or    8x  ))  then ok   then apply  and ok . 

i hope to understand me cuz am arabic man so english its not my 1st language. 

hope that help u .

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I don't know who told you that a GT 650M card doesn't work well with SL.  The card, by no means, is the card the highest performing card in the 600 series but it's well into the mid-range.  The card should provide very satisfactory video for most of your SL time in world.......it will struggle at Ultra settings (shadows will give it fits in heavily populated and textured areas) but you should be able to run medium settings in preferences with no problems at all.  High settings will probably give a noticable increase in texture/object lag......but you certainly can expect 25 FPS in all the busiest of areas.  The card, itself, won't be a problem with SL.

There are many factors besides your video processing speed that will effect your performance in SL (including FPS).  The system memory and it's speed, your Internet connection speed and the quality of that connection are two of the three major factors involved in reasonable performance (things not rendering quickly or at all, slow response when try to move around and low FPS).  The three most critical factors that will effect lag are (in order) video capabilities of you GPU (including the dedicated video RAM), your system memory (both total amount and speed), and your Internet connection (speed, quality, and latency).   Your system has the graphics capability plus the 1 GB of VRAM, system RAM (though you didn't list the memory speed, it should be fine as long as it's not something like 533 MHz).  The unknown, for me, is your Internet connection.  It's a laptop so I imagine you will want to connect wirelessly but that's not what I would advise if you are looking for the best performance you can get with your new computer.  The CPU is overkill.......an i5 Sandy Bridge is much cheaper and it's even overkill for SL.

Have fun with your new computer.......it's quite an upgrade from what you are using now.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

To tell you the truth (and I think you know this as well as do) SL would probably be "laggy" even on the superous of the super computers.  It's the unoptimized content that fills the Second Life grid.  As long as Linden Lab allows users to create content for SL it's going to be slower than any other 3D environment in existance.  Now, if LL decided to no longer allow user content, and removed all the existing user created content (which is starting from scratch because 99.9% of everthing that makes SL what it is would have to be removed and replaced) Second Life would no longer be Second Life.......just some weird online video game without a purpose to exist.  How many people would use a game like that?  You wouldn't, I wouldn't, and niether would 99.9% of the users.  I'm sure you know that....but if you don't then I really wonder about the reason you're still here.  I've read your comments so many times and every time you say the same things over and over again....each time it shows absolute ignorance on your part about what the heck you are talking about (where I come from, most people would call that stupidity).

PS..........

A GTX 690 card is a $1000 video card.  And you have 2?  With your knowledge of computers I highly doubt that.

[Jonathan Sivocci]

Hello Jaysonxd, 

You might want to check this (it worked for me), when i purchased my new laptop it ran SL very crappy had to play it on low settings. untill i discovered the following. 

 

Right click the SL Icon on your desktop and find Processor or something like that (i dont have my Laptop with my atm) but there will be something that allows you to select built in grapchis card or the faster Nvidia version. 

 

this solved the issues for me and SL played fine on Ultra, 

[Jennifer Boyle]

FWIW, I have a 2nd generation Core i7, GTX 580, and 32 GB RAM, and, most of the time, have little or no lag.  I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I suspect that most if not all of the lag I have is due to data not getting to my computer fast enough, either because the server is slow or the network is slow.

[Jennifer Boyle]

Peggy, can you help me understand better?  I have been reading for years that the reason that SL required much more graphics power than other games was that all of the the content was dynamic, whereas in most games it wasn't.  The thing that puzzles me is that, while all of it is potentially dynamic, most of it is, in reality, pretty static.  For example, in the sim where my house is there are structures, fixtures, furniture, and landscaping that almost none of which have changed in weeks which must account for at least 89 percent of the prims on the sim.  There are usually five to 15 avatars there.  It seems to me that it would not be necessary for the server to check for changes to locked prims more often than once every minute or so, that most prims on sims such as mine are locked, and that, therefore, the fact that they could be changed should not necessarily result in much load on the server.  Can you explain why this isn't so?

 

Thanks!

[Poenald Palen]

I think it is more than content optimization, though I agree that is an issue. I really think the way SL works, it's constant checking and the way people move and use SL all contribute. But, yes some stuff is not optimzed well enough, and in some ways there was no way or simply no education on it. I built cars and you just experimented or heard stuff while hanging out! No classes on this, well...at the time. Now the forums are open, there is a full wiki. It is better now, but still...yeah, badly done (or not done at all) stuff is around. LL didn't implement more checks and it is hard to.They are relying on common sense, sim owners should learn this if they are investing over 100$ a month for a sim...right? So, the market decides and those who are sick of laggy items Identify them and tell the others to not use them. ARC was part of this natural common sense method of governance via anarchy with only an upper limit per item uploaded. Well, ARC ws hated. I used to attache cars to myself with a totally blank lowest ARC value avatar shape....it was sort of nifty. People freaked out about ARC, they figure bleeding n00bs into non users was fine. I remember saying we need better detection of hardware. But, they know that and figure...well, common sense is you will switch stuff off and people help each other.

Then chat was breaking down and group chat plummeted lol. Yeah, where are you going to ask? Many are just not into forums, reading huge pages and then waiting for their SL viewer to stop crashing for 20 minutes...weird, huh! lol. Needless to say, the quasi anarchy method backfired, people want total non interaction, zero community and only want a space to hang with freinds....no feedback, resistance or distruption from a public. You could argue they dont want a SL like RL and the only core of the SL product is that is is some kind of escape from rules, a cirtual fantasy area and simply NOT a world....it is a virtual escape to many? Not sure exacly. Interesting stuff to think about.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Any object (or texture) in SL is dynamic as you say.  The server code sends the data to your viewer that is within your viewing distance set in preferences with the focus on what is directly within the viewing angle........but all the data is in the pipeline or has been cached to your computer's viewer cache file.  Stand still and if nothing changed then everything is static.  Turn your camera view or turn your avatar, walk, fly or otherwise do something the change position the content becomes dynamic......it changes due to someone physically changing texture, moving the object (scripts can do that) or you simply moved to another spot where what you see is now different from what you saw before the changes happened.  In a video game where all that content you see on the monitor is stored on your hard drive and that content is set in stone about what it contains (for a cube it has 6, and only 6, potential textures).........that will not change until some game update is done and the textures are changed (you don't do that on the fly as you do in SL).  In SL nothing is set in stone........it is all subject to change at any time (unpredictable) so the content has to be constantly checked for any changes (wait a full minute, or even 5 seconds, can product some very irritating lag issues).  Just because it hasn't changed in a year does not mean the servers can just assume it won't change in the next second.  There is no predictability for the content like in a video game.....it's impossible due to the design of SL.  It's also what makes SL unique in the area of content (besides it being user created).

If you give it much thought, it's pretty amazing that SL works at all.  People seem to think it's all pretty mundane and easy to fix something like lag.  If you visit some of the Open Sim grids I think you might see that those grids are having issues that SL experienced a few years ago..........and they got a head start with the reverse engineered server code they started out with.  It's complicated.  And it's so much better than just a year or so ago.  You should have seen it in 2005......but we loved it for the lag, worn prims shoved up your backside, avatar folded in half, the "missing image" skin, and the frumpy little female runt of an avatar (named "Ruth").

[Coventina Dalgleish]

Here is a good read on the video card in the new lap top  http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-650M.71887.0.html it seems to be a middle of the heap card which should run SL depending on the memory on board It appears that the DDR5 memory is preferred as the DDR3 will create a bottleneck.

 

As far as the guy running the 2 690's maybe he should check the SL specs since SL has no idea of what to do with the SLI setup and 48 gigs of ram is way out of the ballpark hehe but it does help to have more than a 300 baud modem to run the game ))

[Qie Niangao]

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[...] The CPU is overkill.......an i5 Sandy Bridge is much cheaper and it's even overkill for SL.

Have fun with your new computer.......it's quite an upgrade from what you are using now.

---

Agreed on both points. I'm hoping you (the OP) didn't spend too much extra for the i7 because it's not going to give a huge performance benefit for SL and considering this is a laptop, it will burn more battery and generate more heat than the i5s offered for that Sager model (although they don't appear to be offering low power versions of either processor family, so that's apparently not a design consideration).

In any case, you're going to see much better graphics performance with a 650M than a 9400M; it benchmarks at nearly 10x the raw 3D rendering performance. (See this vs that. You won't get 10x the SL framerates, of course, but it will be a very noticeable improvement. The 9400M should just barely work at all for SL--which is pretty much what you've been experiencing.)

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Coventina Dalgleish wrote:

 

As far as the guy running the 2 690's maybe he should check the SL specs since SL has no idea of what to do with the SLI setup

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Hey Cov, even worse with 690's since they are two slightly tuned down 680's in SLI boxed into one package. So that would be a 4way SLI. SL will only use one underclocked 680. So if the 690's are used primarily for SL, that means 1500+ bucks of unused graphical potential.

I really can't think of many situations where two 690's make a difference. If used for games, the second card will generate the fps you will never see unless you have a 100Hz monitor. If used for professional purposes, a professional card (quadro) would probably be the better choice.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

The poster who made the claim that he has 2 690's in his computer has made numerous outrageous claims in the past.  His credibility with me is next to non-existant.  No one in their right mind would install 2 $1000 cards in a computer unless they knew what those cards are going to do for them..........and this poster has shown me that he doesn't know a thing about what it takes to render the simplist of scenes.  And make a note..........I'm no expert by anyone's definition.  All I know is what I've learned by reading (both here on the forums and Internet research), experience (by building my own machines), and a hefty dose of common sense.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Although I agree the statement by jj is probably nonsense, I've met enough ignorant people with too much money both in SL and RL. I was just pointing out why 2 690's are complete nonsense for SL. As long as SLI isn't supported,(and in the hypothetical situation where SL would use the entire potential of the GPU), a single 680 will perform better. Not sure about the memory on a 690 btw, whether that's shared or split by the 2 GPU's. If both GPU's in that "package" have 2 GB, the 680 with 4 GB will outperform it even more. (I assume the memory is shared, so one GPU can use all of it)

I miss the folded in half avatars btw:)