Low FPS

[Esther Lowbeam]

 

Hello,

My FPS is around 3 currently. This seems very strange to me.

Do you have any further suggestions or special tricks that can be performed to get a better FPS. I have already cleared my hard drive and SL cache.

I have a MAc Book Pro mid 2009

Processor  2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory  4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Graphics  NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB

Connection Ping 19, Downlaod Speed 19.05, Upload Speed 1.05 

Many thanks

Esther

[Lindal Kidd]

Those are crummy data transfer speeds, especially the upload speed.  Try connecting to the internet using the free Google DNS service and see if things improve.

Also, restart your internet router and modem.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

On the surface your system is decent enough to run SL at fairly decent frame rates.  Your connection (assuming the numbers you posted are mega bits per second and not kilo bits) is very good.......no mention of packet loss but if that was excessive you'd be getting disconnects along with the low FPS).  Also that ping is more or less useless unless you did your speed tests from your location to the two server locations that LL has for it's servers (San Francisco, CA and Dallas, TX.......and average of a few tests to each location would be best).  I'm going to say the connection is probably not at the root of the problem (but if you are using wireless it's definitely not helping).

What I do see as a possible source of the problem is your video card.  The 9400M (with only 256 MB only card VRAM) card never was a particularly powerful video card (slightly below mid-range when it was developed and released to the market........what?; 4 years ago?).  Be that as it may, the card is good enough to run SL at 20 to 30 FPS in most areas on the grid.  The qualifying part of that 20 to 30 FPS is that your settings in preferences has to be set somewhere in the medium area.  When the card fist came out it could run SL at high with some compromise on frame rates.  But with the newer viewers and everything LL has added to the Second Life server code that is no longer possible..........shadows and depth of field will likely crash your viewer (or even your computer in extreme cases).  You have to limit what your video card is required to do in order to render the scenes fast enough to give you more FPS when you are in-world.  Set your viewer preferences to medium and lower your draw distance to 128 meters or less.  You play with the bandwidth settings but don't expect too much help......1000 kbps is about as high as I would dare suggest for you (500 might be best).  The goal is to limit the work load on the video card.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

The speeds numbers are only crummy if that is kbps and not mbps. It appears the OP used one of the speet test sites (probably http://www.speedtest.net/ ). That site gives the speeds in mbps. Those numbers are very close to my numbers.........and I have pretty darn good numbers.

[Charles Hera]

My download speed is currently 9254 (I have an issue that will hopefully get fixed and I'll be back to 13245 ish and an upload of 822 (constant). That is fast for my neck of the woods *wink* and I run with shadows always, 350 plus distance and can get two avatars on if I need to. So if indeed your numbers are better than mine (there is that question about the way they are noted ) then the connection speed itself seems unlikely.

Aside from lowering your graphics setting and bringing your distance down you might think about trying a third party viewer based on the old 1.23 code -- just to see if that helps. Phoenix, Singularity -- I think Imprudence is still around etc.

Also, you didn't mention if this is a NEW phenomenon and you didn't talk about whether this is across sims. There are some sims where I get horrible framerates and actually moved away from one I loved because of that. Is the framerate better at 3500 meters than it is on the ground? 

Good luck. At 3fps there is really no point being in world. 

[Esther Lowbeam]

Thank you for this answer Charles

I

t is new that this be the case, and it is across the board.

However it was true that the FPS shot up when I lowered my graphics to medium quality.

So that's good to know.

 

I would ideally like to use a much higher graphic setting and am interested in the comment you made:

Aside from lowering your graphics setting and bringing your distance down you might think about trying a third party viewer based on the old 1.23 code -- just to see if that helps. Phoenix, Singularity -- I think Imprudence is still around etc.

Could you elaborate further?

 

Best wishes

Esther

 

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I'm not Charles but I did want to chime in here. You said that by lowering your graphics your FPS shot up. That being the case says to me that you have a less than strong graphics adapter/card. To tell the truth, most users of SL are only able to run SL at medium settings in preferences (some can run at higher settings but experience low frame rates and/or lag so they only use the higher settings when whatever they are doing warrants it.......such as photo taking). You can certainly try TPV's to see if you get better performance with your computer. The main reason people get better performance with certain TPV's is that those viewers don't have the features and options for features that the other viewers have (things like shadows and depth of field). It might be that you don't use those features so you would not care and therefore not have a need for them.....however, you can use a feature rich viewer and simply not enable those features that produce issues for you in world and accomplish the same thing. If high settings on your viewer produce low FPS or lag, moving to a viewer with fewer features just so you can run high settings on that viewer is really doing nothing for you because the high settings on the viewer are not giving you the same features as high settings on the full featured viewer........just set your preferences lower to get the results you want in FPS.

 

Here's the complete list of currently "authorized" third party viewers:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Downloads#non-linden

 

A note on the viewers based on the old SL viewer version 1.23 code. You will not be able to see mesh........instead you'll see odd, out of place prims (it really looks strange and ugly). Mesh is a recent introduction to SL (a little over a year ago) and it's become quite common for builders to use mesh objects for their builds.....you'll miss all of that. Clothing and avatar creators are increasingly using mess for their creations.......you'll miss all of that too. You don't get a boost in performance without changing the hardware in your computer unless you drop features.......you have to weigh whether or not it's worth what you're missing for a boost in FPS. Especially if you can lower your preference settings to get better results without loosing what is fast becoming a very important part of SL........mesh is here to stay and it will become almost mandatory that a viewer displays it (soon, very soon......if not already here).