Lag fixed?

[Manstan Beaumont]

I gave up on SL some months back; maybe a better then a year. I'm running HP i5, 10 gig and a 2 gig card with W7 and with broad band, but could never get more the 12fps out of it with graphics settings as low as they would go. And forget socializing, my FPS would drop to 9 or less if others were around. Were as most games I can play at max settings at 80fps minimum; that would be in town with 30 or more players. I'd thought about reinstalling it but want to know if the lag issues have been fixed? Because with my rig the trouble was not on my end.

[Bree Giffen]

Did you just come back after the server side baking? That might be it. I believe it was part of project shining.

 

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tools-and-Technology/Project-Shining-to-Improve-Avatar-and-Object-Streaming-Speeds/ba-p/1583465

[Heart Brimmer]

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Manstan Beaumont wrote:

I gave up on SL some months back; maybe a better then a year. I'm running HP i5, 10 gig and a 2 gig card with W7 and with broad band, but could never get more the 12fps out of it with graphics settings as low as they would go. And forget socializing, my FPS would drop to 9 or less if others were around. Were as most games I can play at max settings at 80fps minimum; that would be in town with 30 or more players. I'd thought about reinstalling it but want to know if the lag issues have been fixed? Because with my rig the trouble was not on my end.

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Funny, my computer is no where near what you have and I never drop that low when I am at a club, have you thought it might be your connection? just asking.

[Manstan Beaumont]

I can watch streaming hidef wide screen, so no, not a connection issue. I quite because SL was the absolutly only place I had any lag. I can do skirmishes on LOTRO with 12 other players at 80+ fps. I can play NFSW at max and running 120 fps; Yes I know those are rather rediculess numbers, but so is going from 80+ fps on one game and droping to 8 fps on SL.

[Theresa Tennyson]

I'm willing to bet you've got an ATI/AMD graphics card. Most Windows games use DirectX for the graphics language but because SL is multi-platform and open source it uses OpenGL. ATI OpenGL drivers are notoriously bad. People with similar problems to yours were helped by going into "Preferences" - "Graphics" - "Advanced" - "Hardware" and disabling 'Use OpenGL VBO's." I haven't heard too many people complaining about that lately though so it may be fixed by a combination of newer viewers and drivers. Many people find that viewers since 3.5.0 for the LL viewer or 4.4 for Firestorm are significantly faster also.

[Thinkerer Melville]

I am not seeing those rates -- I usually get 25- 30 FPS on more.  Here are 2 articles about the causes and cures for low rates:

• Defeat the lag monster
• Lag, what you can do about it

TKR

: 

[Rhys Goode]

I travel a lot, and use hotel wifi to get on.  Sometimes its works (about 1/3 of the time flawlessly, 1/3 with moderate lag), and sometimes not, but the abiltiy to stream hi-def wifi is not a particualry good predictor about whether or not SL will run smoothly.  I've seen many connections that stream video just fine, but give excessive packet loss when I try using SL, and SL is just not going to run well with packet much over 1%.  My daughter used to have a router that delivered 20Mbps download speed, and would lock up my computer tight as a drum if I tried running SL over the wifi connection, it only worked if I plugged in with a wire.  Did great for streaming videos to my latptop though.

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Currently running 70+ fps on High graphics setting using the LL viewer.  Over wifi, with about 0.5% packet loss. (which does have a noticeable impact when I move about, but not too bad)

CPU: Intel® Core i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz (2195.09 MHz)
Memory: 16362 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560M/PCIe/SSE2

 

[howdoyoulikemenow]

Had severe issues with FPS when I used wireless, plugged an ether-net cable in and cleared it up.

[Penny Patton]

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Manstan Beaumont wrote:

I ... want to know if the lag issues have been fixed? Because with my rig the trouble was not on my end.

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The short answer is "no".

There's a much longer answer I could go into but it would result in a very, very long post so I'll just try to sum it up.

There's multiple, unrelated issues that people lump together and call "lag". The common thread is that they all stem from poor use of resources.

 Videogames look hyper detailed yet run at smooth framerates because the artists who create everything you see understand they need to optimize each and every art asset to use as few polygons and as little texture memory as possible.

 SL content creators, with a scant handful of exceptions, do not understand this. Most SL content is made up of far too many polygons and an obscene amount of textures. Polygon use is reigned in somewhat as higher polygon counts results in a higher "Land Impact" cost. Texture use is entirely out of control and has only gotten worse with the introduction of mesh import.

 Overuse of textures is the single biggest source of performance problems in SL. LL could have curbed the issue by tying texture use to land impact costs, but they never understood the issue. They still don't. That's the problem of trying to create a creative virtual environment with only programmers and no artists on staff. It'd be like trying to get a graphic designer who never got their license and only takes public transit to create a car with no input from automotive experts or even anyone who has ever driven a car.

 Another big issue is server side lag. This is when the server's memory or processor time is all used up creating a bottleneck. There's a lot of things that impact this, the one everyone talks about is script use, and it is an issue. There's no limits of avatar script use so a single avatar can bring a sim to a crawl just by being there, and never realize that they're the source of the problem. There's a lot of tips to reduce script use, usually just deleting unused scripts (like resize scripts) from your attachments should be enough to make your avatar somwhat reasonable. ALWAYS MAKE A COPY BEFORE DOING THIS.

 Avatars with poor connections can lag a sim for everyone.

 A large number of avatars can create lag in a sim. Remember, the sim needs to constantly update every single avatar within the region of any changes made in the sim, that includes people changing their appearance, avatars coming and going, avatars moving, changes to the environment, etcetera. That means the sim is constantly sending a stream of information across the bandwidth it has. The more avatars in the sim, the more bandwidth it's using.

 Textures also impact bandwidth related lag as textures eat up bandwidth as they're loaded on each person's computer. The more/larger textures there are, the more bandwidth is being used.

 When an avatar first arrives in a sim its bandwidth use spikes as the sim tries to send it everything it needs to rez while simultaneously sending everyone else within draw distance that avatar's appearance data.

 

To sum up this summary (the long version could fill a book), Linden Lab really needs to hire someone who understands content creation, like professionally, if they ever really want to address the lag issue.

In the meantime, where you go and the avatars around you determine the amount of lag you experience more than anything else.

[PeterCanessa Oh]

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Manstan Beaumont wrote:

I can watch streaming hidef wide screen, so no, not a connection issue. I quite because SL was the absolutly only place I had any lag. I can do skirmishes on LOTRO with 12 other players at 80+ fps. I can play NFSW at max and running 120 fps; Yes I know those are rather rediculess numbers, but so is going from 80+ fps on one game and droping to 8 fps on SL.

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These games you play - their internet usage is limited to messages such as:

• UserHere, ID, Name, 3d Model
• UserPos: ID, Position, Orientation
• UserAct: ID, Animation Model
• UserChat: ID, Text

Where the 3d and animation models are already installed on your computer via the DVD or download and most scenery is only changed in big, offline, batch updates.  Since there are few messages that refer to already-installed content those messages can be highly compressed as well.  Think of the games as sending tweets to each other!  SL just isn't like that because all the content is custom-made and ever-changing.  It needs a blog post to describe some things in SL.  Therefore SL has to continuously send MUCH more information as you move around and interact.

It's either your graphics card just can't cope with SL, as already suggested, or more than likely your internet connection - especially if you're using wifi instead of wired.  Easiest way to check that is with the Statistics Bar, which is presumably where you were getting your FPS figures from.  What are your ping and packet-loss figures?

 

[Manstan Beaumont]

What's wifi? lol No I'm hard wired. And several of the games I play have dynaimc enviroments. But yes, it is an AMD card, so that may very well be the issue. {ati7870}

[PeterCanessa Oh]

Wifi: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/W/Wi_Fi.html

You got me :-) Hard-wired almost guarantees it's not a connection problem then, unless your ISP is playing silly games.  You got a good rig and it should work well so graphics incompatibility is looking the most likely culprit *sigh*.

Sorry if it appeared I was teaching you to suck eggs, by the way.  You obviously know your way around a machine but the comments I, and other, helpers make in these forums are often intended as much for anyone else who is having similar issues as they are for the OP.