FPS

[Storm Clarence]

What's good, bad, and ugly?

(med, high, and ultra numbers)

I built another laptop this week and I am getting FPS numbers that I just didn't think existed.

 

 

[RudolphFarquhar]

I thought getting 100 FPS was ******* great.

Then I ******* realised I had set the ******* display to ******* binary.

**********Rudi**********

 

[Tears Serf]

Ultra and 3 monitors 28 fps. but its often serverside thet make my day harder.

[Sassy Romano]

My answer is that it's just too scene dependent.  I run 3 monitors on a GTX 680 and some places I could easily get > 100fps, other places it's mid single digits on ultra settings.

I set my max fps to 30 anyway, if I let it run away faster than that, it's 56W more power according to my PSU monitoring software and since most of the time in SL is standing around, why pay more electricity to do that?! :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

[Lewis Luminos]

I usually cruise at about 30 or so. beyond that, I can't really tell the difference.

[phaedra Exonar]

I don't know that could be set I just found the debug seting for that MaxFPS thanks for pointing that out

[Storm Clarence]

---

phaedra Exonar wrote:

I don't know that could be set

I just found the debug seting for that MaxFPS thanks for pointing that out

---

Nor did I.  Throttling the FPS is kind of the point with my OP.  What is good; what is recognizable and what is not? 

I have a technical background, but not in graphic gaming--so I just don't know. 

I've played SL for years at ~10 FPS or less.  I am currently getting ~70 on ultra.  Yes, I notice the difference, but do I need all that?  What are the trade-offs, if any? 

 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

---

Storm Clarence wrote:

I've played SL for years at ~10 FPS or less.  I am currently getting ~70 on ultra.  Yes, I notice the difference, but do I need all that?  What are the trade-offs, if any? 

 

---

The only downside to a high framerate is your GPU working harder, using more energy. Besides the costs, that means extra heat, which can be bad for your computer. Your monitor refresh rate is probably 60 fps (Hz). Anything over that is useless. If you have a 120Hz monitor, that's obviously not the case.

[RudolphFarquhar]

---

Storm Clarence wrote:

 

I've played SL for years at ~10 FPS or less.  I am currently getting ~70 on ultra.  Yes, I notice the difference, but do I need all that?  What are the trade-offs, if any? 

---

You can see how ******* ugly most of the ******* avatars are.

On the upside it makes ******* stalking and perving easier.

**********Rudi**********

[Sassy Romano]

---

Storm Clarence wrote:

 

I've played SL for years at ~10 FPS or less.  I am currently getting ~70 on ultra.  Yes, I notice the difference, but do I need all that?  What are the trade-offs, if any? 

 

---

I think I mentioned it already?  If I throttle my FPS to 30, my PC is quiet (it's pretty quiet anyway) but if I let the FPS run to whatever it can, my power supply monitoring software says that the GTX 680 will use 56W extra when unthrottled and the fans instantly start up and become noisier.

I don't need that frame rate so why have the noise, heat and cost?

[Venus Petrov]

---

Sassy Romano wrote:

My answer is that it's just too scene dependent.  I run 3 monitors on a GTX 680 and some places I could easily get > 100fps, other places it's mid single digits on ultra settings.

I set my max fps to 30 anyway, if I let it run away faster than that, it's 56W more power according to my PSU monitoring software and since most of the time in SL is standing around, why pay more electricity to do that?! :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

---

The MaxFPS setting currently on FS is -1.000.  I do not understand what that setting means with regards to the FPS that I currently experience.  I usually get between 30-70FPS most places (depending on graphics setting) but can soar over 100 at times, too.

 

[Sassy Romano]

-1 means don't try to limit it.

It's worth adding that the currently available firestorm beta has omitted this piece of code but it is back in and fixed but not released. 

[Venus Petrov]

Thank you!

 

[Perrie Juran]

There was a thread about two years ago that I am unable to find right now on the whole topic of frame rates that I am unable to dig out right now.  I'm hoping by mentioning it maybe I'll stir someone's memory and they can link it.

The discussion resolved around a statement someone made that anything above a certain frame rate was fruitless because of how fast the human eye sees. 

Also discussed in that thread were issues like Monitor Refresh Rate, the fact the Servers runs at 45FPS and several other relate things.  The closest thing I have been able to find are some comments in this thread:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/3000-to-8000-frames-per-second-possible-in-this-Viewer/m-p/1086541/highlight/true#M7387

I'd love to find that other thread.  It was very informative.

[Storm Clarence]

Thanks for the link Perrie.  Madelaine's response seemed to nail it.  Others in their responses to this OP echo her words.  

I'm not so sure I am able to discern 30 FPS from 100 FPS, but I do enjoy the experience much more than at 10 FPS.   

A few years back someone posted on cam angles, I wish I could find these posts. 

 

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

---

Storm Clarence wrote:

Thanks for the link Perrie.  Madelaine's response seemed to nail it.  Others in their responses to this OP echo her words.  

I'm not so sure I am able to discern 30 FPS from 100 FPS, but I do enjoy the experience much more than at 10 FPS.   

A few years back someone posted on cam angles, I wish I could find these posts. 

 

 

 

---

YW.  I really wish I could find that old thread I mentioned.  I'd be delighted if I averaged 30 FPS.  For some things higher does have advantages.  Drag Races in SL, those cars move so fast, if you blink you can miss the race. 

Are these the threads on Camera Placement.  I use Penny's settings tweaked a little to my preference.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Improved-SL-Camera-Placement/m-p/1935309/highlight/true#M18669

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/A-Matter-of-Perspective-The-importance-of-camera-placement-in/m-p/971879/highlight/true#M4444

[Storm Clarence]

Kudos to you Perrie (and to Penny.)  These are the threads I was searching for.  

 

 

[Venus Petrov]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

---

Storm Clarence wrote:

Thanks for the link Perrie.  Madelaine's response seemed to nail it.  Others in their responses to this OP echo her words.  

I'm not so sure I am able to discern 30 FPS from 100 FPS, but I do enjoy the experience much more than at 10 FPS.   

A few years back someone posted on cam angles, I wish I could find these posts. 

 

 

 

---

YW.  I really wish I could find that old thread I mentioned.  I'd be delighted if I averaged 30 FPS.  For some things higher does have advantages.  Drag Races in SL, those cars move so fast, if you blink you can miss the race. 

Are these the threads on Camera Placement.  I use Penny's settings tweaked a little to my preference.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Improved-SL-Camera-Placement/m-p/1935309/highlight/true#M18669

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/A-Matter-of-Perspective-The-importance-of-camera-placement-in/m-p/971879/highlight/true#M4444

---

Thank you!  I found the first link because I had bookmarked it.  The second is also very helpful.

 

[Penny Patton]

I'm glad people are finding the camera tips helpful. I've been trying to convince TPVs to include improved presets so people don't have to hunt down instructions on changing their camera placement themselves.

---

Storm Clarence wrote:

What's good, bad, and ugly?

(med, high, and ultra numbers)

I built another laptop this week and I am getting FPS numbers that I just didn't think existed.

 

 

---

 Framerates depend highly on the quality of the build around you as well as your hardware. On average, I get between 10-30fps in most locations in SL.

 Apologies in advance, going to get wordy as I put on my tutorial writing hat and explain why people tend to expect low framerates from SL.

 My computer was the high end of mid range when I got it, but it's a few years old now. When I had my own sim, which I tried to create as efficiently as possible in SL, I was getting around 50-60FPS in environments which looked like this:

 

 That was with shadows enabled and a high enough draw distance to see everything in the sim without the mountains or castles in the distance popping in and out of view.

Before I went on my texture reduction tear through the sim, I was getting 5-20fps in the same environments. Reducing the texture load alone (by replacing large textures with much smaller textures) I was able to go from 5-20 up to 50-60. Texture use is that big a deal.

People don't realize it, but SL is constantly streaming far more textures at your videocard than any modern AAA videogame, and that's the biggest reason SL tends to run so poorly. Even moreso than excessive geomettry. Any given sim is throwing literally gigabytes of textures at you at all times.

 Textures need to be fed through your videocard's Video RAM (VRAM), when texture use exceeds your available VRAM, you see a massive framerate hit as your videocard struggles to shuffle textures in and out of memory. This is also why you'll see textures rezzing and unrezzing frequently. Fully rezzed textures are being kicked out of memory to make room for other textures.

And textures aren't the only thing that uses VRAM. Shadows also use it heavily. This is why so many people experience a huge FPS hit when enabling shadows. It's not that shadows are particularly difficult to render, it's that they rely on VRAM you're already pushing to the limit on textures alone.

 Because of this, a videocard with a larger amount of VRAM will give you a very noticeable FPS boost. However, overcoming inefficient design with sheer horsepower isn't the a practical solution for most people. If LL tried to reign in excessive texture use, most SL users could enjoy substantially higher framerates (double or better) on the hardware they have now and SL wouldn't look any worse for it. Actually it would look better because people could enable higher graphics settings.

[Penny Patton]

I realise the above means little to people who don't create content, except to perhaps shed a bit of light on the mystery of why SL runs so poorly despite looking so much less impressive than top tier videogames that none-the-less get high FPS on the same hardware.

 However, if you are a content creator, I'd urge you to use smaller, more efficient textures. Think like you're creating content for a videogame. In terms of art assets, there is no difference between SL and a videogame, you have to play by the same rules. Too many triangles, too much texture memory, and your content drags down framerates.

 

Avoid using 1024x1024 textures on surfaces smaller than 10x10. Unless it's something like a full body replacement, don't use 1024x1024 textures at all on avatar attachments. Or 512x512 for that matter. I noticed the Lola's Tango mesh breasts use a 1024x1024 texture for the skin by default. If you apply your actual skin texture to them, the visible area amounts to less than 256x256 and you get a better blending between the boobs and your av mesh. Think about that.

Combine textures where possible.

If using an individual texture for a small detail, like jewlery, use a 64x64 texture. You cannot see the difference at those sizes.

If you find yourself using very similar textures for separate surfaces, see if you can create a single texture which can be applied to all these surfaces. With some smart texture crafting, you can generally fake baked shading with clever use of mirrors and offsets.

 

 Ideally, SL should penalize you for excessive texture use through inflated land impact costs. Since it doesn't, people need to rely on their own judgement, but you should always aim for as low a resource impact as possible.

[Storm Clarence]

Again Penny, thank you. 

[Perrie Juran]

---

Penny Patton wrote:

 

 

 Because of this, a videocard with a larger amount of VRAM will give you a very noticeable FPS boost.

---

I know, I've pulled the one sentence out but I'm trying to reconcile it with this statement by Bao LInden:

 

Bao Linden added a comment - 14/Oct/11 12:16 PM

As Kouta Ruska pointed out, 512MB is the cap. But we do not think it is a bug. Here are the reasons why we set this cap:

1, this cap is a soft cap. It tells viewer it is good to make the total amount of textures to follow this cap. But if this cap needs to be overflown to make all necessary textures sharp enough, and viewer has resource to overflow the cap, viewer will do it. Of course viewer will immediately remove unneeded textures to follow the cap if the situation changes.

2, vram is used to hold all stuff for GPU. Textures are just part of it. VRAM needs space for VBO, render targets, and other necessary stuff.

3, When a texture is created, it has a copy in the vram and a copy in the main memory. Normally when vram can not hold all textures for rendering, drivers should do texture swapping between the main memory and vram. This is why we reserve 1.5 times of texture memory cap in the main memory. So say if the cap is 512MB, 768MB is reserved in the main memory. SL is built with 32-bit system. So the max address space it has is 2GB, which includes program space and heap space. Considering the fragmentation issue, the actual max memory (or heap size) for SL is no more than 1.6~1.7 GB. Among that, 768MB is a large enough portion to be reserved for textures only.

4, 512 MB cap is also sufficient for performance. Texture itself is hardly the reason causing FPS drop unless GPU is busy in doing a lot of texture swapping while rendering. This is not the case when we have 512MB texture memory. If you open the texture console by "ctrl+shift+3", and watch the total amount of textures to be bound at an instant, it is very rare that that number is more than 512MB.

Instead of increasing the 512MB cap, we unfortunately might have to do the opposite changes: to shrink this cap, for certain cards. For instance, some ATI cards are not good at texture swapping. So textures eat up all VRAM quickly in some regions which causes FPS to crawl, and eventually crashes SL.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2547?

 

The Viewer caps VRAM at 500mb. So how does a GPU with a greater amount of VRAM help? 

If one looks at the rather simplistic lag meter, the two usual messages you will see for Client side lag are "textures loading" or "too many complex objects (translates usually as other Ava's)."  The other message sometimes is "draw distance too high," but I only get that if I have really cranked it up.

Once textures are loaded, which is generally very quick for me if I am by myself, I generally average 30 to 45 FPS.  But start adding other Avatars and that number will start dropping very fast.

[Penny Patton]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

The Viewer caps VRAM at 500mb. So how does a GPU with a greater amount of VRAM help? 

If one looks at the rather simplistic lag meter, the two usual messages you will see for Client side lag are "textures loading" or "too many complex objects (translates usually as other Ava's)."  The other message sometimes is "draw distance too high," but I only get that if I have really cranked it up.

Once textures are loaded, which is generally very quick for me if I am by myself, I generally average 30 to 45 FPS.  But start adding other Avatars and that number will start dropping very fast.

---

I misspoke slightly. I should have said having greater amount of VRAM can give you a boost, rather than will. I'll borrow Bao from you to explain why.

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

Bao Linden

added a comment -

14/Oct/11 12:16 PM

1, this cap is a soft cap. It tells viewer it is good to make the total amount of textures to follow this cap.

But if this cap needs to be overflown to make all necessary textures sharp enough, and viewer has resource to overflow the cap, viewer will do it.

 

---

In other words, the more memory your videocard has, the more ability it provides the SL client to exceed the soft cap on texture memory.

 

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

Bao Linden

added a comment -

14/Oct/11 12:16 PM

2, vram is used to hold all stuff for GPU. Textures are just part of it. VRAM needs space for VBO, render targets, and other necessary stuff.

---

When you only have 512MB of VRAM total, as many still do, a 512 cap on textures is still going to eat up all your VRAM and drag down framerates because there's a lot of other things that need to be using VRAM. Shadows use VRAM heavily, which is a bit part of why enabling shadows in SL can lead to such a performance hit. So if your videocard has more VRAM, that's more memory SL has for these other rendering features without digging into the amount of capped memory SL sets aside for textures.

 

I also don't mean to say that more VRAM is a silver bullet to solve all your texture woes. It can help, but ultimately content creators really should be using fewer/smaller textures. Game designers understand this, which is why content in videogames use textures that are much smaller than what we see in SecondLife.

 

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

Bao Linden

added a comment -

14/Oct/11 12:16 PM

4, 512 MB cap is also sufficient for performance. Texture itself is hardly the reason causing FPS drop unless GPU is busy in doing a lot of texture swapping while rendering. This is not the case when we have 512MB texture memory. If you open the texture console by "ctrl+shift+3", and watch the total amount of textures to be bound at an instant, it is very rare that that number is more than 512MB.

---

At any given instant, SL can be throwing gigabytes of textures at you. Your avatar alone may be using a sizeable chunk, if not the entirety, of that 512MB texture memory cap. This can vary from person to person and sim to sim. This is why it's important that people work as efficiently as possible regardless of the amount of VRAM they. personally, have. The content you create, whether it's an avatar attachment, a small prop like a drinking cup, or a full sim environment, does not exist in a vaccuum.

 I don't know where Bao hangs out to come to the conclusion that SL is rarely displaying more than 512MB of textures, but It is very easy to figure the strain SL puts on hardware with a little information. First, with the format of texture file SL uses, we know that a 1024x1024 texture is 3MB in size (4MB if it has an alpha channel, whether or not that channel is used). So with 170 such textures, you're using up SL's entire 512MB "soft cap".

 

It's not unusual to see avatars wearing about 50-100 textures each. More and more, content creators are heading directly to 1024x1024 textures for ALL their textures, regardless of the size of the object. I purchased a hair piece earlier this year that had almost twenty 1024x1024 textures.

 So it can potentially only take one or two avatars onscreen at any given time, including your own, to be exceeding 512MB. This is a big part of why people take such a performance hit with many avatars onscreen at once. (Another big part of it is that avatars lack any sort of "land impact" limiting polygon use, so you'll see avatars strutting around with more triangles in their attachments than is used in an entire village from Skyrim.)

 

 Bao's comments are also from 2011, well before materials had arrived on the scene, and while mesh import was still fairly new.

 

 With mesh import, we're seeing far more texture excess. With a sculpt, you're limited to one texture per sculpted prim, but with mesh an inexperienced modeller can separate the surfaces to apply multiple textures to the same shape. And lots of people in SL are doing this because when LL introduced "Land Impact" to replace prim limits, they neglected to consider texture use. This was a crippling oversight on their part and a big part of why so many people believe "mesh" itself hurts their framerates. It's not the mesh, it's the excessive number of huge textures wrapped around those mesh models.

 

On top of that, we also now have materials. Materials are separate texture maps, and they eat up VRAM exactly as other textures do. So, each object in SL that uses materials is potentially adding two more textures to each surface, tripling the VRAM that object eats up. More than that , even, if the object is using an emissive mask. (Haven't seen a lot of people using emissive masks yet, not sure most people have figured them out).

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

---

Penny Patton wrote:

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

The Viewer caps VRAM at 500mb. So how does a GPU with a greater amount of VRAM help? 

If one looks at the rather simplistic lag meter, the two usual messages you will see for Client side lag are "textures loading" or "too many complex objects (translates usually as other Ava's)."  The other message sometimes is "draw distance too high," but I only get that if I have really cranked it up.

Once textures are loaded, which is generally very quick for me if I am by myself, I generally average 30 to 45 FPS.  But start adding other Avatars and that number will start dropping very fast.

---

I misspoke slightly. I should have said having greater amount of VRAM

can

give you a boost, rather than

will.

I'll borrow Bao from you to explain why.

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

Bao Linden

added a comment -

14/Oct/11 12:16 PM

1, this cap is a soft cap. It tells viewer it is good to make the total amount of textures to follow this cap.

But if this cap needs to be overflown to make all necessary textures sharp enough, and viewer has resource to overflow the cap, viewer will do it.

 

---

In other words, the more memory your videocard has, the more ability it provides the SL client to exceed the soft cap on texture memory.

 

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

Bao Linden

added a comment -

14/Oct/11 12:16 PM

2, vram is used to hold all stuff for GPU. Textures are just part of it. VRAM needs space for VBO, render targets, and other necessary stuff.

---

When you only have 512MB of VRAM total, as many still do, a 512 cap on textures is still going to eat up all your VRAM and drag down framerates because there's a lot of other things that need to be using VRAM. Shadows use VRAM heavily, which is a bit part of why enabling shadows in SL can lead to such a performance hit. So if your videocard has more VRAM, that's more memory SL has for these other rendering features without digging into the amount of capped memory SL sets aside for textures.

 

I also don't mean to say that more VRAM is a silver bullet to solve all your texture woes. It can help, but ultimately content creators really should be using fewer/smaller textures. Game designers understand this, which is why content in videogames use textures that are much smaller than what we see in SecondLife.

 

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

Bao Linden

added a comment -

14/Oct/11 12:16 PM

4, 512 MB cap is also sufficient for performance. Texture itself is hardly the reason causing FPS drop unless GPU is busy in doing a lot of texture swapping while rendering. This is not the case when we have 512MB texture memory. If you open the texture console by "ctrl+shift+3", and watch the total amount of textures to be bound at an instant, it is very rare that that number is more than 512MB.

---

At any given instant, SL can be throwing

gigabytes

of textures at you. Your avatar alone may be using a sizeable chunk, if not the entirety, of that 512MB texture memory cap. This can vary from person to person and sim to sim. This is why it's important that people work as efficiently as possible regardless of the amount of VRAM they. personally, have. The content you create, whether it's an avatar attachment, a small prop like a drinking cup, or a full sim environment, does not exist in a vaccuum.

 I don't know where Bao hangs out to come to the conclusion that SL is rarely displaying more than 512MB of textures, but It is very easy to figure the strain SL puts on hardware with a little information. First, with the format of texture file SL uses, we know that a 1024x1024 texture is 3MB in size (4MB if it has an alpha channel, whether or not that channel is used). So with 170 such textures, you're using up SL's entire 512MB "soft cap".

 

It's not unusual to see avatars wearing about 50-100 textures each. More and more, content creators are heading directly to 1024x1024 textures for ALL their textures, regardless of the size of the object. I purchased a hair piece earlier this year that had almost

twenty

1024x1024 textures.

 So it can potentially only take one or two avatars onscreen at any given time, including your own, to be exceeding 512MB. This is a big part of why people take such a performance hit with many avatars onscreen at once. (Another big part of it is that avatars lack any sort of "land impact" limiting polygon use, so you'll see avatars strutting around with more triangles in their attachments than is used in an entire village from Skyrim.)

 

 Bao's comments are also from 2011, well before materials had arrived on the scene, and while mesh import was still fairly new.

 

 With mesh import, we're seeing far more texture excess. With a sculpt, you're limited to one texture per sculpted prim, but with mesh an inexperienced modeller can separate the surfaces to apply multiple textures to the same shape. And lots of people in SL are doing this because when LL introduced "Land Impact" to replace prim limits, they neglected to consider texture use. This was a crippling oversight on their part and a big part of why so many people believe "mesh" itself hurts their framerates. It's not the mesh, it's the excessive number of huge textures wrapped around those mesh models.

 

On top of that, we also now have materials. Materials are separate texture maps, and they eat up VRAM exactly as other textures do. So, each object in SL that uses materials is potentially adding two more textures to each surface, tripling the VRAM that object eats up. More than that , even, if the object is using an emissive mask. (Haven't seen a lot of people using emissive masks yet, not sure most people have figured them out).

 

 

---

I started follow this topic in general when I started having the "textures discarded due to insufficient memory" crash problems.  All the trails I followed in trying to find a solution to the problem always led to the above quote from Bao.  And to no solutions outside of a work around: "Try lowering your texture cache," the key word being "TRY!"  This reminds me of the definition of fishing.

And while you are correct this was written in 2011, there is no indication anywhere that what Bao has stated has changed. 

Quite frankly, although I know more today than I did when I started have the 'discard problem,' I am also more confused then when I started.

Bao is stating that 512MB is (more than) sufficient,  "....and watch the total amount of textures to be bound at an instant, it is very rare that that number is more than 512MB."  You seem to be saying that this is not the case. 

 

[Penny Patton]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

I started follow this topic in general when I started having the "textures discarded due to insufficient memory" crash problems.  All the trails I followed in trying to find a solution to the problem always led to the above quote from Bao.  And to no solutions outside of a work around: "Try lowering your texture cache," the key word being "TRY!"  This reminds me of the definition of fishing.

And while you are correct this was written in 2011, there is no indication anywhere that what Bao has stated has changed. 

 

---

There's two separate issues at work here. The issue of the amount of textures SL throws at you, and the issue of how SL and yuour videocard handles texture memory.

 When more textures are being thrown at your videocard to render, having more texture memory allows you to do that without shuffling textures in and out of VRAM. Exceeding VRAM and moving textures around between memory means bad framerates. That is one issue. SL, or your videocard, being unable to handle a large amount of textures in VRAM is a separate issue.

 BOTH issues can be greatly diminished by the simple solution of using fewer/smaller textures.

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

Bao is stating that 512MB is (more than) sufficient,  "....and watch the total amount of textures to be bound at an instant, it is very rare that that number is more than 512MB."  You seem to be saying that this is not the case. 

 

---

 

 I don't believe Bao is considering the full scope of the situation with that statement.  We know the memory size of textures based on their dimensions, and we can count the number of textures within draw distance, hence requiring resources to render.

 We can also prove that reducing the texture load improves performance quite drastically simply by taking a sim that uses a typical, large, amount of textures, then reducing the texture load and visiting the same sim. I've done this myself and can tell you without reservation that if you reduce the amount of textures used in a sim, you greatly increase framerates, reduce lag and speed up rez tims.

 Unfortunately, the build I did this with no longer exists on the grid or I'd link you to it with an SLURL.

 

On top of that, everything I've said is common sense game design 101, information that game developers take for granted and are the reason why you can run a beautiful AAA videogame at 60+ fps and on the same hardware find yourself getting 20FPS or less in SL.