firestorm problems

[TimeofSilks]

When I get to some areas with heavy traffic, my viewer begins to flicker black and the sceen back and forth. Are there ways to lower lag a lot? I have my graphics down low. I'm not sure what else to do :(

[Amethyst Jetaime]

You can lower your draw distance.  You can also derender avatars temporarily.  There won't be so much to load into your viewer this way.

[Rolig Loon]

There certainly are ways, starting with reducing your draw distance (in Preferences >>> Graphics)  and moving the graphics quality slider (also in Preferences >> Graphics) to an even lower setting.  While you're there, you can also reduce the number of non-imposter avatars.  All of those steps should help, but if your computer is old or just not up to SL standards, they can't perform miracles.  It worries me that your screen is flickering like that, because it could mean that your card is overheating.  If so, you can cause permanent damage to it. You might at least try upgrading your graphics drivers, which could help the flickering.

Read more at http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_very_laggy

[Nalates Urriah]

Most viewers are having problems in areas with lots of avatars. It is debatable whether Firesotrm is more sensitive to the problem. Theoretically it should be less sensitive because of some things the team has built into the viewer.

Lowering draw distance is a key to better performance. But, there comes a point when it distrroyes your quality of Second Life.

Try running in window mode rather than full screen. Having to generate fewer pixels improves performance.

Try setting your Quality/Speed to LOW. That is the  best perforance you are going to get. Then manually advance the various graphics settings to see which ones impact your performance most. Leave those low and turn up and enable the others.

Preferences turn off the tiny profile pictures for chat. They eat video memory and that slows things and often causes texture threashing. Ask how in FS Support Group.

Get the free program GPU-Z to see how your graphics processor is doing. If you are drastically slowing and the GPU is not pegging at 100% then you have a bottleneck somewhere other than the GPU in your system. You can use CPU-Z or System Explorer to see where the bottle neck may be. Sys Explorer will also show you how much memory is being paged to disk (Page Fault), which really slows things down. Lots of page faults is a sign of not having enough memory. Add memory.

Open Hardware Monitor will show you temperatures. You can see if the GPU or CPU is over heating and slowing things down. If this is a recent change, it may be your computer needs cleaning. 

If you are using an HD video chip, you are going to have poor performance. An HD chip has no cores and relies on the CPU cores. A video card will have hundreds of dedicated cores and avoid using the CPU. So, if you have a desktop you could add a  video card.

Make sure your video drivers are up to date.

 

[Lee McKay]

That first answer is total BS. "Most viewers" are most assuredly not having trouble with area where there are a lot of avatars. The black-screening that you are experiencing is definitely the result of an underpowered PC or graphics card. What ended black screens for me was LOTS of RAM...I'm talking 16-24GB of it.  You'll never see another black screen.

[Rolig Loon]

It depends on what "trouble" you're thinking of. Nalates was not responding to the flickering black screen issue with that comment. She's referring to the obvious fact that the more avatars there are in a region, the greater the lag everyone will experience. The OP was asking about how to reduce lag, after all. Avatars are the single greatest cause of server lag, and there's nothing you can do about it on your own computer. Your own answer, concerning the black screen issue, is correct but is addressing the other -- more serious -- problem that the OP asked about.