processor is 100% loaded most of the time

[Verh]

Hello eveyone.

When I play SL, my processor is 100% loaded most of the time and the frame rate is aound 2-5 fps. All graphics settings are at minimum. I have a Pendium dual core 3.0 Ghz.

Surpizingly it's a lot more powerful than the processors in the sys.requirements on this site.

What could be the reason for that? Maybe the minimal specs on the site are just outdated?

 

Thanks!

 

[Verh]

Someone contacted me in SL and advised a firestorm viewer. Unfortunately I don't know how to IM that person as didn't add him to my contacts.
Anyway, firestorm doesn't change anything. The same poor performance.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Verh,

SL is very graphics intensive, so the GPU in your computer is more important than the CPU. I'm gonna guess that with a Pentium era processor, your graphics hardware is just too slow to do well in SL. Tell us more about your computer and perhaps we'll have some suggestions. Go to the Help menu and select "About Second Life", then copy the specs to the clipboard and paste them into your post.

 

[Verh]

Hi.

you are right. My GPU is low-end. But I used GPU-Z to monitor it. GPU load is around 30%-40%, rarely reaching 80%.

I'm ready to upgrade my graphics card, but I want to make sure it will solve the problem. Right now I doubt it.

 

Firestorm 4.7.9 (50527) Aug 4 2016 00:21:28 (Firestorm-Release) with Havok support
Release Notes

CPU: Intel® Pentium® D CPU 3.00GHz (3000.94 MHz)
Memory: 3711 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 32-bit (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon X300/X550/X1050 Series

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.593.100.3-090929a-089303C-ATI
OpenGL Version: 2.1.8544 Release

RestrainedLove API: (disabled)
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.47.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1h zlib/1.2.8
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.8
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.61
LLCEFLib/CEF Version: 1.5.3.FS6-(CEF-WIN-3.2526.1366.g8617e7c-32) (Chrome 47.0.2526.80)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Settings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: MetaHarper Modern (CoolOcean)
Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)
Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 64 m
Bandwidth: 500 kbit/s
LOD factor: 1.5
Render quality: Low (1/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: No
Texture memory: 512 MB (1)
VFS (cache) creation time (UTC): 2016-8-12T19:24:6
Built with MSVC version 1800

[Madelaine McMasters]

It's your graphics system, Verh. According to my favorite benchmark site, that family of chips scores somewhere from 38 to 50. For comparison, a recent vintage low end Intel laptop with integrated graphics would score 10x higher than that, and a top end dedicated graphics system would score 200x higher. The minimum recommended GeForce 6600 scores 63, though the minimum recommended Radeon 9500 scores 36.

I think the reason your GPU isn't being loaded is that it's not capable of doing some of the things required for SL and that's forcing the CPU to do the heavy lifting. A capable graphics card should improve things quite a bit, taking the burden off the CPU.

I'm a Mac user, but others might chime in with recommendations for a good graphics upgrade for your computer.

[Verh]

Hmmm. That's stramge. I thought nobody uses software rendering (it's when the CPU does) now.

Actually I was planning to upgrade my graphics card in the first place. I just want to make sure my CPU isn't the bottle neck.

[arton Rotaru]

What Madelaine said, you need a new graphics card no matter what. The CPU is good enough to feed a modern mid range GPU. It may bottleneck a GTX 760 and better cards, but the performance gain will still be tremendous compared to what you have right now. *At least you shift the bottleneck, from a super weak GPU to a good performing CPU.

*That is if nothing else is broken or whatever in your machine.

[Verh]

Many thanks to everyone who was participating in this thread!
I'll give feedback after having upgraded my graphics card.

[JayWaters]

Memory: 3711 MB

4 gigs of Ram is another reason nobody seemed to notice

in 2016 you should have at least 8gb, 16 would be better

Still the above is true but SL is a wierd wild animal and uses BOTH CPU and GPU rendering, you would also see an increase just by adding by todays standards the minimum of 8gb of RAM, just putting it out there.

[JayWaters]

"a modern mid range GPU. It may bottleneck a GTX 760 and better cards"

Just curious why anyone would think a GTX 760 in August 2016 is modern or mid range

modern or mid range would be a GTX 970 or GTX 1060 these days

a 760 is now 3 generations old and there isn't anythng modern about it. It is a low end card, it was low end the day it was released 3 or 4 years ago.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

JayWaters wrote:

"a modern mid range GPU. It may bottleneck a GTX 760 and better cards"

Just curious why anyone would think a GTX 760 in August 2016 is modern or mid range

modern or mid range would be a GTX 970 or GTX 1060 these days

a 760 is now 3 generations old and there isn't anythng modern about it. It is a low end card, it was low end the day it was released 3 or 4 years ago.

---

The GTX 760 scores 4,951 on the Passmark G3D benchmark test. The fastest card tested by Passmark is the TITAN X @ 12,793. The slowest card in their current (Aug 2016) list of High End Videocards is the Radeon HD 8650G @ 938, ranking 344 in their massive list of cards. The GTX 760 ranks 51.

That places the 760 in the upper 15% of Passmark's collection of high end cards. I'm sure it was higher in that list when it was released. Wikipedia's GeForce 700 Series page lists the 760 2nd from the top of the mid range for that family.

The evidence I've found firmly supports Arton's statement that the GTX 760 is a mid range GPU.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

JayWaters wrote:

Memory: 3711 MB

4 gigs of Ram is another reason nobody seemed to notice

in 2016 you should have at least 8gb, 16 would be better

Still the above is true but SL is a wierd wild animal and uses BOTH CPU and GPU rendering, you would also see an increase just by adding by todays standards the minimum of 8gb of RAM, just putting it out there.

---

Why would you think nobody noticed the 4 gigs of RAM? SL runs just fine in 4GB if you have a good graphics card. Any performance gain obtained from increasing CPU memory would be dwarfed by the improvement from upgrading the GPU. The largest amount of graphics memory supported by the chipset in Verh's computer is 512MB, and it's likely he's got less than that. A new graphics card is likely to have much more, so the addition of a new graphics card will substantially increase the amount of memory in his computer in the place it can do the most good for SL, the graphics system.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Verh wrote:

Hmmm. That's stramge. I thought nobody uses software rendering (it's when the CPU does) now.

Actually I was planning to upgrade my graphics card in the first place. I just want to make sure my CPU isn't the bottle neck.

---

OpenGL drivers implement the OpenGL function library in the most efficient way possible, and that requires a mix of computational abilities, from fast memory transfers to floating point calculations. If a GPU can do it all, the driver will pass the load to the card. If a GPU can't do much more than texture fills, the driver can't send more complex functions to it. A scene that's visually simple may not suffer from this, as most of the work will be simple texture fills, but a scene that requires a lot of depth sorting, vector to raster conversion, shading, atmospherics, etc will bog down as the CPU does that work.

Memory use is also an issue. A graphics system with 32MB of memory will force the OpenGL driver to store most of SL's textures in CPU memory.

The designers of the systems that use OpenGL will be unaware of this balancing act. That's entirely the domain of the OpenGL driver designers. Drivers for a card will be about as old as the card itself, getting updates only for compatibility with changes in host OS or OpenGL. The driver's decision whether to do an OpenGL operation on the CPU or GPU won't change much over time. That's a function of the card's capability.

[JayWaters]

The GTX 760 ranks 51.

There are MODERN MId Range cards in the top ten...Modern is the key factor here

A gtx 970 is a modern mid range graphics card

a gtx 1060 is a modern mid range graphics card.

You get under the top 20 cards you are in obsolete land. Nobody cares about them.

 

Canyou still even buy a NEW 7 series in 2016? Oh yes you can I just checked newegg, you can get a 750ti but for that money you can get a much better card today. Nobdoy wants it, thats why it is still in stock almost 4 years later.

 

Keep in mind the key word is MODERN, I dont see anyone putting anything less than a 970 in any new system being built today if you really cant swing the extra 20 bucks I guess a 960 might happen (I am completely ignoring AMD offerings since all I see is problems with those on SL forums etc and for the money if you play SL the Nvidia is going to be better at Open GL so that eliminates AMD offerings completely in my view...for SL)

[arton Rotaru]

Hey Madelaine,

I decided to not to answer to JayWaters, because they totally missed the point of my post in the first place, and they didn't add anything useful to the topic either. So that fell under the don't feed the troll rule for me. :matte-motes-little-laugh:

[JayWaters]

Trolling? Ok then

Get a 700 series,don't take my advice now and then LATER step up to more ram a better cpu like at least an i3 or I5 and a GTX 970 or 1060 where you will finally actually enjoy being on SL

 

But I'm a troll, do it your way.

[Claireschen Hesten]

Since it hasn't been mentioned, open up task manager go to processes and check to show processes from all users and sort by CPU it's likely something called scvhost.exe is using up a lot of CPU the part of that process using up all the processor is windows update if you go to services select it right click and stop it processor usage will go right down
also if you use Chrome browser open up the Chrome task manager and end the process of any tabs you don't need active whilst using SL things like Twitter, Faceache, Tumblr and Yahoo can use 50%+ processor and/or a significant amout of ram 

[Verh]

Thanks everybody for your replies.

I will not add more RAM any time soon because I installed a 32-bit OS by mistake. But I use SSD, so the ammount of RAM is not that critical.

Will upgrade GPU first. Ofcourse it will not be anything powerful. I will get something used and cheap (can not spend too much right now) but it will be better than what I have now.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Good luck, Verh!

[Verh]

my next question may not be very appropriate for this thread, but I don.t know other forums where I could ask it.
I have found a GTX 570. But the seller sais he's selling it because his power supply cant feed the graphics card good enough to make it work stable. So he had to underclock it.
How do I make sure my power supply will successfully power the card? I havethis tower: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883107012R

[Madelaine McMasters]

 

HP no longer lists the specs for your tower, which is very old. I did find this model from 2007...

http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=c00821657

That has a 300W power supply, which is pretty small. NVIDIA says you need a 550W supply for the GTX 570 card...

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-570/specifications

You'll need a new power supply to run that card. Newegg has a bunch. Here's the list, sorted by "best selling"...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=-1&IsNodeId=1&Description=600w%20atx&bop=And&Order=BESTSELLING&PageSize=36

Your old X300 graphics card is in the only PCIe slot, so it must be removed to insert any new graphics card. I haven't noodled with a PC in 15 years, but I would be a little concerned about interference between a new large graphics card and other stuff inside the PC. Pop it open and take a look. Perhaps post a picture of the guts so more knowledgable folks here can offer opinions.

 

[Verh]

Thank you so much for making it clear!

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Verh wrote:

Thank you so much for making it clear!

---

You're welcome. It's important that we get your computer spiffed up so you can see just how hot I look on Ultra.

;-).

[Verh]

It seems the CPU is the bottleneck after all.

Here's the performance with all graphics setting set to minimal.



 

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

If you were to install a 10x faster CPU (which doesn't exist), I think you'd still see it as the bottleneck. That's because your graphics hardware can't do very much, so everything is offloaded to the CPU, which isn't designed to do graphics work. If you had a zippy graphics card, the CPU wouldn't have much to do.

That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it!

;-).