FPS not where it should be

[Darius Vayandar]

Im lucky to get around 15 fps with the normal SL viewer, with a vewer like singularity it goes up to about 25. but still im told i should be getting like 60 or more. So im curious if anyone can figure this one out.

Specs are:

got a 500 watt power supply, everything is getting more then enough power. have tried upgrading viewers and differnt viewers.

CPU: Intel Core Series Processor (2926.05 MHz) (its an i7)

Memory: 6104 MB

OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit  (Build 7600)

Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.

Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0010.1043

OpenGL Version: 4.0.10188 Compatibility Profile Context

SSE Version: SSE2

 

[Ishtara Rothschild]

It mostly depends on your graphics settings and on the number of prims, avatars and textures that are within view. I have a very similar system (2.8 GHz i7 CPU and Radeon HD 5850, the rest is identical). I do get 60 fps or more in Phoenix, but only if I look at the sky

In a sim with lots of buildings, with my graphics set to ultra, my fps drop to 30. If 20 or more avatars are around, I only get 25 fps. If I then set my draw distance to 512 (I usually keep it at 300), it's only 17 fps. And if I enable shadows in addition, I'm down to something like 10-12 fps.

What graphics settings do you use? What's your draw distance? And do you have shadows enabled?

Edited to add: It also depends on your monitor resolution and the number of monitors. I've noticed that my fps are much higher if I disable my second monitor when I use SL.

[Curious Hazelnut]

I can't speak about your specific system as it beats mine by a big margine. What I can say is that I've done a huge amount of fiddling with the SL settings to try and keep a decent frame rate. The absolute biggest winners for improving frame rate for me are shorter draw distance (I keep it at 96m unless I really need to see further) and turning off some of the advanced shaders (I turn off water and sky unless I'm taking a picture). Those two alone let me have around 30fps most of the time and almost always above 10fps unless things get really really bad.

For comparison sake, I'm on a C2D @ 2.6GHZ with 4GB of RAM and an ATI 2600 /w 256MB dedicated video RAM. So not a good comparison to Darius' computer.

Not as effective as the first two, but at one point enabling VBO doubled my frame rate (although I think there was some bug with it and I had to turn it off to stop crashing every 5 minutes).

Other things I have found that make a HUGE difference. If I run more than about 4 active applications at the same time, SL slows down quite a bit. If I'm doing a massive download, SL slows down quite a bit.

[Darius Vayandar]

ultra 256 DD and looking at myself on a prim heavy sim i get about that much. though a friend of mine has a 460 gtx and a AMD phenom 6 core and he gets maybe 40 fps in a large crowd of avatars. so i dunno, i wonder if this is really all i can get. i mean whne i had an i3 and the 260gtx i got the exact same fps numbers. so i know my new hardware didnt improve it. also tried to make it just 1 moniter as i have 2, didnt make any difference. hell i have 8x AA and the anti filtering on, when i turn it off my fps goes down 1 or 2

[Curious Hazelnut]

From what I've read, the nVidia cards are better for gaming than the ATI cards. Although I've also read that ATI is better at graphics in general. I guess that means that nVidia optimized for gaming.

[Darius Vayandar]

Well when i play other games, like eve online or mass effect, my fps never goes below 50...

[Darius Vayandar]

Here is my settings along with my fps numbers.

 

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/2224/sfpsandsettings.png

and with out the AA and AF

http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/6658/sfpsandsettingsnoaaanda.png

edit to add: this is ONLY in singularity viewer, if i was using pheonix or any other viewer - 10 fps

[Ishtara Rothschild]

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Curious Hazelnut wrote:

From what I've read, the nVidia cards are better for gaming than the ATI cards. Although I've also read that ATI is better at graphics in general. I guess that means that nVidia optimized for gaming.

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Nvidia has much better OpenGL support. ATI still has a lot of OpenGL-related bugs to work out. In DirectX games it doesn't make a difference, and ATI cards used to offer better performance for less money. Not sure if that is still the case. In any case, Nvidia cards are the best choice for SL.

[Claireschen Hesten]

 

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Curious Hazelnut wrote:

From what I've read, the nVidia cards are better for gaming than the ATI cards. Although I've also read that ATI is better at graphics in general. I guess that means that nVidia optimized for gaming.

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nvidia cards are better for openGL based stuff like SL ATI is better for DirectX based stuff any game i've played excluding SL has needed and/or used DirectX

 

[Ishtara Rothschild]

I forgot about AA and AF. Anti-aliasing is set to 4 in my viewer, and anisotropic filtering is turned off since I don't see any texture quality difference if I turn it on. I also had to disable VBO since it causes some visual borkage when I'm under water.

You should get a small fps boost if you reduce your draw distance to 200-300. Water reflections can also be an fps drag. If you don't want to turn it off, I'd at least limit it to terrain and trees.

Other than that, your fps aren't that different from mine. As I said, with a draw distance of 512 I also get only 25 fps in a crowded sim. In order to get 60 fps, I have to look at the sky or tp to my skybox.

[Ishtara Rothschild]

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Darius Vayandar wrote:

Well when i play other games, like eve online or mass effect, my fps never goes below 50...

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Those are directX games that use a smaller amount of textures than SL. The textures are rather small, optimized for fast-paced games and readily stored on your harddisk.

SL uses OpenGL, which isn't the strong side of ATI Radeon cards, and there's an insane amount of custom-made textures that all have to be downloaded from LL's asset servers. Many of these textures are 512 x 512 pixels or larger.

In addition, SL's prim-based architecture causes a very high polygon count. If you switch to wireframe mode with Ctrl+Shift+R (hit Ctrl+Alt+R a second time to switch back to normal view) and look at somebody's prim hair, you'll see what I mean.

[Linda Brynner]

Most unfortunate ATI-AMD and SL aren't the best combination. However for FPS mostly the main computer core processors are responsible for FPS, nonetheless the combination with ATI isn't super.

There are a few things you can try.

 

Your computer

Always start with a freshly booted computer and router. Specially router mostly need a shut down for at least for a minute or 3 at the least.

Turn off the Aero based Themes in Vista and Windows7 as they use fps.

Turn off Wallpapers for the same reason. Specially High Quality wallpapers use a lot of fps. Better use it for SL.

Also mind that the larger your computer screen is, the lower fps you will get. For example when i use SL with my 22 inch screen attached on my notebook i get around 12 - 50 fps depending on the scene. With using my 16 inch notebook screen only, my fps is between 25 - 60.

 

SL > Preferences

Turn off VBO as this is still poorly implemented on ATI cards.

Turn watershadows to minimal.

Reduce Draw Distance

Experiment with Hardware skinning on/off 

Set Maximum Bandwith to 1000 -1200 since SL doesn't ever use more. Setting lower and higher works counter productive.

Experiment with Anti Aliasing set at 0 and 4 (higher isn't seen in SL to my experience).

Experiment with anisotropic filter off (i can't see a difference since viewer 2.x)

 

SL other settings

Turn off classic clouds in your atmospheric settings and Scale shader clouds to 0.00 (clouds cost fps)

 

This is what came to my mind at the moment.

Best of luck :smileyhappy:

[leliel Mirihi]

 

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Darius Vayandar wrote:

i mean whne i had an i3 and the 260gtx i got the exact same fps numbers. so i know my new hardware didnt improve it. 

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The GTX 260 and HD 5770 have equivalent performance so it's not surprising that you get the same fps with them.

 

[Darius Vayandar]

/me bangs head on desk having just been told he wasted 130 bucks on the new card in the last post....

 

on a side note, i reduced my graphics to low and put the draw distance to 240 and now i have 30 fps where i had around 25 before

[Hitomi Tiponi]

 

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Darius Vayandar wrote:

/me bangs head on desk having just been told he wasted 130 bucks on the new card in the last post....

 

on a side note, i reduced my graphics to low and put the draw distance to 240 and now i have 30 fps where i had around 25 before

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leliel is correct I'm afraid - for Second Life there will be little or no difference between them.

Try whacking DD down to 128 when just walking around - you can always slide it up again when at sims where you have already cached much of the content e.g. your home.