Running Second Life on Ultra

[Bunny Latoe]

I want to run my second life on ultra performance but i allways lag so much.

 

I have AMD Radeon R7 200 series

CPU Type
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4690 CPU @ 3.50GHz

 

what do i need to do

[Lindal Kidd]

You need to get a better graphics card.  Here's how your card stacks up against some other popular models.

EDIT: Lillith makes a good point.  With a relatively low powered graphics card like this, you should drop your draw distance down.  I have a GTX 980, and even so, I keep my draw distance to about 150m or so.  Try dropping yours to 128 or even 64, and see how your performance improves.

Edited April 19, 2018 by Lindal Kidd

[Lillith Hapmouche]

R7 200what? Neither are really good (not even mentioning "great"), but even on the lower end, there are difference.

And you probably use the plain presets without any adjustments, since you don't say anything else, and you have your draw distance set to render 4 full sims at once. 

[cykarushb]

It's the GPU, at best that's an R7 260x which is probably best suited for more medium settings. 

Note that lots of avatars and things like a long draw distance, advance lighting, high AA will drastically affect frame rate even on higher end systems.

i have an i5 4570 and a GTX 970 now and I still struggle to get over 60fps in social island maxed if there are people around

[Nalates Urriah]

The three primary speed/performance factors are CPU - 4 Core fast as GHz is key, memory - the fastest your motherboard supports, and your GPU.

Your i5-4690 is decent. These days it is still a bit over mid-range. SL viewers run as many as 20 threads. But, most of the work is still done in a single thread. So, Hyper-threading and more than 4 cores is less important than GHz.

Memory you don't say... but the Linden stated minimum 1GB and recommended 4GB are too little. 4GB is the minimum IMO. 8GB is better. I consider 16GB the recommended.

In Lindal's chart, getting into the 8k to 9k GPU performance range will likely get you somewhere near what you want for video.

BUT... to run on full Ultra and push out the draw distance you'll need a monster machine. Something like an i7-8600k and a GTX 1080 or 1080Ti and 32GB of 3200MHz RAM and a RAM drive for the cache. Even with such a machine putting draw distance out to 1024m will kill performance.

HOWEVER... with a better graphics card and settings tweaking you can probably get performance that will satisfy you on your i5.

I run my i5-6600k (3.5Ghz pushed to 4.1) and GTX 1060 6GB and 32GB of DDR4-2133 one notch below Ultra with a draw distance of 128-256m and some other tweaks to get 20 to 150FPS - Shadows, Sun/Moon Projectors... 

[Lindal Kidd]

Besides Nalates' detailed advice, I would add:  If you do plan on building a graphics powerhouse, don't bother using the methods of ganging two or more graphics cards together for increased performance. (SLI for Nvidia cards, Crossfire for Radeon).  SL doesn't support either one and they won't give you any benefit.