What kind of specs do you need to run SL smoothly everywhere?

[Yumeni Rieko]

I recently upgraded my PC, and I thought I'd finally be able to run ultra graphics on kind of "graphic heavy" sims. But it still runs very bad with shadows on. If I turn shadows off then it's all good.

specs:

i7-8700 6core

16gb ram (2x8 corsair 2400)

gtx 1060 6gb

SSD

So...? Does SL need an i9, 24gb+ ram, gtx 2080 to run smoothly?...It's a shame how badly optimized SL is, and it's going to stay like that forever because it's so old.

[Solar Legion]

Part of said optimization is the purview of content creators.

Beyond that, runs perfectly fine on a Linux machine with 16 gigabytes of RAM, an I7 4790K and a GTX980 ... Oh and all with only the OS itself on the SSD - all the rest on an HDD or two.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

9 hours ago, Yumeni Rieko said:

It's a shame how badly optimized SL is

Plain and simple: it isn't optimized at all.

What is "very bad" in technical terms, anyway?

[Chic Aeon]

9 hours ago, Yumeni Rieko said:

I recently upgraded my PC, and I thought I'd finally be able to run ultra graphics on kind of "graphic heavy" sims. But it still runs very bad with shadows on. If I turn shadows off then it's all good.

specs:

i7-8700 6core

16gb ram (2x8 corsair 2400)

gtx 1060 6gb

SSD

So...? Does SL need an i9, 24gb+ ram, gtx 2080 to run smoothly?...It's a shame how badly optimized SL is, and it's going to stay like that forever because it's so old.

I have a similar system (older) but with a GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2) so "not as good"

Until a couple of months ago SL ran perfectly with my system, multiple avatars, baking in Blender et al. Something very bad happened around that time for SOME of us (others are perfectly fine). I tried everything anyone could think of and I would "think" I had it fixed and then it wouldn't be). 

My best guess is that there was a change in the video card driver that came in (for me) with a Windows Update. The timing is perfect. Recently a new driver came out and I was hoping that would fix things, but NO.  Still blurry. Textures don't appear to be staying in cache etc. 

It is NOT a viewer problem, that much I know and it is NOT "poorly optimized mesh" as I have the same issues in ares with ONLY well-optimized mesh :D.

So IF you are having the same issue as some of us, it isn't your computer other than there is a incompatibility thing going on.  I have a friend on a much older and slower computer who is using my OLD video card (four years old maybe) and he can be in the exact same place with double the fps and no texture grayness.  

If you find an answer, please POKE ME.  

Going to look up that thread and will edit. 

 

Edited May 3, 2019 by Chic Aeon

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Similar experience here with a GTX1050 on Windows 10, November through till March was fine, I could run SL plus Gimp and paint.net and a web-browser all together, then in April I had three weeks of blue-screens when trying anything more than one program running at a time. The last Windows update seems to have cured some of it, at least the blue-screens, but I notice now SL runs taking 60-80% of the CPU and large chunks of RAM depending on which parcel I am in.

 

@Chic Aeon

I don't seem to have half as much problem now with the blurry textures. I tried visiting everywhere I wanted to go so that the cache got filled, then optimised the disk where the cache files reside.

Are you serious about the offer of a poke?

[Coffee Pancake]

12 hours ago, Yumeni Rieko said:

I recently upgraded my PC, and I thought I'd finally be able to run ultra graphics on kind of "graphic heavy" sims. But it still runs very bad with shadows on. If I turn shadows off then it's all good.

specs:

i7-8700 6core

16gb ram (2x8 corsair 2400)

gtx 1060 6gb

SSD

So...? Does SL need an i9, 24gb+ ram, gtx 2080 to run smoothly?...It's a shame how badly optimized SL is, and it's going to stay like that forever because it's so old.

 

SL is a very complicated multi headed monster.

Modern gaming systems are great for monsters with one or maybe two heads.

 

SL is CPU intensive. It will max out your CPU long before your fancy graphics card.

So an 5Ghz CPU and a mid range card from last year will run much better than a 4 Ghz card and a a brand new one.

Shadows is all CPU .. and so enabling it cripples everything else.

 

This all boils down to SL being literally not a game, and your computer being awesome for literal games.

It's like trying to do complex engineering cad on a gaming computer .. sure, it can be done .. but anyone with a quadro card is laughing at you for trying.

 

Sadly there is no magic SL accelerator.

• Plan A: get a faster CPU
• Plan B: reduce draw distance

There is no point in sharing your 'average fps' numbers, as everywhere in SL presents very different load .. heck, even the same place can't be trusted to be consistent every time.

Benchmarking SL viewer performance is a nightmare.

 

 

Edited May 3, 2019 by CoffeeDujour

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Did you Nvidia users keep an eye on your CPU load lately?

One of the recent drivers introduced a nasty bug of maxing out the CPU load for no reason at all. There is a hotfix to address the issue, so perhaps look into that.

35 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Shadows is all CPU .. and so enabling it cripples everything else.

Mental note to moiself: "Tell friend with painfully old FX CPU to disable shadows". 😏

[Coffee Pancake]

Just now, Lillith Hapmouche said:

Mental note to moiself: "Tell friend with painfully old FX CPU to disable shadows". 😏

Or get them into sub zero cooling.. I hear those old FX's can hit 8Ghz.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Not with her mainboard.

But adding another 8 GB RAM for 30€ certainly did show improvement, not just for SL.

[LittleMe Jewell]

6 hours ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

Not with her mainboard.

But adding another 8 GB RAM for 30€ certainly did show improvement, not just for SL.

RAM helps a lot, especially if you tend to have many other things open/running while in SL.  Browsers with many tabs eat up a lot of memory.

[cykarushb]

There really isn't any hardware that you can buy that gives smooth performance everywhere in SL. This game is an unoptimized mess built on a near ancient engine that's really bad at using the hardware you have.

The two biggest factors are single threaded CPU performance and the speed of the drive the games cache is on.

I run SL on a lot of different hardware, and those are the only two things that really impact performance dramatically. Obviously a better gpu can help, but only slightly compared to how some gpu upgrades would affect other games.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, cykarushb said:

This game is an unoptimized mess built on a near ancient engine that's really bad at using the hardware you have.

That's not even close to accurate, but it's popular myth.

7 hours ago, cykarushb said:

The two biggest factors are single threaded CPU performance

Just adding more threads to something doesn't make it magically faster and comes with some major overheads.

7 hours ago, cykarushb said:

the speed of the drive the games cache is on

If you add your Second Life cache folder as an exception to your anti virus you will get a significant speed boost, if you cant do that have have stupid fast internet then setting the cache to zero can be faster. 

Faster is a relative term .. most of your CPU time will still get eaten decoding said textures rather than driving your GPU ... which incidentally runs ~30% slower overall when we enable threaded decodes because SL textures are tiny and the performance boost gets stomped on by the overheads.

 

[Penny Patton]

Like others have already pointed out, it's largely the unoptimized content people fill SL with that bogs everything down. Unfortunately that makes it very difficult to help someone experiencing performance issues, but there are a few things you can do that help yourself out.

• Keep your draw weight low. What that means is hard to pin down since the draw weight numbers you see will be different than the ones I see because of the hardware differences. I'm not entirely sure how much it varies from computer to computer, but I try to aim below 50,000. Failing that, I at least keep it under 100,000. Your avatar is front and centre on your screen, if it's a big source of rendering pain, then you're taking your own lag with you wherever you go.
• Keep your HUD and avatar's texture use reasonable. Get rid of any excess textures, like the enormous store logo textures so many people hide inside the attachments they sell. Try not to wear any HUDs that use a lot of large textures. The HUDs for mesh heads and bodies tend to be real bad about this.
• Set your own draw weight rendering cap to something reasonable. I keep mine at 100,000, but again your mileage may vary.
• Keep your draw distance low. I keep mine around 100m for the most part, sometimes higher but rarely higher than 250m.
• Keep object detail reasonable. I find 2.5 works for me. I'd recommend 3 as the highest anyone should set their object detail if they want to keep their framerates decent.

Ultimately, how much any of that helps will depend a lot on where you are and what kind of avatars are around you. Unfortunately, very few locations in SL are what I'd call "optimized". But in the handful of places that are, I run SL at 30-60fps and don't experience issues like texture thrashing very often. That's with shadows and everything else on, with much less horsepower than the OP's.

My Specs:

• Intel i7-2600 @3.40GHz
• 12GB RAM
• GTX960 2GB

What my SL looks like in optimized sims where I get 30-60fps:

Monster Girl World (Sadly closed recently.)

Private sci-fi RP city

New California (This one is still open. Just a heads up that it is an adult sim.)

[Coffee Pancake]

18 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

My Specs:

• Intel i7-2600 @3.40GHz
• 12GB RAM
• GTX960 2GB

Same CPU (non K), I found going from 12 to 16GB made way more of a difference than I thought it should.