Why in the world does this game run like... well...

[EphyMusicOfficial]

It's God-awful. I don't know how anyone is able to play this game.

For context, my hardware is well above the "System Requirements" (which I'm sure are outdated). Here, let me save you some time:

CPU: AMD FX 8350 (4.0 GHz, well above the listed "2GHz" listed on their SysReq page)

GPU: AMD RX 500 Series (Which is years ahead of the ATI 5000 series, by the way)

RAM: 24 GB DDR3 (No, I'm not upgrading to DDR4 anytime soon)

Internet: 50Mbps Up/Down (Fiber, so symmetrical.)

If I had to guess... NetCode. I ran this game at full spec, I ran this game in "Ultra Potato Mode" (literally turned all the settings to the lowest they'd go), and it STILL ran terribly, even in the "Learning World." So. Does this game require a supercomputer to run? Is their SysReq page severely outdated? Or does this game just run terribly for everyone?

 

Additional Bonus Question: What in the heck is the "m" for in the view distance? I'm assuming Microns because even at the maximum, I could be standing right next to an object and it'd still be polygons for a few seconds.

Edited May 11, 2019 by EphyMusicOfficial
Additional Bonus Question!

[Jerilynn Lemon]

It would probably help if you could post a screen grab of what you are seeing.

Just a suggestion.

[Rolig Loon]

Serious problems can indeed be due to really heavy rendering load (or simply a lot of avatars) in a region, but they most commonly come down to things at the user's end of the pipeline.  This "game" isn't an MMO with simple, canned scenery that is all sitting on your own computer.  Everything that you see is on Linden Lab servers, refreshed and pushed to your viewer 45 times a second. It's not optimized for speed of execution.  It's optimized for flexibility of design.  Any one of us can change her own little part of the world -- things as small as altering the color of a skirt to things as large as flying a space ship across you field of view -- at any time.  All those changes have to be propogated to every viewer. If you are not used to this way of doing things, you're running up against a mismatch of expectations.  That's basically what Qie was saying above.   So, alter your expectations. And adjust your viewer settings to make them more realistic in this world.  Drop your draw distance to something below 128m (half a region's width). Reduce the Max Avatar Complexity setting and the Max Non-Imposter Avatar setting so your system doesn't need to render every over-complicated avatar.  

You'll find other suggestions here >>> http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lag

And here >>> https://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_very_laggy

[Nalates Urriah]

Rolig's and Qie's answers are correct. But, I'll say it a different way.

Most of the games you likely play and likely compare SL to are created by professional modelers and optimized for performance. They also consist of several gigabytes of data on a DVD/Blu-ray or were download to your computer in a long startup download.

SL consists of hundreds of petabytes of data. A few years ago the database of stuff, cars,  chairs, cabins, creeks..., was over 200 petabytes and SL has been growing. To put that in perspective, 1 petabyte takes 1042 days to download on a 100Mbps connection and requires 500 2-terabyte drives to store. So, you won't be pre-loading or caching the SL world as other game worlds are handled.

The SL world is very active. People, animals, vehicles, and things are all moving. All that information about movement and changes has to be sent to all players. When you come into my field of view my viewer and all the viewers that can see you request the data needed to render your avatar. Depending on people's draw distance it is very easy for all the people in a 9 region area to see you and need to be updated and sent all the downloads. The data load grows exponentially by avatar. Turning draw distance up to 1024m can pull the best gaming machine down to single digit frames rates. Most other games have individual players pulling what they need from their hard drives.

So, how do we tolerate lag? We adjust our machines to provide an optimized render for our hardware. I run an i5-6600k # 4.1 GHz with a GTX 1060 and 32MB of RAM. My frame rates are between 15 and 150 with the average usually in the 30 to 60 FPS range. Some crowds will pull me down into the 20's when I first come in. I usually only have to deal with lag in crowded shopping venues or special events that draw a crowd. In those cases I can fly my camera through the event. I generally do not need my avatar to shop or listen in a crowded environment. In general I am so immune to lag I forget the noobs walk into a lag wall they have no idea how to deal with.

To be as inclusive as possible SL supports way more computer models than most other games. We have users still running Windows XP... though I don't know how they manage and they aren't supported by the Lab. This means the variety of computer configurations and the diverse settings needed for optimal performance balanced with personal preference makes almost every user's settings unique. Also, it limits how far they can push hardware o[timization as not all users can run the newest and fastest code. But they start you off with what they think are some pretty good default settings based on your video card that mix appearance and performance in a balance the Lab thinks is best. I, however, think I can do better and believe I have.

Most of us build a set of presets for best performance and other sets for appearance. We switch between them as needed.

Basically we have learned to take responsibility for our SL performance. We have learned how to deal with poorly optimized content made by novice modelers. We aren't going all entitlement generation and saying someone else should fix the unfixable for us.

I'll point out the SL Viewer has over 3000 controls for controlling your experience in SL. 

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, EphyMusicOfficial said:

Additional Bonus Question: What in the heck is the "m" for in the view distance? I'm assuming Microns because even at the maximum, I could be standing right next to an object and it'd still be polygons for a few seconds.

It sounds as if you may be new to virtual worlds that consist exclusively of user-generated content. The effect you're seeing here is (probably) poorly constructed mesh items lacking appropriate Level of Detail geometry. It's hideous, but there's a perverse incentive ("land impact" weighting) that discourages more responsible modelling. There's a debug setting, RenderVolumeLODFactor, that can be cranked up to force the viewer to draw everything with inflated detail and your machine may be so powerful that it's a realistic option for you.

That's "probably" the problem you're describing, but if the polygons resolve merely with the passage of time, maybe you're simply seeing surfaces before their textures are loaded. That's another problem with totally unengineered content, where there's simply no practical way to pre-load everything before it must start rendering.

I dunno... Second Life may not be for you. Your machine should be great at SL and many of us would be thrilled to see the performance you must be seeing, but if you don't enjoy it, maybe you'll always prefer more conventional games.