iMac 5K 24GB RAM and 8GB video ... why does SL suck?

[Sapphire Blackwood]

Hi (again) ... I know this has been asked before but I am at my wit's end trying to desprately to make SL run at anything more than 10-15 frames per second and not look like I'm surrounded by chunky grey block people with a stuttering lag. Had such damn high hopes, too. 

iMac Retina 5K 27". 2017 model with the 4.2GHz i7, 24GB of DDR4 RAM, and the Radeon Pro 580 8GB video card. Great Net connection for every other online game I play. But SL runs like a dog, and honestly does not half as good as some (non-pro screens) I have seen. What am I possibly doing wrong?

I would be most grateful if anyone, anyone at all, who has a similar system could post detailed screen shots of the graphics settings panels for me to emulate, and a screen shot of a popular place (a popular clothing store or bar with maybe 15 people dancing) showing me what their visuals look like in world. This is just so freaking frustrating, I could break down weeping. I really want to be here!! Thank you for any advice.

[Madelaine McMasters]

24 minutes ago, JuliaAemilius said:

Hi (again) ... I know this has been asked before but I am at my wit's end trying to desprately to make SL run at anything more than 10-15 frames per second and not look like I'm surrounded by chunky grey block people with a stuttering lag. Had such damn high hopes, too. 

iMac Retina 5K 27". 2017 model with the 4.2GHz i7, 24GB of DDR4 RAM, and the Radeon Pro 580 8GB video card. Great Net connection for every other online game I play. But SL runs like a dog, and honestly does not half as good as some (non-pro screens) I have seen. What am I possibly doing wrong?

I would be most grateful if anyone, anyone at all, who has a similar system could post detailed screen shots of the graphics settings panels for me to emulate, and a screen shot of a popular place (a popular clothing store or bar with maybe 15 people dancing) showing me what their visuals look like in world. This is just so freaking frustrating, I could break down weeping. I really want to be here!! Thank you for any advice.

The LL viewer defaults to HiDPI (Retina) display mode by default. You'll get some improvement in FPS by disabling that, though SL won't look quite as nice. You'll find that setting at the bottom left of the Graphics preference pane's "Advanced Settings" window. Firestorm has a similar checkbox in Graphics->Hardware Settings.

Don't ever expect to get the kind of performance from your Mac that equivalent hardware gets under Windows. OpenGL, the foundation of the viewer's rendering engine, has never been terribly well supported by Macs, and Apple is no longer supporting OpenGL.

For reference, I have an iMac Pro with 8-core Xeon CPU/32GB and Vega56 GPU/8GB. SL is CPU bound and doesn't multithread much. You may actually get better FPS than I do because your fewer cores run faster than my man, and SL probably uses only one of them. I'm at Ivory Tower right now, getting about 20fps on Ultra with 16x anti-aliasing and 128m DD.

By going to Low, turning off HiDPI and antialiasing, I can get to maybe 60fps.

ETA: Reduce your maximum avatar complexity and the number of non-imposter avatars. I usually run with max complexity of around 150K and max non-imposter count around 5. I think there's also a setting in Firestorm that allows you to render non friends as imposters.

Edited April 20, 2020 by Madelaine McMasters

[bigmoe Whitfield]

one point most people miss out on, crowded places and shadows will cause another big fps drop,   so low draw distance,  no shadows in those instances. 

[Sapphire Blackwood]

Thanks. I've had some luck. Not quite as laggy now and things seem to load faster. Will post my settings later. Still tinkering. Was at Exhale Dance Club and things looked better than they had before and were smoother, less laggy.