Best Envirovement for SL with Highest Settings?

[Nethya Emor]

The more is Second Life advancing, the more I want to keep up with it. I have seen one beautiful Machinema video with all the settings and  Depth of Field used with my Graphic Card, though I am still using Medium Settings for performance reasons, as with Shadows my FPS falls low from 5-15.

The performance is nearly worse then my old PC. (And I updated just because SL and couple of other things.) I want to get more out of SL, thats why I ask you to help me out figure what to do! :matte-motes-smitten:

Connection to the Internet is ADSL of 4Mbit/s (Upload is 256 Kbit/s) (Downloads go around 450 kB/s and uploads somewhere from 20-40 kB/s). I am not sure how high impact on SL does my upload have. While in-world when I stand my bandwidth is around 50. (I put 2800 for my limit.)

Hardware: Intel Core i3 540 (3.07 GHz)
                    Nvidia GTX 460 ( Gygabite, 1Gb DDR5) 
                    4 GB of RAM (DDR3. My old pc had 6 and DDR2)

If you have some ideas how to improve my SL experience, I'd be grateful! 

 

[Shockwave Yareach]

Well, memory throughput on an i3 is not exactly great.  But an i3 with 4G of ram and that Gpu should be turning in numbers in the high teens under all but the busiest places.  I'm running an i7 (950) with 6G and a GTX460 and my settings are maxxed out.  And I still get around 35fps in a fairly populated area -- 120fps in my almost empty dev area.  Your computer combo seems more than powerful enough to handle SL.  So the problem is elsewhere.

You mentioned you have DSL.  I tried that once, and was terribly unhappy with the performance.  The bandwidth was the full amount promised ONLY when it was between 2 and 7am.  It varied with how many people were on at that time.  And at the times I was logging into SL, it was sinking down to dialup levels (no, I'm not exaggerating).  Try pointing your browser to http://speedtest.net before launching SL and see what your available bandwidth ACTUALLY is. 

[Jenni Darkwatch]

One crucial piece of info: What is your render radius?

[Nethya Emor]

I tested it on Speedtest and it is 3.9mB/s and 0.29 mB/s upload. I am using Multiple Threads and HTTP Texture Get. And what do you mean with Render, the Draw Distance is usually on 96. I plan to add more RAM or changing proccessor in future.

[Shockwave Yareach]

Interesting.  You may be laggy as far as responding to the commands, but not by much.

Another possibility -- are you running any P2P programs?  Even if you aren't downloading anything, you are still uploading data, making less bandwidth available to SL to respond to your commands.  And with that 290Kbps upload, a single person downloading part of a movie from you will take all of your upload, leaving nothing for SL. 

[Nethya Emor]

The problem is related to FPS, though the connectivity has its problems too. The ping seem I see is usually 130~220. I usually have either Skype or MSN in background, and web browser. Also run SL in a window mode.

I tested performance with two settings.

SL2 Viewer:

In skybox house: 40-55fps. Antistropic Filtering, 16AA. Packet Loss 0-8% (Max Bandwidth 1500)

In sim surrounded by more in all directions with low population. 10-20fps. Same settings

Pheonix:

In skybox House: 40-50 fps. Enabled Shadows: 2fps (AA downed to 8, 4. Nearly the same). Removed AA+Antistropic: 20-25fps but looks more laggy.

In sim. 12-18 fps. 

Kirsten: 

With Global Illumination, no AA: 5-10fps in Skybox House.

 

[Shockwave Yareach]

Well, one difference between yours and mine is I don't use the AA.  SL looks just fine without it imho, and it takes an enormous bite out of the FPS.  Otherwise, the only thing I could hazard a guess is that talking on skype while inworld is eating almost half of your upload bitrate (100k).  

 

[Jenni Darkwatch]

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Nethya Emor wrote:

The problem is related to FPS, though the connectivity has its problems too. The ping seem I see is usually 130~220. I usually have either Skype or MSN in background, and web browser. Also run SL in a window mode.

I tested performance with two settings.

SL2 Viewer:

In skybox house: 40-55fps. Antistropic Filtering, 16AA. Packet Loss 0-8% (Max Bandwidth 1500)

In sim surrounded by more in all directions with low population. 10-20fps. Same settings

Pheonix:

In skybox House: 40-50 fps. Enabled Shadows: 2fps (AA downed to 8, 4. Nearly the same). Removed AA+Antistropic: 20-25fps but looks more laggy.

In sim. 12-18 fps. 

Kirsten: 

With Global Illumination, no AA: 5-10fps in Skybox House.

 

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Oke that gives a much better impression on what's happening. Shadow code on Phoenix is ancient, so the FPS drop with AA/Anisotropic does make sense.

With Kirstens, your culprit is Global Illumination. For shadows it's not needed, and on all but the most high-end rigs it _will_ kill performance instantly. I won't touch Phoenix, so I can't give you reference numbers there... but with Kirstens, my numbers are as follows (in my all-sculpt ~110prim 32x32m skybox with 15 lights - four of them projectors):

 

100fps: No shadows enabled

50fps : Shadows (Sun, Moon+Projectors)

27fps : Shadows (Sun, Moon+Projectors) and Global Illumination

Settings were on max, draw distance manually to 96m, 16xAA+Anisotropic, enabled multiple threads. KirstensViewer S21(8)Test. The PC I tested that on has a Core2Duo E8400@3GHz, GTX460/1GB (the 768MB version of the GTX460 is crippled, hence 1GB).

Global Illumination _will_ kill FPS quickly if the scene is reasonably complex. An example on ground level, same settings, with 7900prims - about half of them sculpts) in the scene:

28fps: No shadows

17fps: Shadows (Sun, Moon+Projectors)

10fps: Shadows (Sun, Moon+Projectors) and Global Illumination

So, depending on the complexity of your skybox it's quite plausible to have such low numbers, especially with Global Illumination enabled. Global Illumination is, as far as I recall, CPU dependent, not GPU.