SL on low spec PC

[Abel Balczo]

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get SL to run effectively on a low spec PC?

[Marcus Hancroft]

Howdy, Abel. 

SecondLife is a very graphics intensive virtual world.  Depending on how "low spec" your computer is, it isn't gonna run well at any setting.  You can try moving all graphics sliders to "low" in Preferences and make sure your "Draw Distance" is set to the lowest as well.  If you have the capability and the means, one of the best things you can do for your computer is to upgrade the graphics card and add memory.  Those two things will help performance.

With everything set to "low" the world isn't going to look pretty, but you might be able to explore around.  Just be prepared for a LOT of lag. 

Good luck!

[Jonty Bluebird]

The two things that spring to my mind are to tyurn the graphic detail down in the preferences window in the Viewer, the other one is to just make sure that nopthing else is running on the computer, no other programms and only the essential programms running in the background.

[Poenald Palen]

Um, you turn down draw distance and maybe adjust the network speed lower (or higher if you have an isp that plays nice with that) but the main issue I think will be textures loading. At least it is for me. So, I just enable the advanced menu's and the viewer 2's Develop menu and then hunt down "Disable Textures" and click that. In viewer 2 it will stay off. 1.23 would turn textures back on when you restarted the viewer and that is fine, because you need to load some textures of the place or the objects you wish to use most of the time anyway. It will leave stuff grey if you leave it on all the time lol. But, it helps a little when you are just wanting to stay in one area and not travel sim to sim.

This sounds weird, but turning off water helps a bit. But the fastest and highest gains in Frames Per Second will be with changing your monitors resolution down to about 800X600. YOu will need to shrink the UI in the ctrl+p preference window somewhere. It is a slider, just go all the way to the left to 0.75 and then try out 800X600 resolution and also maybe put the hz up on your monitors settings, 70+ is nicer and smoother looking. 85hz is easy to get on most monitors at 800x600 and you might even see higher, for a CRT. Now, the flat LCD or whatever style are maybe different.

[Lynda Klossovsky]

depends how low spec you mean...it also depends if you want graphics,

you can use a text based browser such as metabolt (listed in the tpv list) to runs models etc from and you dont need a powerful pc at all

 I have run a petium 4 quite successfully with graphics...even a celeron will do if you dont need good grafix..

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Hello Abel. It would be better if you give us PC's specs. Now the only we can do is to guess. During my holidays previous summer i used to log in with a very old 10'' Dell with graphical card incorporated in motherboard. Usually my avatar was like an egg, everything arround me grey for long time, everything was in slow motion and i had difficulties to move and to rotate my camera. With few words it was a pain although i could log in and chat with my friends. As already mentioned depends of how low are your PC's specs. Except of low distance and graphics, avoid to run other applications when you are in world.

[Numpty Mistwallow]

If you simply MUST run SL on a lower spec PC then I'd suggest NOT running Windows as it's a total resource hog. Try Ubuntu or Debian Linux.

[Viktoria Dovgal]

I had to deal with that for quite a while, glad that's out of the way!

Biggest bangs when I had to deal, roughly in order:

Draw distance low, really low. A lot of viewers won't go below 64 draw distance in the control panel, but you can set RenderFarClip as low as 24 before the camera glitches.

Put the fully rendered avatars low, really low, RenderAvatarMaxVisible to around 5 or 6. That's in the regular graphics settings in 2.x.

Some old machines work better with avatar impostors on, some with it off, try both and see.

Drop particles to 256, 0 is possible but it makes stuff way too fugly.

2.x lets you turn off water transparency, do that. That's where most of the water hurt comes from, water gets rendered even if the sim's all dry land.

Graphics options, hardware, try VBO on and see if your card can handle it. On old old Nvidia it can be a MAJOR win.

If you're on a Mac, check if RenderTextureMemoryMultiple is less than 1. Try it at 1, even 2! Then go back to graphics hardware and slide up the graphics memory. It never made sense to me, but I got better performance on one old clunker if I set graphics mem to double what the card really had. This setting can make things worse too, just put it back to default if it doesn't help.

Graphics settings again, turn flexi quality down as low as you can stand. It will probably still look OK, just less flowy.

Terrain detail on low, it makes the ground textures smeary but frees up memory for other things.

Media OFF, go to settings and turn it on as needed if you really want to try to see something, but this will totally kill an old machine. Streaming music isn't so bad.

Make the cache smallish, the larger the cache, the more RAM is eaten up by VFS and texture cache index. OTOH, if your bandwidth is low too, the memory hit from the bigger cache could help more tha it hurts. It's always a balancing act.

In Advanced or Develop, look for "Fast Alpha" or "Automatic alpha masks (non-deferred)" and try it. Soemtimes it helps a lot, sometimes it doesn't help at all.

Avoid complicated attachments on your own avatar, especially majorly flexi stuff. Your own avatar is usually right in front of the camera so it's easy to lag yourself.