What makes one viewer give more lag than the other?

[Glitter Rain]

I use Imprudence viewer only, because it has the least lag for me. I can't use Phoenix because everything is all greyed out and the lag is horrible for me.  I'm on a laptop.  My laptop is fairly new. Only one year old.  I purchased it with the best graphics card Dell computers sells. It's frustrating to hear people on laptops that paid $400 for it when I paid almost $5K and have terrible lag most all the time!  What causes this?  Thanks all :D

[valerie Inshan]

It could be either your graphics card needs updates, or your internet connection. Make sure you don't use wireless but a regular cable instead.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Graphics-cards/ta-p/700073

[Rolig Loon]

Everyone uses their computer differently and expects different things out of SL, so it's hard to say why you have more lag than the next person. There could be hardware reasons (some costly graphics cards just can't process images as fast as some cheaper ones), or it could be your physical setup (maybe you're using wireless, which drops performance for a lot of people).  It could be your Internet connection ( a slower cable vs an optical fiber, or an ISP that throttles bandwidth at busy times of the day). Maybe it's the settings you are using in Preferences( too large a draw distance, using shadows, antialiasing, anisotropic filtering .....).  Maybe it is the viewer you use (V2 and V3 viewers do have more features and demand more out of your computer than V1viewers).  Maybe it's the places you spend time (Shopping malls are laggy for everyone, but a quiet, private estate can have almost no lag).  The only way to tell is to chip away at the factors you can control, one at a time, and see what works for you. Here are a few wiki pages that you light find helpful:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lag

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/I_have_a_lot_of_lag._How_can_I_improve_performance

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Typical_Frame_Rate_Performance_by_Graphics_Card/GPU

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Checking_for_packet_loss_%28network_lag%29

[Storm Clarence]

Go into preferences and raise your bandwidth to 2500K.  Set your graphics card to medium or high.

It may not solve lag as lag can generate from many points, but it should increase your FPS.  

[Nyll Bergbahn]

Hi Glitter.

Please advise your laptop specifications. It sounds like your laptop is only using the integrated graphics and not the discrete card, which has been a problem with Second Life. Use Options > Edit to add details of your laptop.

If your Dell laptop is using Nvidia Optimus, then look at Selina Dryssen's comments at the end of this thread.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Technical/Dell-XPS-17-has-a-3gb-NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-555M-card-8gb-ram/qaq-p/902099

[Baloo Uriza]

Imprudence has a focus on efficiency and quality over throwing everything and the kitchen sink before it's tested.  That's probably the biggest difference in terms of usability over Phoenix.