Poor game performance....need suggestions

[Neo2154]

Second life is extremely slow loading, choppy at times, and just plain laggy. I'm running a 2.7 amd MHz processor, radeon hd 6670 graphics card, 4gigs of ddr2 ram, windows vista 32bit, and a 120 gb hdd....any suggestions on how to fix this issue?

[Chelsea Malibu]

Well for starters, I'd consider a new graphics card.  A 512 card really is not optimal these days. 1024 or even 2048 is better.  You can get 1024 cards for as low as $60 US these days.  You can also go top of the line for $300 or more depending on the card.  I run dual Asus Crossfires in parallel and I still get lag at times.

Also RAM.  It's almost like you can never have enough.  Unlike most other games, SL loads each scene as you enter it.  Since most is built by amateurs (and I don't mean this in a bad way, it's just not professional game builders/designers) they tend to use very high resolution graphics.  Those graphics, all scripts, animations and such load into your RAM and Graphics Card memory when you enter into a scene.  This cause lag if there are not resources to allocate this data.

I recommend no less than 6 GB of RAM where anything at or above 12 GB is optimal for gaming.

 

[Neo2154]

My card is a 1024mb one ddr5....starting to think it's just the ram

[Sephy McCaw]

yourr computer is fine, you dont need to change anything with it, sl is not friendly on AMD graphics cards, and you should turn off OpenGL vertex buffer, that is pretty much the failing problem for AMD cards..... your system is more then nough to handle sl

[Neo2154]

How do I turn off the open gl?

[Claireschen Hesten]

you just need to turn off VBO and you can find that in prefs > graphics > advanced hardware options in my 3 and a half years in SL and 3 systems running ATI cards having VBO on in SL has never played nice with ATI graphics at all 

[Neo2154]

Stuck at the docs atm, but I'll try that when I get home....I'd like it to perform flaw easy like I see in the vids

[Void Singer]

Vista32 can only use 4Gb max of physical ram even if you enable 4gt.

the HD6670 actually seems to compare fairly well with the GTS 450, edging a little behind... should be able to get high out of it, maybe even ultra, but doubtful of things like shadows.

honestly I don't see anything in there that stands out, unless it's just particular region(s) that the problem is in.... performance of course will NEVER be as good as any 3d game on the market, at least not on max settings.

[Neo2154]

Flawlessly*....stupid phone

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Since Chelsea seems to have missed that the Viewer itself is a 32-bit program, which isn't going to be able to address more than 4GB without some fancy work-arounds, I doubt her figure for memory use. That's partly why some Viewer components are distinct programs.

Voice and streaming media can be a problem. They're competing for bandwidth on your internet connection. They don't go near Linden Lab, so they only make a difference if the cause is near your end. 

[Poenald Palen]

There are two ways to check your network for packet loss or ping time issues, since the network is so important and your hardware seems find enough...well, here is the ways to check it.

NOTE: these instructions are for the latest 3.0 veiwer and some of the 2.x veiwers.

First. The lag meter.

1. Enable the 'Advanced' menu by going to the me menu>preferences and chosing the 'Advanced' tab on the left. Then, simply check the check box for "Show Advanced Menu" and click 'OK' to close the preferences window.

2. Go to the newly reveiled menu called 'Advanced' and then go to the Performance Tools listing, then it will expand and you simply click on the listing called 'lag Meter' to fire up this easy to read meter.

3. Check it out! What does it say? Click  button with ">>" to expand it to let it give you some guesses on what is happening IF there is lag.

What does it mean?

Easy, green is fine, no guesses are posted beside the corresponding light. Red means something is going wrong or not working well. Read this. Ping times, GPU issues and server issues. It will tell you what might be happening. If you see this light up after you are getting lag, it might give you some help on finding the issue.

The second method is to play around with the ctrl+shift+1 expanding menu thingies and then wonder what you are looking at and maybe see the sim is running with time dialation or whatever. But, the lag meter is using the same stats and is more is more helpful lol.

You can also try disabling http inventory, this sometimes helps me stop crashing...not clue why. Since you now have the advanced menu enabled, you would now know how to enable the Developer menu lol. Same place, the check box right under it! Simply go the 'Develop' menu and then select HTTP Inventory IF it has a check box beside it. IF there isn't a check mark neer this listing, then you might not want to bother.

If you have sattalite or a microwave(wireless...m, 3g or whatever else is around) then you might need some software to help with TCP/IP enhancements or spoof something..I read about it real quick and really don't know much about it and not sure if it really helps that much for SL. SL wiki says they don't support it, but it might work...most likely not...I mean, in so many words. That is mostly for sattalite and wireless ISP's, not sure about otheres. Your wireless Lan....not sure if that would be an issue, you might have band width resitrictions though...so, it might be worth digging into your wifi Lan settings and maybe unthrottle it. Wasn't there an issue someone had with Qos? Not sure....but, either way, networks effect SL alot because of the way the SL sim and viewer relationship is.