Terrible, Terrible FPS - EVGA Nvidia GTX 580 superclocked.

[Fisk Zinnemann]

Now this problem appears to span every single SL viewer, and I don't know why. Here's my OS and hardware:

Windows 7 X64 Home Premium

AMD Athlon II X4 630 @2.8 GHz

6GB Dual-channel DDR3 RAM @532MHz

1536MB Geforce GTX 580 Superclocked (EVGA)

I think I've covered all the important parts. 

I can run Battlefield 3 on Ultra with 40FPS, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim on the highest settings with no discernable visual lag, and Crysis 2 on Ultra with the DX11 packs, and Ultra-high resolution textures, 30FPS easy. 

I run SL with deferred rendering and ambient occlusion enabled, as well as reflections, atmospheric shaders, etc.. Draw distance at 512. That said, I can be standing on a platform 4000m in the air, and I'd never get more than 20FPS. 

On the ground, I get something closer to 5FPS, unless I set my draw distance to 70. Which makes the game practically unplayable with any degree of enjoyment.

Does anyone have the slightest idea why SL might be performing so poorly on my computer?

Note: Prior to getting this graphics card, I was running an ATI HD5670, and the performance with that card was even worse. Before that, this hard drive had been on a computer that ran a Pentium 4 with a card from the late 90s, I believe. Total crap.

[Chelsea Malibu]

It more than likely not your box or the viewer.  One thing that makes SL different than other games is that nearly all the content is built by users and most of them are not professional game builders.  As such, they deploy very high resolution graphics and high poly count objects that are not optimized and kills your performance.

Also, unlike other games, SL is not loaded into your PC, just the application to run SL.  Every time you log in, it must load the entire scene, animations, textures, scripts, etc where with a PC game, all of this is already installed when you load the game.

My suggestion would be to not try to run your PC at the same level as you run other games.  A draw of 512 is a bit overkill since sims are only 256 M wide.  20FPS is about the most you will get and anything above 12 FPS cannot be seen by the naked eye in video streams.  What you areally have in SL is a stream and not what one would call a game in it's truest sense.

 

[Fisk Zinnemann]

Thanks for your prompt reply, Malibu - Only there's something very strange about my client's performance. A friend of mine runs a slower computer with less RAM and a 280GTX graphics card - a card much older and technically inferior to the one I'm running - only she manages to get 25-40FPS on the ground with even higher settings than mine - and in the same sim, too! She's not one to boast or exaggerate. If the problem isn't the hardware or my client, or the environment, where may the issue be?

[Ayesha Askham]

@Fisk

 

What Chelsea says is essentially true...however... I would make a couple of suggestions.

1) Your RAM is not high by current standards, upwards of 8MB might be advisable. But its not THAT bad, 4 is thought to be adequate.

2) Check your settings, Draw distance of over 400m is pointless, IMO.  Also in your Viewer's Graphics settings, check the Anti-aliasing setting: x4 is plenty, I gather recent Linden Lab "official"  viewers default to x16 which will crucify even a GTX580.

Do you have "Vertex Buffer Objects" enabled?  If not try it, if Yes try turning it off.  (It's a fickle suck-it-and-see setting).

Other than that I cannot suggest anything else.

I run an Intel i7 @3.4GHz, with 16MB 1366MHz RAM, an NVidiaGTX580 on Win 7 64 bit HP so I am not that different, I get 75FPS normally, with a low if about 20FPS in complex scenes.

Oh, also check your line speed and SL bandwidth settings.

Good Luck! :smileywink:

[Chelsea Malibu]

And this too I agree with.  I don't bring up the RAM issue as there seems to be a lot of debate on this but I run 12 GB and it was a huge improvement over the 4 I once had on my Vista Computer.  However, only a 64 bit box can run that much RAM and I think the debate comes in from 32 bit users.

Another thing neither of us mentioned is that you are talking about other games that I believe are PC based games and not MMO's.  Realize in an MMO, you have network performance to deal with as well.  If you have a wireless connection, it becomes very laggy and if you don't have a good router and modem, this too can cause issues.  Many of the cable routers your cable provider gives you have very low throughput.

[Tristizia Demonista]

Try out the Shing Dev Built , this Dev-Viewer has the latest Graphic Bugfixes and some other improvemnts built in.

Or if you like to try out a TPV which has all the fixes of the above, look at Nirans Viewer. 

Both of these have the latest UI and are very fast.  

[Aveline Stein]

Try lowering your draw distance to something more reasonable like 128-200ish. Also, Ambient Occlusion is eating about 15-20fps on my computer and i dont see a big visual difference personally.

6GB ram should be plenty if you do not run alot of applications in the background.

I am getting around 30fps in complex scenes with not many avatars with 16AA in Firstorm. up to 70 in simple scenes like my skybox home where there really isnt many shadows to draw (1920 screensize).

Make sure you have the latest driver (285.62 i belive) and that you have created a profile for the viewer in the driver settings.

There is also a chance that your CPU may be limiting the graphics card. SL will not use all 4 cores and 2.8ghz is not a whole lot to feed an overclocked 580.

 

[Nya Jules]

Turn off Anti-Aliasing if you use Lighting and Shadows. I get 20-25 FPS with no people and only textures on the screen, using standard Firestorm ultra settings (well + the shadows). I run an i7 980x@4GhZ, 12GB ram and a 580gtx. The 20-25 FPS are only the real average, meaning that there are a lot of frames dropping down to the 12 FPS indicator, making it really laggy, so I prefer running ultra-settings without shadows but therefore constantly high FPS.

[namssab1nad Piers]

4 GIG of RAM is plenty.  One thing you may want to check is your Virtual Memory.  If you have it turned off, it can have a huge impact on how your system handles large loads of data being sent to your computer.  You can have 8,12, or even 20 GIG of RAM and still be slow if your Virtual Memory is turned off.  In my system (XP Pro)  I have the choice to turn it off, let the computer decide how much it needs, or I can set a maximum amount to be used.  I let the computer decide.

[Ormand Lionheart]

 I joined Fisk in SL and side by side we compared fps. I have a GTX 460 and intel i7 930 overclocked. Even though we have similar systems and his video card is about 50% superior to mine my fps were 100-200% higher. We went thru everything it could be hardware bottleneck, viewer settings, heat issues etc. Last resort was he was going to try his other hard drive. Also his fps were so low when he changed to shadow mode he should have crashed but only lost 5 fps whereas I went from 60 fps to 9 fps. He's got some weird issue that is very hard to pin down. Not his conncetion which was over 30mb/sec. I know someone with a GTX 580 and they get 50% more performance than I do. Also Fisk runs BF3 very well so maybe some issue with the video drivers installation although I guess this was an issue with AMD also. It's definitely not a typical or common problem in his case.