How do i get the best performance for second life with Graphics Card AMD Radeon 6750 HD( FPS 8-30)

[Jesse541 Skytower]

So iam trying to set my video card up for best performance in second life right now i run 8 to 30 FPS depending on the sim IM on what can i do to boost FPS I think in the AMD control center ive done what i can .. Can I change something in my bios like a 1G card I know this is a duel card and should boost for gaming auto but I was hoping I can do something to boost it thanks for the help and hope to see u around SL 

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Hello Jesse. Some things you can do.

1)If you have wireless connection, prefer direct cable connection.

2)Change your Maximum Bandwidth under Preferences --> Setup tab till to find what is better for your system.

3)Experiment with different drivers. More about at this thread.

4)Follow the general suggestions here.

5)Try a T.P.V.

6)Avoid to run other applications when you are in world

7)Avoid to wear too many scripted objects.

 

[Lindal Kidd]

8 to 30 fps is not bad for SL.  Second Life has miserable frame rates compared to most MMORPGs.

This is for a couple of reasons.  One is that SL is based on OpenGL, and not DirectX like most games.  Nividia does a pretty good job of supporting OpenGL, AMD not so much.  Either way, DirectX is faster.

The other major reason is that SL does not pre-download content to your hard drive.  Most content in most games is made by the game developers, and does not change -- so it can be downloaded to your computer once and accessed quickly from there.  Second Life's content is all user-created, and subject to change at a moment's notice.  A lot of the textures used are not optimized for efficiency.  Every time you change locations, or even turn to look in a different direction, SL has to download a lot of content to you over the internet.

You can do some things in your Preferences/Graphics settings to help, like turning off reflections, reducing your draw distance, disabling antialiasing.  But SL will always be clunky compared to games with pre-made content.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Most of the settings you can adjust in your video card's control panel will not help (and even hurt) performance in SL.  A few things like anti alias help as long as you understand it will slow the performance down a little bit......most other settings it's best to set them to allow the program control and then set those up in the viewer preferences.

 

As mentioned you might be expecting too much from your card when using SL.  Unlike most video programs SL uses OpenGL rendering instead of DirectX.  OpenGL is a great rendering engine and competes quite well with DirectX,  However, DirectX is on every Microsoft computer ever made and the game makers know that.......they therefore optimize their games to make the best use of DirectX so that the most customers are happy.  The video chipset and card manufacturers also know that and the put the most effort into to making sure DirectX is properly supported with their drivers......that sometimes causes the OpenGL support to suffer a little with each of the two major chipset makers (AMD/ATI and nVidia).  At the moment there doesn't seem to be issues with either chipset for OpenGL support.........just a month so ago nVidia had some issues with OpenGL and before that AMD/ATI had some issues (it goes back and forth but the manufacturers usually fix the problems with drivers pretty quickly).

 

For your FPS the draw distance you can set in preferences are probably the most major area when you can make changes that drastically effect FPS.  Having a draw distance set over 256 meters is probably something that is absolutely useless to do........the distance across a sim is 256 meters (how much detail are you going to see at 256, let alone 512?).  Some other things are your connection speed, ping times in excess of about 500, and packet loss greater than 2%.  Your video card is probably the most important part of the equation for good frame rates but the other factors will make that high end card look bad if they are out of line.  Frame rates of 15 + in a moderately populated area is probably on the high end of average.  Highly populated areas can drop your FPS to 10 or less and still be quite normal.  Go to 4000 meters high and your FPS can jump up to 120 + quite easily.  I say forget about FPS and judge the performance by what it looks like to you.....if it's relatively smooth video in most places you have good performance.