Major performance issues....on a top line computer....time to ask for help.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

65 FPS in a game that contains nothing but professionally created content that is optimized for performance (fast rendering) and every bit of that content resides on that fancy gaming hard drive of yours (I assume its one of those 10,000 rpm jobs) is not really all that impressive.  Second Life contains almost no professionally created content and the amateurs who created the content probably don't even know how to optimize a texture or mesh prim.  Not one single object you see on your monitor resides on your super duper hard drive......it's all stored remotely on servers located in either San Francisco, CA or Dallas, TX.  The viewer you installed on your computer is a browser.  The viewer sends information about your avatar and it's location to the LL servers who then find the textures and objects that are within your set drawing distance and send that data back to your computer.  Then your computer can take if from there.  You are not going to get 65 FPS playing any game in SL.  On a quiet day and everything is perfect in the world you might get 25 to 35.  I believe you can beat the 10 to 15 you say you get (but maybe not....it could be just the invironment of the sim you are playing your game in with poor textures).  Try lowering your draw distance to 64 meters (96 at the most).  That's going to limit your reaction time for your game in most cases but SL is really not a good platform for games anyway.

 

If you are looking for butter smooth video and little or no lag in your games, then SL is not where you should be.  It's just not designed for what you want.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

65 FPS in a game that contains nothing but professionally created content that is optimized for performance (fast rendering) and every bit of that content resides on that fancy gaming hard drive of yours (I assume its one of those 10,000 rpm jobs) is not really all that impressive.  Second Life contains almost no professionally created content and the amateurs who created the content probably don't even know how to optimize a texture or mesh prim.  Not one single object you see on your monitor resides on your super duper hard drive......it's all stored remotely on servers located in either San Francisco, CA or Dallas, TX.  The viewer you installed on your computer is a browser.  The viewer sends information about your avatar and it's location to the LL servers who then find the textures and objects that are within your set drawing distance and send that data back to your computer.  Then your computer can take if from there.  You are not going to get 65 FPS playing any game in SL.  On a quiet day and everything is perfect in the world you might get 25 to 35.  I believe you can beat the 10 to 15 you say you get (but maybe not....it could be just the invironment of the sim you are playing your game in with poor textures).  Try lowering your draw distance to 64 meters (96 at the most).  That's going to limit your reaction time for your game in most cases but SL is really not a good platform for games anyway.

 

If you are looking for butter smooth video and little or no lag in your games, then SL is not where you should be.  It's just not designed for what you want.

[Lindal Kidd]

Peggy is right...but it doesn't answer the question of why you were getting 25 fps before and 10-15 now.

Have you changed your viewer?  The new mesh-enabled viewers are awful performance hogs.

If you did change your viewer, check the graphics settings.  Especially note the antialiasing...the default is now 8, where it used to be 0.  Turn it down, or even turn it off. 

If you're mainly interested in combat, disable the advanced sky and water shaders.  You won't need beautiful landscapes.

Make sure that "run multiple threads" is enabled, in the Advanced or Develop menu.

Have you changed your internet service provider?  Check your connection speed, make sure your ISP isn't throttling you.

Do you have other programs open on your computer?  Close 'em.  Check one of the Windows tweaks sites for ways to speed up your machine.

Try a different viewer.  The older Phoenix, build 1185, is still the best performer for me...but don't take that as gospel.  Different computers get wildly different results, so try several viewers.

[RoudyRaccoon Hand]

Ugh, tried everything, still the same results, 5 different clients, all the suggested options, it seems the FPS doesn't respond to any input I give, I am locked at 25-30fps outside of combat, just standing still looking at a sim wall, it's almost as if someone was taking the rendering pipeline and clamping it with a vice grip, literally not a single FPS gain from turning every SL feature off.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

With what you listed as your computer specs there is no reason you can't get at least the same FPS as I do (which is, on average, in a moderately populated and textured area 25 to 35 FPS and in a lightly populated, moderately textured area about 45 or so and on my sky platform at 4000 meters 90 +). My CPU and video card is i5 2.8 gig and GTS250 1 gig VRAM with 8 gig DDR3 system RAM. I use SL veieer 3.2.4 (the one that's supposed to be so laggy). I recently switched from viewer 2.8 which got about 5 FPS more........so there was a performance hit on my system (just not enough to effect my SL enough for me to notice much at all). The main difference I see with you last update to your post is my download is significantly faster than yours.........tests out at 27 mbps on a consistant basis.

 

You didn't say what your operating system is (mine's Windows 7 x64). I suspect you are using the same. I have my Windows preferences set to performance instead of quality (virtually every bell and whistle turned off). I only run what I need to run for security in background. My security software is the Comodo Security free (it's quite SL friendly and an excellent anti-virus/spyware and firewal software package). Check your system set up to see what's running that you don't need running and decide if the bells and whistles are important enough to you to have that fade when opening or closing pages or windows.

 

On my viewer preferences. I have my graphics set to high. I can run shadows but there is a pretty stiff price to pay with my GTS 250.........I get about a 10 FPS drop at all but my sky platform. I have my draw distance set at 256 meters. Anti-alias at 4x (which reminds me to mention if you set any preference in your nVidia control to over ride the program control, that may be your problem........I tried that and it brought my SL to a near standstill). Anistrophic filtering is off. Other than that my graphics is pretty much the default high setting. I can run at ultra but it's laggy on my system and not worth the hit for me. Even with a pretty fast connection speed I have my bandwidth set at 1500 kbps........you'll never get much more than that anyway. I have noticed that ther'e very little change in FPS with lowering the bandwidth in preferences untill you have it set to less than 500 kbps. You might play with that setting to see if you can get a little better frame rate (I doubt it but it's worth a few mintues playing around with). Also, if you haven't done so already, do a few tests to both San Francisco and Dallas to see what your actually download speed is ( http://www.speedtest.net/ ). If your speed is close to 1 mbps then contact your ISP to see why you're only getting 50% of the advertised speed (assuming the worse case that you are only getting 2 mbps and not the 4). Whatever your speed is do not set your bandwidth in preferrences to more than about 80% of the tested speed).

 

That's about all I can think of off the top of my head right now. Aside from the connection speed, you're system is much higher spec'd than mine.........I can see no reason why you should, at least, perform as well as I do. I do want to say again that SL is not a very good platform for the games you want to play.......you won't ever get, on a consistant basis, much more than 25 to 30 FPS (that due to the way SL is designed.......it's not a game and it's not built for games. Even though you can play a game here.......just don't expect the same performance you would get on a platform that is designed for gaming).

[RoudyRaccoon Hand]

I found my issue, it's the CPU, apparently Bulldozer series CPUs have a completely different architecture that is not supported in 64bit Vista or by most CPU needed programs, I'll hop to the Phenom II CPUs again, as it's clear my friends with almost the same setup are getting nearly 85FPS on their clients. (Even though that's impossible on a sim standpoint)

 

And Speedtest results:

11ms Ping,

31.30 mbps download

2.09 mbps upload

[Peggy Paperdoll]

That's great that you found your problem. And even your bandwidth is better than mine.

 

Good luck with the CPU upgrade.

[RoudyRaccoon Hand]

Hehe, well "downgrade"

 

Thanks for your help you guys.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

When something works better, no matter what a manufacturer labels it, it's an upgrade.

 

It sounds like you're getting better performance. If anything I said or posted helped then you're welcome. If not then phooey on you.

[RoudyRaccoon Hand]

Not quite yet, I am trying to set up an exchange and cover the cost difference with the store for my CPU, if not, oh well, I'll go back to bulldozer when SL supports it

[Faubio Alter]

It appears your question has been edited from the other responses it looks like a low FPS rate, check your connection it doses not matter how good your machine is if your connection is having problems it will simple not receive the information it needs to perform correctly. I'd look look there first. There are two fps rates one is for the sim the other for your PC which fps rate is low? SIM fps second rates do not exceed 45 fps (edit, normally, though they have been known to spike to higher rates on occasion, rarely).