system configuration. How many money I need to pay?

[Lali Kamala]

Configuration of my PC:

CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1075T Processor (3010.11 MHz)
Memory: 8191 MB

Motherboard:  Asus Crosshair IV Formula

Graphics Card: GeForce Asus GTX 580/PCI/SSE2 

OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0012.8562
OpenGL Version: 4.2.0

All drivers is updated.

 

As you can see I have powerfull PC.

All most modern games works perfect on maximal settings.

But only Second_Life always wrote to me about my PC can work only with middle grafic and if I use ultra grafic, with all lights-shadows-shaders, I can have hard lags.

Year by year I pays new money for new powerfull components for my PC just for use Second_Life, but always reads about my system too weak. 

How many money I need for PC wich can work perfect with your viewer ?  $50 000? $100 000?

Maybe the problem is that SL uses too old grafic and physical engine, which is hardly compatible with the video cards of the new generation.

If I'm right, tell me why you don't do nothing with It? 

 

[Lindal Kidd]

I feel your pain.  I too have a powerful PC, and a very fast Internet connection.  And yet, the performance I get in SL is not as good as many of my friends get, with less powerful computers.

There are so many variables involved that it is difficult to determine where the problem lies.  I suggest you enlist the help of a friend, or a service technician, who really knows the guts of Windows and the BIOS and can get into your Services and other low level settings, and tweak things.

[Nalates Urriah]

The problem is not your hardware. Your AMD 6 core CPU is excellent. Your nVidia 580 is the top graphics card out right now. Win7 64 is the best Windows OS you can get.

You may be able to get a tiny amount of performance from overclocking, but probably not enough to justify the effort.

You should be able to improve performance by changing your graphics settings for Second Life. See: Graphics Tweaking for Second Life.

Your nVidia control panel will allow you to setup specific settings for SL.

To see what type of performance others are getting look at: How Fast is Your Viewer? - Second Life.

You don't say what performance you are getting. If you would add that information to the How Fast thread it can help others. 

You can get System Explorer (free) to easily see what your system is doing. If your CPU's are maxing at 100% or you are seeing high page fault rates you'll have an idea of where to start looking for problems.

You can get GPU-Z to see how your video card is doing. I doubt it is, but if the graphics load is 100% you know something is using the GPU processors. My 560 GPU seldom carries a load over 25%.

What you will  find is that the SL viewers are not highly optimized for OpenGL. The viewer focuses more on compatibility with older systems. The Lab is improving performance. But, for now even high end machines do not provide performance at the level you see on DirectX games.

I mostly run my system on HIGH with Lighting & Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and Sun/Moon shadows enabled. I get from 15 to 25 FPS (check Viewer Statistics - Ctrl-Shift-1).

[Ansariel Hiller]

The problem is that SL is not a Windows-only software but also runs on Mac and Linux. So it's not possible to use DirectX for which all modern GPUs are optimized for. Instead, SL uses OpenGL which as of today is not as powerful as DirectX and cannot make use of latest GPU technology. To make it even worse, LL used (and in some places in the viewer still uses) old and in the meantime deprecated static OpenGL functions instead of shaders, that in the end also gives negative impact in viewer performance even to the extend that the viewer cannot be run at all (ask people with last generation nVidia 4xx series cards!).

Also you should keep in mind that the content in SL is user-generated and in most cases not optimized in any form - in contrast to other 3D games where the content and the environment is generated by the company that makes the game. So you also might end up in places where obviously nothing is happening but suddenly the performance runs way down. For instance: I was standing in a place outside with a few trees and buildings - nothing special at all - and performance went down to a few fps because it turned out somebody places about 600 MB of textures around the place and the viewer was constantly busy with reducing texture detail!