cykarushb

In SL the CPU is actually handling a lot more of the graphics than you would think. Most games use the CPU graphically at some level, and SL does the same, but because the game is so bad at utilizing multiple cores and threads, it quickly becomes a bottleneck at higher settings no matter what you have. Absolutely NOTHING running on an 8700k should ever dip below 60fps in 1080p, yet there are people on this forum with that problem. the CPU mainly handles lighting and shading effects, the gpu is more for geometry and textures, surface effects and filtering, various forms of AA the gpu does share some of the shader effects however, and they're tied into texturing and surfaces if you disable basic shaders for example, it will decimate your FPS because pretty much everything except for the geometry is immediately offloaded to the CPU since lighting is a big part of SL, even without the advance lighting, the underutilization of the CPU is a serious issue that's really holding the game back, even if it IS a super unoptimzed mess of content with insane polygon counts and super high res textures, modern hardware should be able to handle it fine

I'm really hoping we get this someday. CPU utilization with SL is trash. My i5 4570 and GTX 970 can max this game, but quickly I gets to the point where changing settings does nothing because my CPU is being underutilized. Render distance at max, 30fps. Render distance at minimum, 32fps. Turn reflections on and off, bump mapping and shiny things on and off, 970 has no problems with it and there's no difference in frame rate since the CPU is holding everything back. i shouldn't need the best of the best single threaded performance to play this game smoothly and if I didn't care about graphics or frame rate, I'd play on my Pentium 4 system from 2003

Don't run a case open for temperature problems, add and change around fans to create airflow. need an intake and an exhaust, more for hotter parts, you want air to exclusively flow in one end and out another, optimally exhaust should be at the back and top and intakes should be at the front and bottom having the case open entirely negates airflow since the air you intake just blows out the side instead

obviously... https://hyperionics.com/hc2/index.asp if youre not using this to record runescape in 640x480 youre not recording your screen properly

bingo also if this starts happening a lot, clear your viewer cache

The problem there is that almost nobody has enough RAM to make a proper ramdisk out of. Most people are still on 8gb, 16gb is getting more common but its still mainly for people who game a lot. Even 16gb of ram really isnt enough for a proper ramdisk, especially if you need that 16gb of ram as well. Ive got the xeon system now wtih 32gb of ram so that might be an option but really it gets into the land of diminishing returns, im giving up half my ram for a place for my browser to cram stuff and an SSD would do it just as well, with a near negligible speed loss. As for this thread from 2011, if anyone cares, stick the viewer cache on the SSD, it doesnt matter where you install the game, the boot time for the game i pretty quick anyway.

SL wont take advantage of SLI/Crossfire configurations unless youre using some specific dual chip cards, and 1070ti SLI is really just not a necessity for anything right now anyway, wait a year or two until the cards are cheap and perform kinda average, then get a second for SLI to have your configuration last longer. I only suggest an AIO because its easy, it fits into anything with a 120mm fan mount, without details on case cooler height restriction, ram clearance, etc, its just easier to say "buy an AIO" because its gonna work 100%.

If you never touch it, it can last decades. Many suggest replacing it every so often however, and whatever you consider "every so often" to be. Personally, ive got systems that have never had their coolers removed in the last 20 years and they still have the same temps. Ive got others that get new thermal paste every few months or so when i take them apart for fun and cleaning. Unless you start seeing temperature problems with a clean cooler, dont bother.

If you have a Z87 (updated bios) or Z97 motherboard, sell the 4790 (temporarily replace it with a Pentium G3260 or something for like 30$) and buy an i7 4790k, overclock the crap out of it on an AIO water cooler or something similar. AIO water would be the easiest option for you if you wanted a cooler upgrade and OC potential, but a high end air cooler wold also be a good option. Just upgrading the cooler on a 4790 will do literally nothing for performance, it will make it run a bit cooler and probably be less noisy but really unless that thing is hitting 90-100c its not even going to thermal throttle. Dont bother with an 8700k unless you need 6 cores, and for SL you definitely dont need 6 cores. A 4790k will hold you for a LONG time.

Off topic but this sounds entire fake. I dont think even HD 620 can do more than 1080p medium in Skyrim, and it could hardly be called dinosaur tier. Dino tier would be like Intel GMA x3100 or something which wouldnt even be able to display the video ads on steam, let alone play skyrim at all, or ultra for that matter. And SL can at least start on hardware below its minimum requirements, related, and theres no way Skyrim would even start on there, i had trouble getting Steam to open to install Hotline Miami... But as i said, off topic. Same with this This is a good point though, just because SL isnt laid out like other games, doesnt mean it has to perform this bad. This game looks average, its nothing special anymore, its not that advance and its not really that intensive, its just that it utilizes hardware so poorly. "This ferrari is performing bad because of cheap gasoline i put in it, not because 5 of the 6 cylinders arent working". Its built off an engine that came from a time when single core processors were the norm, its terrible at using the CPU for CPU tasks, and it likes to offload rendering of certain things to the CPU instead of the modern GPU's that can handle it. Video cards have come a long way from the early to mid 2000's, the best example i can think of is how a Core2Quad Q6600 came out in 2007, where the highest end GPU of the time was the Geforce 8800 Ultra. That CPU can be paired with up to a GTX 670 without a CPU bottleneck occurring (widely debated on forums, most say 660ti but if you OC a little its fine with the 670). That GPU is roughly... well simply look at this: http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-670-vs-Nvidia-GeForce-8800-Ultra/2181vsm14944 Now we're getting to the point where a high end GPU is actually pairing well with the high end CPU's. There was a time when the GPU didnt need to do that much because the CPU could handle it all, that time is gone, we have GPUs that are incredibly powerful and are capable of a lot more and LL hasnt done any optimization to properly use them. SL is still a game, it is an electronic experience, whatever the hell you want to call it. Smallworlds was also just a game and it was basically the same thing, just a social avatar game. SL in its purest form is just another social avatar game. Theres a lot more features for sure, and you can do just about anything compared to say, Habbo Hotel. But its in the same category and is. a. game. It might be an issue with just extensive avatar detailing, i sometimes have decent framerates in crowds until someone joins with a complexity of like 500k+ and it just bombs my FPS. Disabling avatar Cloth tends to help a bit. If theres lot of flexi hair around, which for some reason people still use flexi hair, turn down flexi detail. These are CPU bound tasks, and even a high end processor is going to be absolutely wrecked by those details if lots of them are going on at once.

And please do recognize that absolute top end hardware is not a requirement for SL this game runs on toasters, my very basic i5 4570, GTX 970 and 8gb of ddr3 glowing rectangle plays this game fine maxed in 1440p to get decent frame rates even in crowds if you need or really really want no holds barred performance from this game, by all means get the absolute best you can afford, but my system was about 500$ total including the monitor and it runs fine (and it came with that previously mentioned quadro I later replaced with a 100$ 970) i ran this game fine in 1080p for a long while on an athlon 5350 and a 750ti, even a 16 year old Pentium 4 and a 14 year old GeForce 6200 can still play the game at abysmal frame rates

LGA 1151 skylake system with an i5 6600 or i7 6700 (or their K variants if you want to OC), 8-16gb of 2400mhz ddr4, some random storage but an SSD is useful for SL cache, whatever case suits your fancy and is compatible with your choice of motherboard size (speaking of motherboards, chipset h110 for locked, z170 for unlocked processors), for a GPU look into raw performance per dollar, and for a PSU always 80+ bronze minimum and 150-200w over your estimated power draw The reason I say Skylake is because it's cheaper to find skylake parts in the used market, and there's a near negligible performance difference between say, a 6700k and a 7700k. You could go back to Haswell with an i7 4770/4790k and also get just about the same performance. 8700k only outperforms because it has two more cores that SL will never utilize. Haswell would also be a good option since DDR3 is cheaper than DDR4 example https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DxHk9J kinda just your bog standard gaming machine, however with no GPU, for that as I said look for raw performance per dollar. The remaining 270$ can get you a GTX 970 or even a 980 on eBay which perform similarly to current gen cards one step down the chain (970-3gb 1060, 980- bit below a 1070) what I suggest, if you want to cut that budget down, a lynnfield Xeon system is super cheap and performs really well. I got a Xeon x3440, 32gb of ecc ddr3, and a motherboard for a bit under 150$ total, and the Xeon performs similarly to an i5 2500 but at 1/3 of the price, and ecc server memory is super cheap compared to regular memory also an option on sever hardware is workstation hardware, older quadro and FirePro cards do great with SL due to its graphical layout being more like a workspace than a game, the comparative workstation card to a gaming card will always outperform (quadro 4000 vs GTX 465 vs GTX 550ti is something I've been testing recently, quadro beats the other two by a landslide) problem there is that after a certain age point, quadros become more expensive than their consumer counterparts, since they're not in a resale cycle yet, a quadro 4000 is about 100$ while a 550ti is around 45-50$

But that doesn't mean that a sata ssd is going to be bottlenecked by the sata interface. the reason why 2.5" sdds are popular is simply because of cost, the most capacity per dollar compared to nvme and pcie, and most consumers don't need or wouldn't even notice the speed difference

Thats just blatantly false. Sata II even is a 3gbps interface, even a top of the line Samsung 860 evo tops at like 500-540mbps read/write. And we're on sata III 6gbps now, 2.5" ssd isnt going to be bottlenecked at all, and its significantly faster than the current high end hard drives still around 200-300mbps, even an average mid tier ssd is gonna be 300-400mbps vs an average hard drive at 7200rpm getting 150-220mbps. Optane however is a very interesting prospect if your motherboard supports it, its basically HDD cache and does have a significant performance improvement over the HDD alone. The problem is that its fairly expensive for the capacity you get. Anything made post core2duo is gonna have at minimum 16 pcie lanes to work with. And even then anything short of a 1080ti or higher is gonna be fine on pcie x8, it doesnt cause any bottleneck. The Nvidia Titan V is actually the first GPU to even come close to saturating pcie x16 3.0. In fact its common on other server motherboards to have "open ended" pcie x8 slots to put x16 cards in, because even the highest end GPUs of 5 years ago could hardly saturate pcie x8 2.0

Really depends on what processor you have, for the majority of non-k, locked intel processors the stock cooler will be fine, its designed to handle the 65/84w TDP of the processor. 70c isnt bad, its not gonna harm it, its just not ideal. You probably wont see thermal throttling until you hit 90-95c, and you wont see that with a load like SL. Your synthetic testing got close however. Replace the thermal paste if it was dry, doesnt hurt. If you did this for the love of god do not run that machine hard until you replace the thermal paste, if it maxes out and cant dissipate heat, it will heat up extremely fast and will thermal shutdown and possibly cause damage to the motherboard. The CPU can take the heat, the socket cannot. As someone who has built a lot of PC's, if youre going to upgrade cooling on what lillith says is a 4790 (im not sure, but it applies to just about anything), if you want to go with air cooling look into a Cryorig H7 (C7 if you have a slim case) or Hyper 212 Evo, BeQuiet Pure Rock line, Cooler Master T2 if you want a small tower, or a Noctua NH-D15 if you want to go all out (though on a locked processor, its absolute overkill). Water cooling may be an option since the higher end haswell processors are pretty hot, even the non-k locked versions, any regular all in one cooler would be a decent option, the Corsair H60i is really popular and fits in anything with a 120mm fan mount for the radiator. Dont use the ceramic stock paste that the coolers come with, always go with better quality thermal compound, Arctic Silver 5 or MX-4, Grizzly Kryonaut is also fantastic stuff. Liquid metal is a meme and destroys aluminum coolers. tl;dr, your temps are probably fine, replace thermal paste since it was dry, stock cooler should be OK but a cooler upgrade would be a good option

no, as i said, unless youre on something like a mini pci wireless card in a laptop from 15 years ago, you should have 0 problems with a wifi connection on SL i even have a little nano usb adapter one i sometimes use on older laptops in UBS 1.1 ports that still saturates the ports capping me at 12mbps, in fact thats exactly what i used for when i tested out SL on a computer with below spec hardware, besides the camera latency due to general poor system performance, i was getting about 10mbps download speeds and SL loaded it to that ancient 5400rpm IDE drive over wifi just fine and had 0 issues with textures, it loaded about as fast as any other PC ive used tbh even 1mbps dowload speeds, SL will be fine, i see this game peak at 1.5mbps utilization in most places, sometimes 3mbps when its loading particularly large textures into the cache so im stating that if OP is having problems with slow loading textures, on an SSD, then something is wrong elsewhere, its not the hardware, even a terrible internet connection wont really affect that much, my suspicion is its a cache problem as rachel said, either that or something is constantly using the SSD and SL is getting a low load priority (rachels on point with disabling superfetch and other windows caching) also dont try and defragment an SSD, its not going to do anything, defragmenting moves files into more compact and accessible locations on a hard disk platter to lower latency caused by the reader arm articulating back and forth across the drive, if it doesnt have to move as much its a tad quicker SSD isnt mechanical, it doesnt need it, its going to read the same speed whether its finding a file on module 1 right by the connectors or module 16 at the end of the board I use a lot of technical terminology to leave absolutely 0 questions left, if someone doesnt understand whats being said, google. Its 2018 and if a person doesnt know more than "press button, click internet for facebook" its time to learn how. I have a grandmother whos owned computers since the late 80's and she still calls my uncle for PC help because she does stuff like accidentally disable the wifi adapter or delete bookmarks she wants back. You gotta learn stuff yourself because it makes everything go a lot faster when things go wrong. Otherwise you end up like my grandmother and absolutely refuse to learn about computer stuff because you feel like its too complex, and rely on others to help you. Im here to help and im happy to help, but i like to weave education of some sorts into my replies so people learn something and dont have to come back again with the same problem because theyre just looking for a step by step on how to fix it.

for example the main website page scales well with 1440p as far as space utilization goes also can get get larger file size uploads, this a 4.4mb image (because its 2650x1440) very few invision forums out there that have a file size limit this small, most are 20-30mb per post

i got a 1440p monitor recently and ive noticed that SL is a bit of an outlier with compatibility for higher resolutions on their site

I run on wifi all the time and its fine. Again with old problems that for some reason stuck around socially here, a wifi connection would be a problem if it were still 2003. But here in 2018 i get upwards of 90mbps download speeds off of it. Latency is a non issue, i play all sorts of online games on it all the time, bandwidth for SL is set to max. For OP, youre only gonna see so much of a performance increase before moving in the land of diminishing returns for loading times in SL. A ramdisk is only going to go so far, unless you have some really high speed memory youre not actually going to be much faster than an older SSD anyway due to the overhead produced by a ramdisk. Depending on what hardware you have in your PC, you can try higher clock speed ram, if you have 1600mhz DDR3, see if your motherboard supports 1866mhz, if you have 2133mhz DDR4, try 3200mhz, etc, just if your board supports it. You may also be able to overclock your ram. If you get an identical second SSD, you can try RAID 0 in different configurations to get a massive speed increase for read/write times from the disks. A single newer SSD on SATA 3 is going to be about 350-380mbps write speeds, two of em in raid 0 is gonna be around 650-700mbps, 4 of them is going to be around 1gbps and up to 1.2gbps You can get way faster speeds with PCIe drives or NVME if you have the slots for multiple PCIe drives or NVME drives. But again, diminishing returns. Ive got an aging Adata SP550 that gets around 230mbps and its near the end of its lifespan by now, and that gives me 0 problems with SL. Everything is pretty fast, and i dont see low res textures for too long or anything. Im sure a modern SSD or something on NVME would increase my performance, but what does 1-2 seconds matter when starting the game? If you are running hardware made in the last 5 years, have an SSD or even a 7200rpm HDD on sata 2 or newer and have problems with extremely slow loading textures, something else is wrong besides just your cache loading slow, something has to be causing a hangup.

Wether it's an unoptimized mess or not, it's still a game. A virtual experience sure but really it's just a game. it benefits from workstation hardware however, specifically quadro and FirePro gpus will show better performance compared to their consumer counterparts in various ways you could say it's an interactive 3D workspace, but so is roblox and that's still just a game

I also gotta add, entirely unrelated, that is why buying anything newer than sky lake is super dumb. A 4790k from 2013 performs almost the same as a 6700k or 7700k The 8700k has a 12% increase in single threaded performance over a processor from 2013. "a socket a year keeps the consumer in fear" back on topic for OP, I have a feeling your GPU isn't being used properly, power up GPUz and start watching the sensors page to see how much of it is utilized, change settings around in SL to offload to the CPU and see if it drops

I do things besides play SL. An 8700k + 1050 = GPU bottleneck for anything other than SL. Like having a Ferrari with a 2 cylinder engine. If all I played was SL and I really needed the better framerae, yeah I would probably have an unbalanced system too. But otherwise the i5 and 970 pair fine for most other games. I could upgrade to a 4790k but then my 970 is a bottleneck, I'd need to buy a high end GPU and I just don't want to. That would put me near the current high end, OCd on par with a 7700k and a bit below an 8700k in multi core due to the 2 less cores. note that no game should require such an imbalance in hardware, it's insane that LL hasn't done something to work with this yet, I have never played a game more CPU bound than SL

I can max SL out entirely in 1440p at social islands with 10+ people around and I get 30-40fps with an i5 4570 and a GTX 970 Something is very wrong with OPs hardware utilization, even in 4K maxed they should be seeing better frame rates. As Lilith said, monitor CPU and GPU utilization to see what's going on, I have a feeling that the GPU isn't doing something and the CPU is picking up the slack, where even on a super high end processor you'd see performance problems because of SL's poor utilization of multiple cores and threads. I demonstrated this a while back, turning off basic shaders offloads almost all lighting and shading to the CPU with kills FPS, getting a lower frame rate with it off than with it + Advance lighting on.

That's for my ham radio, I just included it for the sake of having more things on the list. the ascap is the important one for music broadcast (and actually does let me broadcast music over frequencies my HealthKit can handle)

Get a ASCAP New Media Statutory license, CDBS FCC License, and Amateur Extra radio broadcasting licenses like me and you can broadcast anything you want yourself without any ads, lel