cykarushb

Does it happen on any distance or only up close?

It's the GPU, at best that's an R7 260x which is probably best suited for more medium settings. Note that lots of avatars and things like a long draw distance, advance lighting, high AA will drastically affect frame rate even on higher end systems. i have an i5 4570 and a GTX 970 now and I still struggle to get over 60fps in social island maxed if there are people around

It took a bit longer than normal but i got in.

Internet connection stability problems? Check your internet speed at http://www.speedtest.net/ Focus more on if it drops out and seemingly stops going up over a period of time, or if the test stalls out. A low, consistent internet speed is better than one thats a bit sporadic.

This may be a cache issue, cache should actually be cleared fairly often. Not daily at all but maybe after each update if the update doesnt automatically clear it. The Cache stores textures and other information about a place you have visited and uses it for the future when you visit again. If something is wrong in there and it cant load from cache, it may not load at all. The fact that its happening with different visits/logins implies it may be cache actively corrupting itself. Though this usually results in things like gray or pink textures. I have seen it basically leave users with the lowest resolution textures and sometimes just straight up missing objects. Heat wouldn't cause this issue, heat would result in worse overall performance rather than things not loading correctly. If it is space specific, it may be just related to that single place. For OP, i suggest doing really just a full re-install of SL, cleared cache and all, see if that helps. Worst case scenario you're out 5-10 minutes of time.

Your GPU does not cache textures, no modern video game does this. They are taken by the GPU from the games cache, sometimes that's held in RAM or from a drive. Your GPU is not displaying to you a full high resolution texture at any time. If there's a poster in the distance using a 1280x1280 picture, it's not magically going to cram 1.6 million pixels into something the size of 2 square inches on your screen. It's taking that image, compressing it down to size to be relative to the distance you see it at, and then rendering the frame. Every frame rendered in SL is going to be pretty much the same size unless you're looking at lots of flat colors or gradients, like the sky. If a texture is too big and is taking a while to load, the GPU doesn't care, it just won't load that texture until it's properly cached. You just get gray/pink objects. And that can be mitigated by having any decent modern internet connection and anything faster than a 4200rpm hard drive. Stick this game on an SSD and set the cache there, stuff loads near instantly on my humble 10mbps download speeds. I think I'm gonna make that one of my next tests, go down in graphics card video memory until SL can't be played. though, as I posted a while back in general tech discussion, a 256mb GeForce 6200 was still capable of graphically displaying this game i wonder how it would pair with the core2quad, maybe it was the 16 year old pentium 4 holding it back

SL's performance problems have nothing to do with textures, believe me, i run this game on a GPU with 768mb of video memory, and ive run it on way less than that even. Textures dont work that way with a video card. Video memory is a frame buffer, the GPU renders the scene in frames, sends the frame to the frame buffer, before its displayed on your screen. The larger and more detailed the frame, the more memory it uses. So a 1080p, high color, highly detailed image (such as a giant rainbow gradient or something) will take up a lot of video memory, a flat color screen will take up almost none. Textures are not stored in vram, they are cached elsewhere and the GPU takes them directly from the cache. The reason you get low performance in SL has very little to do with unoptimized user created content, thats definitely a problem, but modern hardware is up to the task of displaying the absolute mess that is the average sandbox. The real performance killer with SL is the single threaded rendering of lighting, shadows, and particles. They are CPU bound tasks, and they are limited to one thread on a processor. Its sort of a legacy thing that has stuck around since a single core processor was the norm, those graphical features got more advanced but the rendering programming behind them did not. The better single threaded performance you have, the better your framemate will be, because even a current mid tier processor can be a bottleneck to a GPU if the single thread/core its using is being maxed out, so while the GPU can easily do its job, the CPU cannot. My best performance on SL was on my old gaming PC with an i7 4770k. Even after i sold the GPU and it had a mere 750ti (a woefully underpowered card to pair with a 4770k), i was netting nearly the same performance as i was with my GTX Titan black. The Titan was on a whole other level compared to the 750ti, but i was still getting my usual 70-80fps on higher settings with people around in 1080p. Maybe a bit less, but less than 5fps was lost. And i remember at the time i was just mind blown, every other game out there when i upgraded FROM the 750ti to the Titan originally i was seeing 2-3x the framerate i had before, SL was a weird outlier. And its simply because of the processor, if SL was able to utilize more cores and threads properly, im willing to bet that 4770k+ Titan Black would've gotten me triple digit framerates, the card was hardly being used. And the same thing is going on now with my poorlad machine (had to sell off my nicer PC and hardware after i lost my old job), with its Core2Quad Q6600 and various GPU's ive tested, the CPU is a bottleneck, i get almost the same performance whether using a Quadro from 2006, a GTX 465, Radeon HD 4870x2, GT 720, even borrowed a GTX 970 from a friend and saw maybe a 20fps increase. The Q6600 is old, and while its still fairly usable in 2018, not with just one core being utilized fully. Im pretty much relying on multicore usage for games because thats the only thing saving the Q6600 now after 12 years, if a game can use all four cores, it can still hold its own, but SL wont use more than 1 so im seeing a CPU bottleneck. Whats hilarious is i previously tested out SL on the legacy viewer on XP using a 2.2ghz Pentium 4 and a GeForce 6200 and got it to run, and besides being kind of laggy on my normal settings, if i dropped it down low, it was still playable. And not one of those 775 p4's, a proper northwood one from 2002 was still capable of playing SL. tl;dr, no. problem is a poorly utilized CPU

I'd say anything over 10 years old if it hasn't been done already, should be torn down, cleaned and then repasted. I did that with this card first and it definitely needed it, the original thermal paste was dry as a bone. Heat is a common issue, a demanding game like SL will max out components, which will create a lot of heat, which will eventually cause hardware crashes and blue screens if they get hot enough to thermal shutdown.

it is actually possible to keep this card cooler by simply upping the fan curve, so its loud, but its cool, relatively speaking

Up next is a medium/low configuration designed for best framerate while still maintaining some nice visual quality. Some settings are left alone because they not change the framerate substantially. What ive discovered is that this is actually somehow optimal, i cant really imagine why, but you'll see in a second what 'bare minimum' is like. And this is absolute minimum in 1080p. What i learned here is that something is clearly being offloaded to the CPU and is drastically reducing performance. Basic Shaders actually are a necessity to get any decent framerate, i have a feeling that without some of these graphical features, the system is relying on the CPU, and the CPU is already handling lighting and other effects so it gets bogged down. So, conclusion? The worst ATI card ever made is perfectly capable of SL. The medium/low settings defined above were netting me a comfortable 20fps on average with no stutter, now thats not great, but its far from bad. Its stable, card wasnt getting too hot so its not being maxed out. This was ok-ish, very playable. I had no problems besides the odd crashing when messing with transparent water. Would i recommend buying a 4000 series ATI card in 2018? Hell no. Listen, this card, this 4870x2? This crap was 60$, thats the cheapest i could find and i had to last second snipe an auction on ebay to snag it for that much. These cards are super rare and highly sought after because of their kinda nicheness (sort of like the first picture of it sitting on a 701c, a very niche laptop). This card is expensive for its performance, runs hot as hell, its loud, and im not 100% sure if its going to last the night before catching fire. And all 4000 series cards are kinda like that, they are defined as AMD housefires, they are hot as hell and really dont perform that great. But they WILL in fact work with SL. Theyre bad cards by all means, but its not like a bad card wont work, it just works badly. I play SL regularly on a Quadro FX 4600, essentially a workstation version of an 8800 GTX, its an ancient card from 2006 and it still handles this game fine. Integrated HD 620 graphics on my newer laptop perform well for SL, better than the Quadro for sure. Im gonna be looking for just weird stuff to run SL on, im thinking super low end "display adapter" style cards like an HD 3450 or an 8400gs, suggest ideas if you want to see SL running on any specific hardware.

Now when i say worst i dont mean absolute lowest end, i mean the most impractical, expensive, hot, power hungry, unstable piece of crap you could ever buy, in 2008 and now 10 years later. This is a Radeon HD 4870x2, it is a dual GPU monster from 2008 that once cost a whopping US $550. It was once ATI/AMD's flagship GPU to compete with the Nvidia GTX 280. Though it really didnt, because the 280 was a good card, this thing... this was a very bad card. So theres a lot of talk on these forums about how ATI cards dont play well with SL. Well, heres an ATI card, one known to be an absolute mess, it is the card that started the "AMD Housefires" meme because it is responsible for the deaths of 2 people due to actual housefires, there are no up to date Windows 8.1 drivers, im forced to use an ancient Windows 8/8.1 "compatible" driver from AMD, im forcing a crossfire profile (though speccy doesnt pick it up) so both GPU's are being used in crossfire mode. Now thats a rarity for SL, see, only these dual GPU cards are actually capable of doing that. SL doesnt support standard crossfireX, but single card crossfire isnt really the same thing, the internal bridge essentially spoofs itself to programs as being one single GPU. SL sees one GPU, the bridge is splitting the workload onto two. The problem is that this creates a lot of instability, some games will frequently crash, some features just wont work and sometimes utilization can get kinda weird and cause crashes from that. Several times during my brief testing i was unable to turn on Transparent Water because it would instantly crash SL to a white screen and then crash the display driver. So what i tested here is on my Q6600 system, starting with the near max settings. Simply standing in social island 5, watching the horizon. Note that avatars definitely crush the framerate on this thing. These settings are netting me an unstable 2-5fps, but there is no "stutter", if you can pick out stutter at this low of FPS anyway, it doesnt freeze. It doesnt get as hot as i was expecting either.

Eyy i actually have one of those sitting around in a closet. You could actually upgrade that to "playable" for SL. Note, it will not use certain graphics cards. You gotta use something super low power if you were to install a dedicated GPU in the system. It wouldnt even take my little GT 710 because the pcie slot is limited to 25 watts. Leaving you with basically the HD 6670 as the best low power option where you'd still get decent performance. That and a phenom quadcore, which the PSU should be able to handle, will run SL. Ive run it on way less.

tl:dr your hardware is too old for SL and Windows 10 only installed because it technically could it should not have been simply because the resource overhead from 10 is way higher than 7 Even then, your computer will just barely play SL its time for a new computer,

Heat.

Ok, basically what that tells me is that you do not have a dedicated graphics card, or if you do it’s not detected, and your motherboard integrated graphics are only using the Microsoft basic display driver. Thats really only designed to display the desktop. The Nforce stuff in there implies it’s one of those old nvidia chipsets. Its really not gonna run SL well at all even if you had the correct drivers. I use a program called Driver Booster to find drivers for stuff I don’t know the specifics on. Just pay attention to it because it tries to make you install bing and some other program they have. It’s not malicious and I’ve used it dozens of times, just really inspect the install screens lol I honestly wouldn’t even suggest upgrading this system, an Athlon X2 is very outdated now and will be a performance bottleneck for SL even if you upgraded with a better Athlon and a dedicated gpu.

I have a little Acer Aspire with an i5 7200u and Intel HD 620 graphics. It handles SL on medium/high settings in 1080p just fine for a smooth 30-50fps. I would recommend something with at least a mobile GTX 1050 for SL If you really want to crank up the settings. HD 620 suits me fine, but a beefier dedicated GPU will net you better performance with some aspects of SL. Note that’s SL is very CPU heavy, things like lighting are actually more CPU bound than GPU. A cooling mat will not reduce internal temperatures, it simply makes the outside less hot. You don’t have any intake vents on the bottom of the laptop to help with getting cool air inside the system.

This is a hardware issue, Macs in particular are known for this. And that’s not just hating on apple, it’s their poor design decisions that lead to this. because they want this thin and light laptop with essentially no ventilation besides around the hinge you get extremely restricted airflow, the cooler needs airflow to exhaust out the hot air and keep the processor cool what you’re seeing happening is the processor getting super hot because the cooler can’t do its jobs, leading to thermal throttling (the cpu slows itself down to keep cool) causing you to lose performance the specs are fine for SL, it’s apples god awful idea of cooling the thing that’s causing the problem, even if it was brand new with no dust in the cooler it would do this, 2015 mbp were known for this the MacBook Air is even worse, and tends to overheat itself to the point of BGA failure, where the processor gets hot enough to unsolder itself from the motherboard

Up next I’ve decided to do some tests with “old ati graphics cards”, because according to some people on this forum, these cards don’t work with SL and cause endless problems. Im gonna start with the high end, a 4870x2, a dual gpu crossfire monster. And then I’m gonna work my way down to older and older cards until the game is unplayable.

NOPE if i was forced to change my password id just quit, no joke, ive done it before on other games My password is something i want to use and i can remember easily. I do not care if its vulnerable because its easy or simple, ive used the same password on everything that can use it since i was 10 years old. I signed up for habbo hotel in 2006 before they even required an email. I had my username, and a 4 letter password. Never had my info compromised, even as a 10 year old i wasnt dumb enough to give out my information. Around 2011 they phased out non-email accounts and required an email and an 8 character password to sign up, and older users had to update their accounts for it. I have not touched that account since 2011. Did the same thing with runescape, though they still allow username only accounts, they did require me to change my password to something new, which i never did. This game is played by people 14+ (i think or is it 13?) and these people should be smart enough to know how to not get their account stolen. Their password is their business in how secure they want it to be. Over the years of stuff changing their password requirements, my universal password has like 10 variants now and if i havent logged into something for a long time im sitting there trying all these combinations of what it could be, usually i just reset it or make a new account.

I think you guys just hang around toxic people, again, i very rarely see anyone discriminate against others based on what kind of avatar they have or if theyre new or what social circles theyre in or anything.

apricot paws = GOAT they make some of the best clothing options for DSD/Rawr avatars, which is difficult to deal with sometimes since not many clothing options work well on DSD bodies

I really gotta change my look up more often.

oh yeah, those guys this is mildly racist but 99% of the time its the brazillians that do this, in every game, i have literally no idea why there are so many brazillians playing social games but they seem like they have a very vocal and blunt minority going after the furry booty any time im at a newbie friendly place or a f2p home like SI4/5 i get a bunch of those messages

Probably be best with the standard LL viewer. 9600GT should be able to do medium settings, its just a tad below an 8800 GTX which can hold medium/high in 1080p easily