JoyofRLC Acker

The graph is strictly vido memory, or is it total memory? Thanksfor the helpful comments.

(yes a recurrent topic and I have read various posts but have some basic questions to help my research) Im starting to look for mid range lap top, probably 15" screen - $ and weight are considerations - and am wondering about GPU. Some basic questions: - am I right Passmark is a good benchmark? (of course all benchmarks are simplistic to a degree). are there any "gotchas", ie a GPU with good benchmark that SL will choke on? (assuming CPU, RAM etc all good). - what would be a reasonable Passmark GPU benchmark to get "good" SL performance, or better, today (Im a sailor, so would like a reasonable DD say 250-350; want v good rezzing but usually in not overly crowded sims) - ditto in say 3 years time (my current machine was "high end" 5 years ago, now it sometimes struggles) - I do want to plan ahead a bit! - am I right that SL doesnt use more that 512K video memory? if so, could that change in the next 3 - 5 years? - am I right that NV is preferred to Radeon? Why? I have seen people say they are happy with radoen cards.

I believe that another reason they are sometmes somewhat taciturn is that maintenance is to block a griefer exploit. Maybe they could summarise on a regular basis, (well after such events), what kinds of 'down time' they have had (scheduled maintenance, LL problems, network issues, "unscheduled preventative maintenance"). Or perhpas they do I just havent seen it. For me, the bigger issue is that their release strategy (frequently and often) means that SL is not fully functional 2 mornings a week (ie sailing for exampple is more or less impossible). So we have a fully functional SL for 86% of the time, approx. For someone who is not around here much on weekends its more like 80% up time (and thats assuming NO UNscheduled down time). But it is what it is ... I suppose I do need time to clean the kitchen, do filing haha.

Download seems very low indeed. Shouldbe at least one orderof magnitude higher.

Why on earth would they tell us something like that? :smileyfrustrated:

Camera glitches have been bad across sim borders on a variety of sail boats for a number of weeks now. I think on all channels, certainly including Main.

(Not sure where to post this, mod please redirect if appropriate) Im looking for comments from anyone else running SL on Dell XPS M1730 laptop. Yes, a bit old now, but in its day high end and should really still be SL capable (with some dialling back on the graphics). Ive been having a number of issues with "lap" & crashes & also intermittent freezes (client goes non responsive for anywhere from 1 to several seconds, wither white or black SL window). One thing Im having trouble nailing down is the best graphics drivers for SL. Has any one got any experience / advice on this? The Dell web site of course hasnt been updaetd in ages. I was running on NV 301 series driver but started getting more problems about the same time a SL began rolling out the latest changes a few eeeks ago. So I went to 307.83 and thats when I started getting a lot more of the video freezes. About to try 306.23, but would welocme any advice. Also on the best SL Graphics, netwrok settings etc.

Will this work with older NV cards (8700M GT) ? I like the idea of setting max temp.. my machine is fine most of the time (Del XPSM1730) but there are times in SL it starts cooking! (Did have to get GPUs replaced a year or so agi under warranty; Im not sure the original fan was working right).

At rhe end of viewer logs are some netwrok stats, including a line for "reliable packets" # and %. What is this? Its always well under 100%, which on the face of it doesnt sound good. A short SL session where I just go to my home walk around nd quit, all with 'perfect' on scrren experience, its 80%. An hour of activity, sailing etc its more like50% - 60%. What is this sta and does it matter? (In contrast the dropped packets # is extremely low).

Teagan - you raise an interesting point. Its a little trickier as my GPU is one that was (I think) specific to Dell laptops and the NV website says to used Dell drivers not NV. Dell as had hardly any updates. I forget te details now but a couple of years ago I went through cycles of trying the NV drivers and rolling back to Dell. It might be worth my while to check that all out again. ... I note that no one has really commented on the (relevance or lack of!) the other things I have turned off, as mentioned above Talking to another sailor in world he mentioned that something is def up with SL cos of the little quick freezes that seem to be happening now. I was noticing those big time yesterday. (These are mid sim. not the border; and affecting different classes of vehicles - bikes and planes as well as boats).

Oh - the BW setting - Im on a WLAN (cable broadband out of the house which typically gives me 11 MBPS plus from the US servers (30 MPBS down, 3 MBPS up locally). But the Firestorm ppl are pretty adamant to not go over 500 with WLAN. Yes, I do keep a very careful eye on the network - and my neighbours!

Thanks for the various suggestions. Yes - DD seems to be a popular suggestion. I understand the "square law" effect. But as I said, I get acceptable (or better) performance for quite a while, its usually only after an hour or more that the frezze / crash cycel starts up. Id have thought that DD "too high" would give viewer lag from the get go? I dont understand the time aspect of this. Anyway, lll try lower DD (though I dont like that when sailing) and see if I still get the problem. Ill check the Grpahics specs; the machine was advertised as having 4 GB memory and I recall being somewhat miffed that they included the Graphics memory in that - this machine also does "work" and when not in SL I like to have a LOT of programs open! Yes the dual 8700M seem a waste afik just about nothing really uses the two, There is also a physics accelerator that i think is not used either. How maor a job would replacing the grpahics board be? Not sure its worth it the machine is 4 years old but I dont have new puter on the horizon this year anyway. Any comments about the impact of those other settings: - http textures - render glow - vertex buffer objects Truning them on / off one by one is not coclusive as its so hard to do a controlled experiment in SL with this sort of thing. Is there anythng I shold be looking out for in the viewer log?

Need some help. Ive had problems with freezes / crashes after being logged in a lingish time (2 hours say) and or sailing. The frequency of these events seems to come and go. The scenario is: normal operation for a period of time; then some variations on : increased "normal" lag; hard disc light comes on steadyl ping times of 2 or 3 seconds or more (zero or minimal packet loss); screen freezes and or blanks white or black; screen unfreezes for a little (but often weird lag type effects; finally i get kicked out of SL, or thrown off my vehicle or fly to EOW. Different suggestions have been made in the areas of network, graphics card or memeory. Im running on Dell XPS M1730 with 3 GB Ram, dual NV 8700 GPU with 1 GB memory - full details below. I came across some threads in here with suggestions for similar problems. I'm asking for comments as to whether they would help my problem - AND WHY (people hardly ever say what the effect od these various settigs really is!) - turn http: textures off (they default to on for my setup) - turn off Render Glow (defaulted to on for my setup) - turn off OGL Vertex Buffer Objects Is there a good resource on Viewer settings - that REALLy explains what they do and which ones have most impact on performance or crashes? As I say Im having a really hard time deciding what area to look in - graphics, memory, network, SL servers. The viewer log is not very enlightening - nothing jumps out other than to indicate there looks to be enough available memory left over. Configuration: Firestorm 4.4.2 (34167) Jul 1 2013 23:33:25 (Firestorm-Release) with Havok support Release Notes CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz (2493.75 MHz) Memory: 3070 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit Service Pack 2 (Build 6002) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce 8700M GT/PCIe/SSE2 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0013.0142 OpenGL Version: 3.3.0 RestrainedLove API: (disabled) libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/1.0.0d zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.1 Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000 Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded) Voice Server Version: Not Connected Settings mode: Phoenix Viewer Skin: MetaHarper Modern (CoolOcean) Font Used: Deja Vu (96) Draw distance: 900 Bandwidth: 500 LOD factor: 2 Render quality: Medium (3/7) Built with MSVC version 1600

what does the "total reloiable packets" at the end of the viewer lof mean?

I have a WLAN using Dlink and its fine almost all the the time. Agree with most of Rhys comments. Of course I get crashes (mainly when sailing) but they can be tied to other SL issues. Packet loss is always low. Do make sure to pick a good channel; and avoid any interference in your house / appt. (My european microwave can be deadly so use a kettle to make tea!). My ISP also had a combo router which was a POS from what I read on the web. Running it in bridge mode with my DLInk works fine however..

One thing Ive always wondered, does it matter which server in Dallas or Phoenix, speedtest usually offers 2 or 3 iirc ( I havent done this for a little whie).

Just confirming that sailing has been pretty rough in Blake. Yesterday though on a main channel private estate it wasnt quite so bad. Dont have hard data, but subjectively the same problems others have reported. Not sure that vehicle velocity is an issue. I do suspect that using keybaord while crossing is a factor (yes thats an old one but I suspect its more acute now but again only a suspicion). Have noticed that in some situations what looks like a region corssing crash (submarining to infinity or EOW) can now recover after quite a long delay with the vehicle back at the original location, scripts responding etc but cam position and angle all messed up. Also Yesterday managed to cross the finsih line while avi and boat was absent from screen and screen view was stuck! Too much werid stuff that is hard to descrbe precisely.

Yesterday a couple of unusal things sailng in Blake (aside form the usual weirdnesses). On a sim crossing started to "submarine" and plowed relentlessly to end of world. And the just syuck there spinning slowly. Not unusual. What was, was that after a while (I was in the process of making sure the bat was truly unresponsive), the boat suddenly popped back to more or less where it was and carried on sailing. This happened twice (different sims). The first time the cam angle after the pop back was really weird and offset, and couldnt find a way to fix that. The second time everything was quie norma and I finsihed the race, just some 90 seconds later than i should have!!

Some odd tings noticed yesterday sailing in Blake. Alas it wasnt feasible to get hard data but one oddity was the handling of a sim border crash. One time a nice pop-up appeared telling me (is this a step towards being able to PREVENT it? lol).the sim had lost touch with my avi (I forget the exact wording). One innovation is that after the border crash and while "sailing to inifinity" the scritps on the boat coninued working (text HUD display updating as the boat moved, sails luffing appropriately etc) but the boat just could not be steered - totally non responsive to any keys (well, arrow keys or function keys). I dont think Ive seen that before.

Having assorted issues. Mainly crashing while sailing. But just now probs logging in (FS categorises as unexplained error and check grid status which of course says nothing relevent). Now also TP Issues once I did get back in.

My apolgies for having only impressions rather than hard data, but I think this is similar to something I have been seeing more of over the last few weeks. Sailing mainly in Blake and Sailors Clove sims. Unexpcted objects appear briefly in front of the boat, just after a sim crossing (trees or fauna from the sea bed) when the boat is NOT flying or submarining. Also seeing far more ghost objects. The boat ahead appears as a static shipwreck. Hover text shows the skipper aboard. As you sail through it it vanishes. And then reappeasrs sailing normally up ahead again. (This is on current Firestorm but I hear its the case with other viewer). I would say that sim border crashes are reduced (for the sake of clarity, this is a GOOD THING I know people expect complaints here mostly ). But the time delay over a sim crossing now seems much more variable, in a 30 minute race Im seeing 3 or 4 crossings over 3000 msec, as high as 8000 msec (typically the delay is 500 - 1200 msec -- 'delay' means diff between sl time and real time). [edited for typos]

Just been racing in Blake (just after restarts ended, according to grid status). Most people saying its not good. For me 90% of sim xings were ok, 5% poor and 5% excruciating (> 3000 ms region border xing time dilation, the max i saw was around 8000 msec). But in 2 races, only 2 . 8 and then 0 / 5 survived. So obviously not good. Have to go back and check whats changed in this rollout i guess.

I have had a foew oddities as well with scripts ...hard to describe exactly but for example - when selcting a script in an object the edit page opens with titel NEW SCRIPT and remains blank; or it is Loading ... for ever, I have put this down to asste server issues (if thats where scritps are ultimately stored). Not the most critical issue for me atm as the project Im working on has strong backups etc so its easy to "replace" the offending script(s) in the object. That may not always be true though LOL. This topic probably belongs in another thread - could someone redirect it (and thus I may see more info).

Yeah, I guess my concern is the multiple flavours of spam just make me wonder if theres a single root cause, or not. IF (and are we sure of this?) it all started at the same time, maybe. But I know tha in particular I have seen the recurrent region connect / dsconnect & related messages quite often going back a long time. What Im afraid of, but of course have no evidence, is that there are multiple underlying causes of the spam; that they had something to somehow suppress the spam and that got broken recently. Also, Im not sure that the spam is sufficient to explain all of the BW spike - can someone do the maths, please? Not sure if simply suppressing the spam is thw best answer as opposed to making aure its not generated in the first place. Presumably a lot of other things are happening when a spam msg is generated - the spam is just a report of something not the thing itself. At the end of the day though well beat our brains out tryig to second guess this ... really we have little choice but to sit back and see what happens. Or leave for other places that work better, if there are any.

And main channel next week?