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Kathmandu Gilman

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  1. The offerings from AMD are not really suitable for a dedicated SL rig. The Ryzen and Ryzen2 CPUs are multicore monsters that can eat Intels for lunch in certain situations like workstation and rendering machines but SL is a single threaded application first appearing in 2003 and although vastly better than back then, it still runs best on a fast CPU with a few cores. Running SL on 28 cores only doing 1.8ghz will be a very disappointing experience compared to a 6 core 8700k easily overclocked to 5ghz or a 4 core 7700k overclocked to 4.7ghz. SL is like most games needing a fast CPU and can only really use a few cores at most. If you need an editing rig for videos that you use for SL too then a Ryzen may just be the ticket but for just running SL, the price per performance is atrocious.
  2. Just wanted to share my experiences with Second Life on some different hardware so you could get an idea of what you might see if you decided to upgrade. I recently purchased a Gigabyte Aorus external GPU box and hooked it up to my HP Spectra 360 15" laptop. Basically it is an an externally connected video card which connects through a Thunderbolt3 type-c port and turbocharges your laptop to near desktop performance. The laptop is no slouch itself and the Nvidia MX 150 internal graphics can run SL adequately itself but with the Aorus Nvidia 1080 box connected it steps it up from adequate to good in my opinion. Laptop: 2017 HP Spectra 360 15" with Intel i7-8550U, 16 gig system memory, Intel 620 integrated graphics and Nvidia MX 150 dedicated Graphics set at 1920x1080 resolution. Using all of the same High preferences with shadows and looking at the same scenery and draw distance. Laptop with integrated graphics: 12 fps average Laptop with dedicated MX 150: 34 fps average Laptop with Aorus Nvidia GTX 1080 eGPU box: 74 fps average And just for comparison to a rocking desktop. i7-8700k watercooled and overclocked to 5gig with 32gigs memory and Nvidia GTX 1080ti: 119 fps average, changing the resolution to 4k only dropped the fps to 109 which is surprising. 4k on the laptop pretty much cuts the fps in half across the board.
  3. Sl will run on a cheap Win10 Tablet so it should run on your setup even with a creaky old video card. It may be that SL just doesn't recognize the driver correctly. Uninstall SL and reinstall it. Try installing a different viewer like Firestorm, they tend to pay more attention to drivers than LL. To be honest though, you could buy a used Nvidia 750 off ebay for $60 -$70 and have a far better experience assuming your computer can support it. Example: http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX750TI-1GB-DDR5-192Bit-PCI-Express-Video-Graphics-Card-/112335642083?hash=item1a27b9dde3:g:p4QAAOSwsW9Y01gn
  4. That is far more dependent on what the motherboard can support. Rule of thumb I use is put in the fastest memory in the fastest configuration the motherboard and CPU can handle without overclocking. Unless you are advanced enough to overclock your memory and willing to cope with the instability that may induce, it isn't worth the bother or expense. There are lots of vendors out there that sell "Superwhamadyne Doucheinator Memory, DD4 3200 (oc)." That usually means no motherboard supports that RAM natively at that speed without overclocking so save yourself some bux and buy the memory your board supports without it. Also, to be honest here, RAM speed isn't a huge factor in the overall scheme of things. You cannot perceive the difference between 2133 and 3000 or 3200. System memory moves data at 4 to 7 gigs per second and at less than 30 megs, SL loads to memory in thousandths of a second and the cashe in tenths of a second if it didn't have to wait on the hard drive. I've run SL on RAM drives and on SSDs and on old fashioned hard drives and the difference is not really perceivable. A fast SSD make a huge difference in the overall responsiveness of the computer though and is well worth the investment. Swapping out 2133 for 3200 will only change benchmark scores.
  5. I'm on a 5820K with 32gigs of ram running 4.7ghz on liquid as well and the 980 should not even come off idle unless you have AA filtering maxed out or something. SL doesn't tax a graphics card much at all. Now, that being said, you need to realize SL can't use the extra power the card offers. A 960 or 1060 or better card is more horsepower than SL can draw on. SL can run quite well on a higher end laptop and even better with discrete graphics onboard so a mega monster card and rockin' CPU should make SL run 200fps but it doesn't. When I started SL in 2004, everyone said SL runs best on computers made 5 years in the future. In 2017 it can be said that SL runs best on computers 5 years in the past.
  6. Linuxgod4u is right on the money for the most part but I would recommend no less than a dual core CPU, four is better and anything else is overkill just for SL. The key here is the CPU single thread speed as SL is not optimized for multiple cores. A $3000 multi-core processor will not run SL anywhere as well as a $180 one with just two cores. i3 7350K or i7 7700K CPU's are the fastest available right now with single thread speeds and they are on the lower end of the price range. They tend to overclock easily so a 7700K overclocked to 4.7 or better would make SL run very well. Another point is ram, and SL needs it and the more you can cram in, the better. SL was horrible in the past with crashes due to memory leaks so the rule of thumb was the more ram you had, the longer between crashes. This is still somewhat true today so anything over 8 gigs on a 64 bit system will mean a better experience. I had 64 gigs on my old machine and it never crashed. Ever. A super fast SSD is not that important so you don't need an expensive one, if you can get one that has read and write speeds over 400 you are golden. At less than 30 megs, SL loads pretty quick even on an old platter HD but dealing with the cashe means a faster drive matters. 5 tenths of a second versus 7 tenths of a second is not perceptible in load times but the faster the cashe is read, the faster it loads. Graphics cards probably only matter if you need eye candy. Any Nvidia card with a number XX50 or better will run SL well enough to get most of the high end effects like an Nvidia 970 or 1060. Of course you are building a gaming machine in essence so it will run other games quite well if you put in a high end card like a 980 or 1080 Ti but sadly, SL will not take much advantage of the power. My 1080 runs at idle with all of the settings on high and shadows enabled on a 4k monitor yet only does 30 fps in a crowded club. I've run SL on a cheap Chinese Windows tablet and it was quite playable.
  7. The one who dies with the most orgasms wins silly...
  8. I really don't think they can really do that because I don't think they even know what that would entail. LL's main focus is the infrastructure of SL, mainly the servers that the sims run on. Those run on Linux using middle ware Intel Xeon processors from 2 to 5 years ago. The client is somewhat secondary and it is focused on the core user with an average computer on a so- so internet connection. They don't test high end components because they aren't designing SL around the .5% of users on $10k monster computers with 4 Titan GPUs in SLI because it doesn't make economic sense. To be honest, I'd think you would be shocked to see how cheap a computer an SL optimized system would be. From my testing I can tell you SL runs best on a CPU that has the highest single core speed rather than modern multicore beasts on the high end of the CPU scale. A $125 i3 Intel double core CPU with the highest single core speed available will run SL better than a $2500 i7 mega monster CPU because SL is not a multi-threaded program. I can disable 4 out of my 6 cores on my i7 5820 and SL will run just fine with no fewer fps. Of course with all 6 cores running I can have 4 instances of SL running, my browser open and playing a movie no problem but a machine solely to play SL doesn't need an expensive processor. The GPU is the heart of an SL machine yet it doesn't need the best available. An Nvidia GTX1060 is hardly taxed by SL at highest settings and my 1080 is way overkill, it never bumps off of idle for the most part. System memory and a super fast SSD will make SL far more responsive and will crash less. SL has had some really agregious memory leaks in the past and still has some so the more system memory you have, the longer you can go between crashes. Back on 32 bit machines with a ~3.8G limit on system memory, you were crashing pretty regularly. Once 8 gig and 64 bit machines became the norm, the crashing became less an issue. I have a 64 gig machine that rarely, if ever crashes in SL. A fast SSD makes SL load and load the cache much quicker. A good motherboard is essential for an SL machine, one that can handle lots of fast system memory and can accommodate fast SSD flash drives such as M.2 SATA at full speed will make a huge difference. On the other hand, it doesn't need to be an enthusiast's board for overclocking because the 2 to 4 fps you might see isn't worth the money, time or risk. My i7 5820 is overclocked to be 35% faster and I might get 2fps better. 4k Monitor. These rock with SL as long as you have a card that can handle it. At 4k you don't need anti-alaising which is a huge performance hit the higher you go. Jaggies are as dead as disco baby. I find a trackball or mouse with assignable keys to make a huge difference in playability.
  9. SL is designed to be barely playable at 5 frames per second and 15 is their target fps for an acceptable experience. Laptops are such a dice throw as to how they will work with SL.
  10. Not to burst your bubble but you really have a somewhat middleware computer rather than what is considered high end these days. SL is basically legacy software and it cannot take advantage of multiple CPU cores. AMD processors rely on many cores running at less computational power than Intel. In fact you can go into the bios and turn off all but two cores and SL will still run the same (but will generate less heat, an old overclocker's trick). The Nvidia 1060 is roughly equilvilent to a Nvidia 980 and is by no means a slouch card> I have a Nvidia 1080 with an Intel i7-5820 CPU and 32 gigs of ram and I can barely get 30 FPS with 10 avatars nearby and it get's below 10 fps with much more than that even with imposters activated. Of course I have a lot of eye candy turned on but turning it down doesn't affect it like you might think it should. The kicker is that even though SL is struggling to do 10 fps, the resources of the GPU and CPU aren't being used. Case in point, my i7 with 6 cores was dragging at 11 fps in a crowdwd club with lots of mesh furry avatars and my resource meter for the cpu was 43% on one core and 20% on another and the rest were idle, the video card was basically idling as well. That's right, SL can't use the mega resources that modern computers can throw at it. Things will get a little better when SL moves to a native 64 bit viewer in the near future but don't get too excited as it will only allow more system memory to be utilized. SL code was first written in 1997... back when Redneck Rampage was the state of the art and Tomb Raider II was just released. It wasn't even developed by game makers, the original crew were internet wizards doing things considered impossible at the time. The game was secondary to be honest. They have been stuck in this trap for a while and really fixing it would break everything.
  11. I have significantly better specs than either of these and getting more than 2 instances to run smoothly is a challenge, four is a slideshow and I've got 2 GTX 580's in SLI and 64gigs of memory. You're gonna need a GTX 780, 690 or Titan to run 5 instances unless you turn off all the eyecandy and AA filtering. I find Nvidia cards work a lot better with SL than AMD but others have different exeriences. The Intel i5 will probably run better since SL is lightly multithreaded and doesn't really benefit from lots of cores. A few really fast cores works better than a lot of moderatly fast cores. Turning off logical cores and overclocking will speed up SL a good bit in some cases, depends on the configuration. SL loves ram, the more, the better. Due to memory leaks, the more memory you have, the longer you can usually stay in SL without crashing. I have a ram drive set up for SL and its cashe to speed loading times but I don't think it helps all that much except maybe with the new cashe system. Makes sure you have good cooling, SL will turn your computer into a space heater especially if you have the graphics turned up. I melted two GTX 8800's back in the day because of it. The HAF series of cases with the monster fans are almost a requirement.
  12. I have SL on a RAMdrive and yes, I really can't tell the differance either. Here is why. Most HHDs you buy today have a pretty good transfer rate, somewhere in the 50-100mbs range typically. An SSD can up that to nearly 600mbs and a Ramdrive can increase thaat to 5000mbs. Now, lets consider loading SL, its a 25mb application. this may take 1/2 a second to load from an HHD and on an SSD its even faster and on a Ramdrive the key press never reaches the down stroke completely before it is loaded. Thing is, to the human experience, they are all equally fast. Having the cashe on a Ramdrive is again not going to make much difference to you, a human living in slowtime. When SL loads, it also loads the cashe into memory so, by the time you are rezzed enough to move around, the cashe is already in fast memory even with a slow HHD.
  13. I know in the past it hasn't worked but perhaps in this new age someone has developed a viewer that can take full advantage of an SLI set up? I have two Nvidia 580's and when in SLI mode SL runs like its 2004 again. Runs fast on single GPU but I want to be able to film with high frame rates in crowded areas. With Fraps and 30 avatars I'm below 20fps which is too low to really get fluid motion.
  14. You could say the same thing comparing a text MUCK to SL or a Bugatti Veron to a 1973 PInto.
  15. Turn up AA up to 16xQ with Ultra settings and get back to me... I don't think your ATI based video can even render VBO objects. Once you've experienced the full effect of all the available eye candy in 100fps its hard imagine SL any other way.
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