Lunar Hermit

TL;DR: Lower Viewer Texture Memory Buffer under Graphics, Hardware Settings to <288MB. I know this is an old thread, but (for me at least) it's still a debilitating issue. I noticed it when my friends got mesh houses and my framerate dropped well below 1 FPS and made my entire computer slow. I don't have the best rig but a Haswell i3 and a GTX 750 should have no problem running SL! Yet for some reason if these houses are rendered, I'll drop to sub 1 FPS in less than 10 minutes! Anyways, I think I have found a legitimate fix! Whilst checking around in the settings, I thought I'd mess around with the Viewer Texture Memory Buffer under Graphics, Hardware Settings. Lowering it to the minimum worked, and I played in both houses for several hours, albeit with horri-bad texture quality. Interestingly enough, SL wasn't using all of the video card memory either (as mesured by Process Explorer)! Curious, I played around with the Texture Buffer Memory slider until I got the GPU memory usage hovering around 900 MB (out of 1GB) and have not had any problems yet! Going higher caused sub 1 FPS again. Sometimes textures can be a bit blurry but it's better than unusuable framerate dips. My magic number is about 288 MB. I plan to upgrade to a 750ti with 2 gigs of memory sometime, if I do I'll max the buffer memory again and make another post here with the results. I hope this helps someone! I'm using the latest version of Firestorm by the way. I feel like I have my hands tied with any other browser! >.<