Cannot get good FPS.

[Jin Wonder]

I have been struggleing with bad FPS with second life for a while. It's so tireing I'm actually considering diffrent vitrual worlds who have their software together. The below information is from the new firestorm and I'm STILL getting 9 - 10 FPS in some cases with my video card over clocked. Can anyone offer any help here?

 

Firestorm 3.2.2 (24336) Nov 27 2011 17:05:37 (Firestorm-Release)
Release Notes

You are at 172,995.0, 296,789.0, 1,010.1 in FEMBOY NATION located at sim20194.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.26.208:13004)
Second Life Server 11.11.09.244706
Release Notes

CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) 9500 Quad-Core Processor (2200.11 MHz)
Memory: 3072 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 460/PCI/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0012.8579
OpenGL Version: 4.2.0
RestrainedLove API: (disabled)
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Vivox 2.1.3010.6270

Settings mode: Phoenix
Viewer Skin: firestorm (dark)
Font Used: Deja Vu (96)
Draw distance : 128
Bandwidth : 1000
LOD factor : 2
Built with MSVC version 1600
Packets Lost: 36/97,547 (0.0%) 

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Your system is fully capable of getting pretty good FPS in most areas for SL most to the time.  You said 9-10 FPS in some cases.  Does that mean you get better frames in other cases or worse?  If other places you get better then that is normal for most any computer no matter what video card/system they have.  Higher populated areas and/or areas with a lot of textures around will have lower FPS than lightly populated areas with little textures.  That's the nature of SL and the dynamic 3D environment of the platform.........there is just more for you computer and graphics to do in the areas with lots of avatars and lots of textures.  And, a very big contributor to lag (or lower frames rates) is the fact that almost all the content you see in SL is user created (over 95% of that content is user created).  It's one of the biggest draws for people to come to and stay in SL......the ability to create anything from simple textures to hang on a wall to complex mesh to build anything their minds can dream up.  Many of the content creators in SL are professionals who use their expertise to make and create..........but many more than the experts are amateurs.  Most of the content you see in SL is not optimized for performance.......and the creators who made the content don't even know what that means.  That simple sign texture on a plain background might have a resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels saved at 32 bit color depth........when a 256 x 256 pixel texture saved at 24 bit color depth is probably a much better choice (certainly easier on everyone's graphics rendering).

 

That problem is not going to go away.  But there are somethings you can do to help your system to compensate.  Maybe compensate is not the correct word.  Things you can do the lessen your system's work load when in SL.  Things like turning off background programs you don't need running while in SL (maybe shutting down some of that Windows 7 resource robbing Aero Glass features).  Email checkers, MSN or Yahoo messenger, Facebook, your favorite RSS feed.......all those little light weight programs add up to resources your graphics card and CPU need to render the SL world around you.  On that note, you have 4 gigs of system RAM.......on an x 64 system like you have you can run much more (depending on how much your motherboard will support).  If you get another couple gigs of RAM, you'll see a marked improvement in all around performance for your computer and that will be very noticable in SL.

 

And finally, I don't know what you expect for FPS in SL.  You'll never get the 120 + you can see in some professionally built game program (they not only have a static number of textures and prims those are also optimized for performance by experts...........and stored on your hard drive instead of the remote servers that LL runs the program from).  Your system I would think you would be getting 20 to 30 FPS in most moderately  populated and textured areas in SL (entirely playable with very smooth graphics).  Those numbers will vary wildly if there is a lot of avatars coming and going or you are moving around, changing your camera view.  That's normal for any system.  You can try a test.......stand in a area where you are getting what you consider low FPS (that 10 or so).  Fly straight up to 2000 or 3000 meters..........watch your FPS move up.  I get 20 to 30 FPS in most places most of the time..........on my sky platform at 4000 meters I get anywhere from 90 to 120 FPS.  That's because at that height there is very in the way of textures or objects for my graphics to render..........down on the ground there is a lot. 

 

You might be expecting too much from both your machine and SL.  You'll see the same thing in any grid that allows user created content and is populated like SL is.  Most of those other grids are about 5 years behind SL on the tech end.........and it shows with heavy lag spikes, frequent crashes, and very low FPS.  I've visited a few........they are worse that SL in those respects.

[Nalates Urriah]

Peggy makes lots of good points and suggestions. I have some additional ones, and some suggestions for how to find out what the problem is.

First if you play Facebook/Flash games... restart the computer and then open Second Life. Browsers are having problems getting HTML5 and Flash to play nice. Also, Google Reader or other Google Browser tasks that store data on your computer can destroy your SL frame rate. It seems they are leaking memory and screwing up video cards... its like they are fragmenting memory and failing to release resources. A restart clears all that.

Assuming its nothing so easy...

Open the Performance Monitor. Open the Task Manager too (click any open space in the bottom task bar and right-click). Start SL and take it to a window rather than full screen. You are going to need to see all 3 programs. You should see 4 processors in the Task Manager .

In the performance monitor, expand the CPU section. Check the 'Image' column for Second Life. Check to see how many threads are running. Typically it is around 20.

Next expand the Memory section. Click the column heading Hard Faults to sort it. Get the high numbers to the top. Find SL. Ideally it will be 0 but 200 to 500 for short times is not uncommon. But, it should decrease and get back to 0 or at least very low numbers.

So... if these things are not happening something is wrong.

If you have a sustained high number of Hard Faults, something is wrong and your computer is sending SL memory to the hard disk to make room for more data. This usually happens when you are short on memory. SL needs about 1gb to run comfortably. More is better. But with 4gb, you should be good. So, if you have high Hard Faults, get back to us.

If only one CPU is hitting 100%, you have multi-threading (Hyper-Threading on Intel) turned off. In the viewer you need to open Debug Settings from the top menu item Advanced. If it is not there press Ctrl-Alt-D. Change the settings for these values.

• CurlUseMultipleThreads - Use background threads for executing curl_multi_perform (requires restart).
• RenderAppleUseMultGL - Whether we want to use multi-threaded OpenGL on Apple hardware (requires restart of SL). --- There is no information on whether this has any affect on a Windows machine. Changing it on my Windows machine seems to have no effect.
• RunMultipleThreads - If TRUE keep background threads active during render – Default = False. --- There is little information on this setting. What I have found is that setting this item to true hands off texture decompression to multiple threads, which can run in other processors cores. It improves performance.

The SL viewers are very sensitive to task swapping. So, running anything forces SL to Hard Fault will slow it down.