Why is my FPS so bad?

[Zeaig Zabelin]

Does anyone have any idea why i am getting such low FPS? i get on average 20-30 fps. In a fairly empty sim. But when i go to a new sim it jumps down to almost 11 FPS untill it fully loads everything and then goes back up to a low 20-30fps again.

 

I would assume this should NOT be happening considering my hardware.

 

I have the graphics set to max, But shadows are off and view range is only 256. Water Reflections are also set to minimum.

 

I have a EVGA Nvidia GTX 980 Classified Edition graphics card.

Ram - 24gb DDR3

Processor- I7 CPU 920 2.67GHz    [ This is obviously my weakest link in my pc ]

HD - 512gb Samsung SSD

OS - Windows 8.1 Pro

 

To put this into perspective, I can run crysis 3 on max graphics at nearly 60+fps the whole time. Why cant i run SL at a reasonable rate? I have a laptop with a mobile graphics card that seems to run second life better lol.

 

Any suggestions on this?

[doobie322]

You may want to check what your draw distance is set at.. If this number is too high, then you have to wait for everything withing that distance to load up before frame rate goes up, and also your particle rate if thats super high it can cause issues at well. Even with an excellent card myself, i keep mine at 96M for draw distance and 4096 for particles so it doesn't take but a moment to load.

[Zeaig Zabelin]

Well as i said in my post, My draw distance " View range" is set to 256 which is basically the default setting if im not mistaken. Tho that being said i used to be able to crank that up to pretty much any number i wanted even up inte 600 range and still barely feel the effects.

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Zeaig Zabelin wrote:

Does anyone have any idea why i am getting such low FPS? i get on average 20-30 fps. In a fairly empty sim. But when i go to a new sim it jumps down to almost 11 FPS untill it fully loads everything and then goes back up to a low 20-30fps again.

 

I would assume this should NOT be happening considering my hardware.

 

I have the graphics set to max, But shadows are off and view range is only 256. Water Reflections are also set to minimum.

 

I have a EVGA Nvidia GTX 980 Classified Edition graphics card.

Ram - 24gb DDR3

Processor- I7 CPU 920 2.67GHz    [ This is obviously my weakest link in my pc ]

HD - 512gb Samsung SSD

OS - Windows 8.1 Pro

 

To put this into perspective, I can run crysis 3 on max graphics at nearly 60+fps the whole time. Why cant i run SL at a reasonable rate? I have a laptop with a mobile graphics card that seems to run second life better lol.

 

Any suggestions on this?

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There was a post by someone who had similar problems who said they were improved by turning shadows on - apparently some high-end Nvidia cards throttle themselves down in SL if the load isn't high enough and turning shadows on helps with this.

[Pamela Galli]

256 is high. I keep mine under 100. I rarely need to see all the way from one side of a sim to the other.

[DKTitan]

Check your clock speeds and gpu usage I can almost bet that sl is not even pushing that thing. That 980 is more than enough and certainly should yield better results. With shadows on and shadow density the gpu usage will rise but it's not going to get any better. I fought and fought... And gave up. It's sl not your system

[Nalates Urriah]

With your hardware you are on the low side for FPS.

When you post your hardware specs use HELP->ABOUT... and copy-paste the information. That gives us version numbers and hardware details.

Get these free programs to check your hardware and what it is doing; Open Hardware Monitor, GPU-Z, and CPU-Z. Hardware monitor will give you temperatures. If chips are running hot (over 75C), you may see throttling to prevent chip damage.

Looking at what the GPU and CPU are doing can tell you where the bottleneck is.

Memory has speed... you may have a lot of slow memory. Check it's speed and the bus speed of your motherboard. Make sure everything is running at max possible. Slow memory can be hard to detect as a problem by most monitors.

If you are runing Win8 make sure you don't have the 100% disk use problem. You can use the resource monitor or task manager in Win8 to check disk use. OHM can give you an idea of disk use. A free program named System Explorer also does a good job of telling you what is using the disk. The 100% disk problem will cause lots of odd slow downs.

No matter how hot the computer, long draw distances are a problem. But, that may not be your problem. Turn your graphics settings down to MEDIUM and see what that does to your FPS. Then turn each graphics setting to max one by one. You'll find one that hits your FPS hard. Back that one off and move to the next one. This is a balancing procress to get you performance and quality you like with your specific hardware.

Remember. SL uses OpenGL. So, you are not going to get the Windows optimized performance that comes with games using DirectX.

Also remember that content in SL is generally made by non-professionals. So, do all your testing in a single place so you are not affeted or your results distorted by content. This also means you are not going to have the performance in SL that you do in other games with HIGHLY optimized content.

There are a number of tutorials about how to improve FPS in SL. most are rather elimentary. Mine are all old. But, the basic information is still applicable. http://blog.nalates.net/2010/12/17/graphics-tweaking-for-second-life/ 

 

[Penny Patton]

The sad fact is that SL has unreasonably high hardware requirements if you want decent framerates.

 

Why? Because no one optimizes anything. In fact, whenever optimization is brought up, most content creators tend to get defensive and argue against the need to optimize content.

 Check how many unique textures are on your avatar alone sometime. Most avatars are walking around using more texture memory than an entire level map from a modern AAA game like Alien: Isolation or Assassins Creed: Unity. A single avatar.

 Go into wireframe and mode and check out all of the avatars loaded with solid looking wireframes because avatar attachments have no LI restrictions.

 

 If LL doesn't want their new virtual world to suffer the same fate they're going to have to be smarter in encouraging content creators to manage resource use.

 

 My private residence is way more detailed than most sims you'll ever see in SL but I get higher framerates there than anywhere else in SL because I only use optimized content.