need help horrendous lag

[pheinox]

I need help. my firestorm veiwer gives me horrendous lag when being in a sim for over 4 minutes and a new avatar pops up or a prim gets made come from the point of orgin on where the avatar rezzed in or the prim was made and the prim can be as simple as a cube.

 

what happens is that ill run from 60 fps then the thing i mentioned up top ahappens and then it runs all the way down to 10 or 4 fps depending where i am.

 

this hase been happening to me for a while know ever sense i got new parts for my computer

 

system specs

intel core ii Kick GHz dual core

4 gigs of ram

nvidia gforce gts 450 igb gddr5 ram

1 terra byte hard drive

mother board a g1-sniper m3

wired connection desktop

core temp when running a bench mark on proccessor runs around 34 to 40 degrees fherinhight

same for the video card 

i did recently suffer a brown out that fried my brothers video card but no damaged to my computer.

thanks for the insite natalas 

and im going to try disabling my vertex buffer for open gl

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Since the install of the new hardware, have you gone into Graphics settings and click on the hardware button and enable or disable " OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects" to see if anything changes?

You may consider a reinstall of the viewer. It may help. Also make saure your viewer is fully upto date with the latest mandatory update

[Nalates Urriah]

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. Get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need.  To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

It also helps to know if you are using a laptop or a desktop and a wired or wirless connection.

Without that information all we can do is guess. That means you have to try all our bad guesses and eliminate them one by one. This is easier for all of us, if you give us good information to start with.

Also... there are numerious types of lag. The low FPS is one type which may be all on the viewer side, a combination of viewer, network, and server side issues, or just a server side problem.

In the article Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection I tell how to SPECIFICALLY test your connection to SL. It also has the information to mostly figure out if network lag is your problem or a server side problem.

The program System Explorer (free) improves on Windwos Task Manager allowing you see more of what is happening in the computer. The section on Page Faults, memory swaps to disk, is more easily read. If you are getting high swap rate, your computer needs more memory. You will also be able to see if all the i3's cores are sharing the load.

Get the program GPU-Z (free) to see what your video card is doing. You can see if it is over heating. On laptops you can see if the HD graphics is running or the nVidia, which makes a big difference.

SpeedFans (also free) will let you check all the units fans and sensitive thermal points. Over heating CPU's will drag a system down.

The SL Forum article Setting your preferences explains many of the viewer's settings. The Debug Setting describes most of the rest. With good information on what your system is doing, you should be able to tell what to tweak or try to improve.

In general set your Max Bandwidth at 1500 or 80% of your connection's download speed. Setting it higher can end up choking the UDP side of the SL connection.

Check your video RAM setting in Preferences->Graphics->Hardware. Take it to the MAX value. Mac users should check the Debug Setting for rendertexturememorymultiple, it should be 1.0 to get the highest possible max video ram setting in Preferences.

Once you have worked through the basic settings consider your graphics settings. See: Graphics Tweaking for Second Life. This article will lead you to some of the better explanations of what various graphics settings do and which will have performance impacts. You can balance appearance and performance to your taste.

[Lindal Kidd]

You have a pretty good system there.  And Nalate's suggestions and links will help you troubleshoot any problems that are on your end, or in the internet connection.

I'd like to suggest a second avenue of approach.  You say the lag is worst from "one spot on the sim".  This makes me suspect one or more high-detail objects in that area.

Detail is found in two areas:  Textures and meshes. 

High resolution textures (1024x1024 pixels) can really lag your viewer.  Just a few of them in your field of view can produce a noticeable slowdown.  Builders should, but often don't, pay attention to texture resolution and only use what's required to get the job done.

Everything in SL, not only Mesh objects, is made up of a 3-dimensional mesh of triangles.  The more of these triangles that are in your view, the harder your viewer has to work to render them.  Sculpties, and highly detailed Mesh objects, can have way more triangles than they really need -- it's a "more is better" situation similar to builders using high resolution textures.  You can SEE the triangles in the world by using Wireframe mode -- hit CTRL+SHIFT+R to toggle it on and off.  You can also get a reading on how many thousands of triangles your viewer is rendering, the "ktris" from the Develop menu, render info statistics.  Anything over about 2500 ktris or so is going to show up as noticeable lag.