User:Jaszon Maynard/Jaszons sandbox Performance

I'm currently developing this article and will probably eventually publish it to the wiki

Second Life is very demanding on most computer systems. Due to the unusually dynamic, user-modifiable, constantly changing nature of the Second Life world, you may never see it display as smoothly as you would in your typical 3D computer game. However, it can be well-enjoyed nonetheless.

Performance in Second Life is primarily affected by your computer and the speed at which it is capable of drawing the world that is Second Life. It can also be affected by other factors, such as the quality of your Internet connection, as well as problems occurring on the server computers that are running Second Life. Performance can be improved by changing settings in Second Life, though in some cases you may not achieve satisfactory performance without hardware and software upgrades (new computer, or new CPU, memory, graphics card, newer drivers, etc).

Types of Performance Problems in Second Life

Low Framerate (FPS)

The Second Life program may be asking your computer to do more than it can handle, and if your computer hardware is not powerful enough, or not setup correctly, it cannot draw the Second Life world very quickly. This will result in a low framerate (also called low FPS, frames-per-second) and your view of the world will be jerky and stuttering, more like a slideshow than a movie.

Framerates tend to worsen when you are near a crowd of other avatars (though a future version of the Main Viewer based on Windlight technology will have an "avatar imposters" option to help with that problem), or in a region with a large number of objects.

While it would be terrific to get 20-30+ FPS in-world most of the time, many residents do not achieve that, yet can still enjoy Second Life quite well. Linden Lab keeps track of average resident framerates here, and generally 1/2 of the residents have less than 15FPS.

If you'd like to see what your framerate is, you can learn how to display it by reading about the Statistics Bar.

Lag

If your Internet connection is not good enough, or if the Second Life program is overwhelming your connection with the amount of information it is trying to download, you may experience various kinds of Internet-related lag. What is happening is that information flowing between your computer and the Second Life server computers is making that trip too slowly, possibly with data getting dropped (lost) and needing re-transmissions. This often results in events being delayed in Second Life. For instance, you may try to make your avatar walk, but it may take a long time for it to respond to your attempt to make it walk. Then, when you attempt to stop walking, your avatar continues walking longer than you wanted it to. You may type some chat text but it doesn't appear on the screen right away. Or someone may reply to a question of yours but you don't see the reply for a long time after they wrote it.

Short Guide to Improving Performance

You do not have to complete all the steps in this quick guide to improving performance. Simply go through it, step by step, and when you've had enough, or when your performance has improved enough, you can skip the rest of the guide, or come back to it another time.

This short guide will not cover in-depth diagnostics, analyzing server performance, diagnosing your system's weaknesses (so you'd know if a simple memory upgrade would help), or any steps that would require you to install additional hardware or software. It should be applicable to all supported operating systems.

Reduce Your Graphics Settings

The Second Life world can look pretty attractive. But that beauty comes at a price. Your computer has to work hard to render the world. If you turn down your graphics settings to the minimum settings, your framerate should improve. If you'd like to take a cool looking screenshot or Snapshot, you can always turn your graphics settings all the way up temporarily, then set them back to your "normal" settings for everyday use.

If you have a lot of time, you can turn your settings all the way down, then experiment with gradually increasing some of the settings to see if there are any that noticeably improve appearance without making your world become noticeably jerkier. Depending upon your computer and graphics card, there may be some graphical details you can get "for free". That is, activating them causes no noticeable degradation in performance.

To reduce your graphics settings you first need to bring up the Second Life Preferences window. To do so, look in the Main Viewer's menubar and in the Edit menu choose the option for Preferences. Now you will adjust various settings in some of the tabs in the Preferences window.

The Graphics Tab

In the Graphics Tab, find the field labelled "Draw Distance" and set it to the minimum value, 64. What this means is, at a higher value, like 128, items that are farther away (up to 128 meters) are drawn so you get to see them, but items even farther away are not drawn. When you reduce this to 64, more items are not drawn...all the things between 64 and 128 meters away that you could see before, you won't be able to see now. This should improve your framerate. The effect in-world will be, as you're walking down a street, if you look in the distance you will see...nothing. No people, buildings, trees, mountains, etc. Even if they're actually there. As you walk closer to them, they will suddenly pop into existence (from your point of view). You can now either click "OK" in the Preferences window and see if this change has improved your performance enough, or you can continue making changes.

The Graphics Detail Tab

Some options on the Graphics Detail Tab may be disabled/"greyed-out". If so, ignore them.

Uncheck all the "Shaders" options. Note that on many systems, "Enable Bumpmapping and Shiny" can be activated with no performance penalty.

Set "Avatar Rendering" to "Normal". Set "Lighting Detail" to "Sun and moon only".

Set "Terrain Detail" to "Low". Note that the world looks significantly better with this set to "High" (better-looking textures are used), and on many systems it can be set "High" with no performance penalty.

Set all the "Mesh Detail" sliders to their lowest settings. This will make various things in-world look blockier and less round.

You can now either click "OK" in the Preferences window and see if this change has improved your performance enough, or you can continue making changes.

Full-Length Guide to Optimizing Performance

don't forget to cover:
verifying that Second Life is properly configured in regards to your graphic card
testing to see which graphics options your card supports "for free"/minimal impact
usage of expanded Lag Meter
driver updates
diagnosing sim performance (Stats Bar)
analyzing your own hardware/internet weaknesses