Lag Killer

Lady Cera led a workshop on lag reduction today and had some fantastic points. Find some of Lady Cera's notes below. Thank you for hosting Cera and thank you to everyone who came out!

As most of you know, Second Life can suffer from lag problems. Lag means a lot of things to a lot of people, but in our team (viewer rendering), this mostly boils down to graphics pipeline stalls.

Put simply, this means the more times the GPU (the part of your machine that does the rendering) needs to render *different* things, the slower the experience becomes.

So, what does this have to do with YOU?!

People are going to build their avatars the way they want. This is great. But, it can also mean potentially disastrous performance for those nearby. Dev's chatted and said "Let the Residents see what effect avatars nearby can have on their experience." Aren’t you curious to see just how expensive those new boots *really* are? So the Devs created a tool to view your ARC #!

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

ARC DEFINED:

Avatar Rendering Cost shows a point score above each avatar's head which indicates how "laggy" they are on the viewer-side. ARC is found in Advanced Menu > Rendering > Info Displays > Avatar Rendering Cost. [Note: If you don’t see an “Advanced” menu option, toggle it on or off by Ctrl+Alt+D].

The score is a factor of the size and number of textures used, and the number and type of primatives used. Avatars with large textures, lots of flexi-prim parts and high prim count objects, and/or invisible parts will score higher than one that uses fewer/smaller textures, using a few sculpties instead of many basic primatives, etc.

The score are color coded. The center of the Yellow band is about a score of 1,000. The numbers turn fully red at 2,000. It's generally best to be considerate of others when putting together your avatar, and to do what you can to stay under a score of 2,000, especially in crowded areas. Under 1,000 is even better. These are only guidelines, but be aware that the higher your score is, the more lag you generate for other people, particularly those with older machines.

Green (Good), Yellow (Eh), or Red (Meh!)

COMBAT OTHERS HIGH ARC (extreme lag cases only):

What to do if someone with high rendering cost is causing you lag?

(This is more for if "all else fails" and your system is too taxed to play)

If you have avatar impostors enabled, mute them. They will be replaced by an imposter, with the effective rendering cost of 1. Their original rendering cost will still be displayed. This is particularly useful on machines that get poor framerates, you can mute high cost avatars to help increase your framerate in crowded areas.

Here is a list of things that we can easily do each time we log in to reduce lag... even when we want to wear those 18,000 ARC outfits....

go to your Advanced tab >>Rendering Types>> turn off (uncheck)

water

trees

grass

clouds

particles

bumps

Now, when you log out, and back in again, all of these will once again be checked... you will need to go back in and UNcheck then.

these things you can change and will remain changed until you put them back....

1) on the top of your screen, go into preferences, in the window that opens, make the following adjustments....

2) Network Tab: Maximum Bandwidth, move the slider to read 500.

3)Graphics Tab: Draw Distance, set this to 95-96

4) Graphics Detail Tab: turn off (deselect)

bumpmapping and Shiny

ripple water

avatar vertex program

avatar rendering, set to normal

lighting and detail set to sun and moon only!

Terrain Detail, set to low

move all Mesh detail sliders fully to the left.

5)Adv. Graphics Tab: turn off

anisotropic filtering

turn off emable open GL vertex buffer objects

graphics card memory, select the highest size available

fog distance ratio set to 2.0

max. particle cound set to 50

outfit composite limit set to 2

Now, click apply and then "OK"

also remember , disabling all scripts will help lower your ARC number and reduce lag incredibly... for scripted hair, shoes, skirts.. anything that has a sizer or color change, that is a script.. make a copy of this if you can... set the size or color that you want and then remove the script.. you wont need it anymore and it will greatly reduce your ARC and lag around you .

also , removing any HUD that you have on and are not using.. just disabling it will not help.. you need to detach it and keep it in your inventory.

If we all did these little things, everyones SL would run alot smoother, no matter where we are. = )