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fast computer are that it enables you to have a smooth gaming experience at high screen resolutions with all the fancy graphics effects turned on there is another more fundamental benefit however that has to do with how games are designed most 3d games have a main loop which is a constantly repeating piece of code that performs the most important parts of the game many times per second drawing the screen checking for mouse and keyboard input moving your avatar etc if your computer gets overburdened performing any one of these tasks most notably drawing the graphics the entire game suffers for example on a really slow system even typing in chat can be painful on second life because it takes up to a second for any letter you type to even show up on the screen hardware components that affect gaming performance here are the basic computer components that have a direct impact on gaming performance display adapter also called the video card or graphics adapter this is the part of your computer that generates graphics on your screen most computers in the world have so called integrated or on board graphics which are not designed for 3d gaming because they steal memory and processing power from your system instead of doing it on its own all true gaming pcs even laptops have either nvidia or ati graphics with their own video memory cpu also called the processor the cpu is the brains of your computer while it was once easy to compare two cpus by simply looking at their clock speed which is these days measured in gigahertz or ghz cpus today come with 1 2 or 4 cores which are kind of like mini cpus so a 4 core cpu can almost do the work of four single core cpus at the same clock speed memory also called physical ram and measured in gigabytes gb this is very fast temporary storage for the code that s currently running on your computer every program currently running on your system uses at least a little bit of memory different operating systems have different requirements windows xp seems to run games wonderfully with 2gb of ram while vista does best with 3gb or more although you currently won t see much of a boost past 3gb modern operating systems do something called paging or swapping where if physical ram gets low they will automatically start using a portion of your hard disk for virtual memory so you can still run your programs but performance slows down significantly as a result hard disk this is one of the most overlooked aspects of system performance even though the hard drive is the single slowest part of any pc sometimes several hundred times slower than physical ram a fast hard drive speeds up things like booting your computer and launching applications and also speeds up any program like second life that uses a local cache to store things like textures and prim data the standard speed for most notebook hard drives is 5400 rotations per minute rpm which frankly is too damn slow many computer dealers offer faster drives as an upgrade which i really recommend more on that later components that don t affect gaming performance sound card most computers come with on board audio and unlike integrated graphics solutions audio doesn t require a ton of processing power you can buy nice expensive add on sound cards for your desktop and even laptop computer but you will only see a tiny amount of performance improvement if you see any at all network card wired as with audio most computers come with built in ethernet networking ports for wired connections there are some so called gaming network cards out these days which are supposedly optimized for online games they make two arguments first they say the cards free up system resources by offloading tasks to the network card second they prioritize gaming network traffic treating gaming packets with preferential treatment the end result supposedly is reduced ping times so far these cards have yet to prove themselves they don t improve fps the ping time difference is sometimes noticeable but doesn t necessarily boost your gaming experience and unfortunately these cards aren t always that reliable network card wireless the average broadband connection today is between 512 kilobits to 5 megabits per second in comparison the absolute slowest wifi 802 11 card you can buy today is 11mbps over twice the speed of the average broadband connection any new wireless card today at least supports 802 11g which is up to 54mbps most if not all wireless chipsets are add on cards or plug in devices so they do not use a whole lot of system resources so long as you have a good router uncongested air and you re within a reasonable range of the router any wireless card is going to perform just fine benchmarks in order to see how these different components contribute to second life s performance i ran controlled tests on a number of different computers you can see the full results online and a description of the tests and my findings follows click the image to see the results testing procedure in order to get consistent comparable results across all systems i picked a low traffic high prim high texture location fairy s grove creations in aurora and did not move my avatar at all between logins i also configured each of the computers to run sl in exactly the same way you can see some details about this in the benchmark test notes tab of the published results all had fresh installs of the 1 19 1 4 build of the official second life viewer all were configured to run second life at 1024x768 in full screen non windowed mode this is because screen resolution has a direct impact on performance also full screen mode performs a fair amount better than windowed mode it s just not very convenient for people who build in sl my avatar was placed at the landing point of fairy s grove creations in aurora facing the opposite direction from the store to see my exact position and viewing angle click here the aspect ratio setting in second life which is only available in full screen mode was set to auto detect the metric i used to determine performance was frames per second or fps just like frames in a movie a 3d computer game draws the screen you see many times every second rebuilding the entire scene from scratch the fps can fluctuate depending on how many things the game has to draw and how busy your computer is with other tasks i only monitored the fps when there were no other avatars on the screen because every avatar causes the computer to work a little bit more to draw as i said these results reflect best case scenarios in terms of performance i recorded performance on two graphics quality settings low and ultra that s what the two fps columns in my results represent the number of frames drawn per second at the respective quality settings in my tests the differences between low and ultra were not that obious the only really noticeable difference was that you could see further off in the distance under ultra but as you see from the benchmark results the difference in performance was profound all computers tested were relatively clean they didn t have any other programs running in the background and weren t bloated with a bunch of unnecessary software i often had to wait a few of minutes after first logging in with a new computer because it took a long time for all the textures to download i only recorded the fps when it appeared that all the textures were fully rezzed the only change i made to my interface was to close the minimap and enable the statistics bar ctrl shift 1 the minimap covered up the statistics bar otherwise i watched the fps number at the top of the statistics bar do not confuse this with the sim fps metric which actually talks about the current sim s performance not your computer finally it s important to note that while the standing still fps ratings here are a good measure of how fast these computers render 3d graphics they do not reflect the effect of the amount of installed memory or the speed of the installed hard disks as neither of these things is directly related to your computer s ability to render graphics they both only become important when you re actively trying to move around and do things in game for example if your computer doesn t have much memory for second life every time you turn a corner it will have to load a bunch of things from your cache causing noticeable slowdowns in responsiveness and on screen rezzing even if your fps rating doesn t drop understanding the results while i expected the one computer with the integrated graphics chipset the dell d630 to perform badly i was actually kind of shocked to find that this 3 month old computer performed worse than two computers that were manufactured over four years ago even though it had exactly the same cpu and memory as the admirably performing dell d830 the lack of a 3rd party graphics solution caused it to run second life at almost 1 4 the speed something i personally found kind of alarming was the fact that our brand new quad core dell desktop didn t perform as well as my 2 year old dual core gateway notebook with a lower clock speed at the low quality setting although it did do a fair amount better at ultra quality my guess is that some of the computation heavy operations involved in the high quality graphics settings benefited from the extra cpu cores while the low quality settings weren t using all the power the cpu had to offer but i don t know why the dell would perform worse than the gateway at any setting the results were consistent though the dell was simply slower i will note that the dell seems to play world of warcraft about 15 20 fps faster than the gateway at comparable resolutions there s something about sl the dell just doesn t like apparently the dell is running vista which supposedly doesn t perform as well on games as windows xp but i don t think that alone accounts for the discrepancy with second life the single core systems all performed worse than the multiple core systems that had 3rd party graphics even though their cpus all had comparable clock speeds the single core systems also tended to have less ram than the others none of the computers in the test had less than 1gb of ram so the effects of memory aren t very pronounced in the results three of the bottom four computers only had 1gb but they had slower processors and worse graphics cards than the others too i will probably do a future article about getting the best performance out of second life but for now just know that while vista requires more ram than windows xp vista actually makes better use of available memory than any previous version of windows there are still a lot of people out there with 512mb or gasp 256mb of ram and i feel for those residents i really do notice that of the three fastest computers in the test the one with only 128mb video memory did fine at the low quality settings but terribly in comparison with the others at ultra quality this may be because ultra increases second life s draw distance which means the program displays things further off in the distance while the draw distance was low the display adapter s video memory was adequate to hold all the textures it needed to display on screen but once i bumped things up to ultra and more prims came into view the display adapter ran out of memory and had to start loading the extra textures from system memory slowing everything down buying recommendations who makes the best computers every major computer manufacturer makes desktops and laptops capable of playing second life just fine you should base your decisions on things such as reputation price features and aesthetics there are boutique shops like alienware and falcon that make super duper fast computers for super duper high prices but when you consider that any computer is going to start showing its age within the first year or so of ownership i just can t justify the expense of some of those places of course if it s a desktop you re after a savvy techie type can build her own system for less than it would cost to buy an equivalent system from dell or gateway or whatever doing it right is harder than most people seem to think however and i personally like having 24 hour tech support which is something i wouldn t have if i built my own what about apple the new intel based macs are not the fastest computers in the world but they re damn nice it seems that mac support for second life seems to lag behind pc support so if you re buying a computer mostly to play sl you re probably better off sticking to a cheaper faster windows based system even though i have no real problem with macs you really should not bother with any of the pre intel macs these days though the latest sl client versions don t seem to run very well on them from what i hear laptop or desktop unless you re the hardest of the hardcore gamer a good notebook is going to deliver all the performance you need in a portable convenient form factor anyone who says laptops aren t powerful enough for gaming has never used a powerful laptop a notebook with a wireless connection will connect to second life from anywhere in your house or even from starbucks or the airport i personally value this flexibility over anything else and i will never buy a desktop computer for my own personal use again the fact that all the technology of a laptop is crammed into such a tiny area means that notebooks are not very upgradeable in fact the only things you can normally upgrade on your system are memory and hard drive and wireless card often but that s normally not necessary the small size also results in a higher cost you can easily spend twice as much money getting a laptop as a desktop that meets or exceeds the same technical specifications get a desktop if you re more concerned about future proofing you can replace any component of a desktop for better parts as they become available and bigger models have plenty of room for expansion they also cost less than notebooks and are usually performance leaders the fastest desktop at any given time is going to be faster than the best performing notebook that s just how it works out laptop minimum requirements when choosing a notebook computer make sure that the computer you select meets or exceeds these recommendations any other options available from the manufacturer are irrelevant to gaming although i can promise you that a lot of the cruddy software they ll preload on your system is unnecessary and will steal memory and cpu cycles from your games until you clean up your computer a bit remember these are minimum recommendations if you can afford better go for it display the computer must have ati or nvidia graphics with at least 128mb of video ram 256mb is recommended as you won t be able to upgrade your video later on cpu choose an intel dual core cpu with a clock speed of at least 2 0ghz for the past couple of years intel processors have consistently delivered the best performance power efficiency and features if you re really strapped...