Slow Down

My watch, glasses, and necklace aren’t causing your lag even if you’d like to believe it. Your low-end graphics card is causing your lag.
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How many times have you found yourself at a club, party, or beach and you begin to notice major lag? How often did you find yourself being blamed for it because of your hair or your jewelry?

Well, it wasn’t your fault—but the party hosts probably don’t want you to know that.

Gwyneth Llewelyn has written a great post on understanding what really causes lag. It’s worth reading the post from beginning to end, and here’s why:

• Lag isn’t caused by high-prim items like hair or jewelry, and it’s not caused by scripts. That may have been the case several years ago when Second Life was in its infancy, but technology has changed since then even if people’s views on lag have not. As Gwyneth points out, graphics cards don’t even understand what prims are; graphics cards view avatars in terms of polygons and triangles.

• Most of the time, lag is created due to your computer and it’s not experienced the same way by all users. Users will have inappropriate graphics settings or low-grade graphics cards on their own computers and simply blame everyone else for their computer’s poor performance. I can attest to the truth to this point because having used SL on two different machines, the machine with the better graphics card gave me far less lag than the older machine with a worse graphics card.

• Open spaces create more lag than places with more structures. This is because your computer is forced to increase its view (draw distance). Want less lag? Make more rooms in your store or club.

• If many avatars are in one place and not moving around much—such as a club or beach—you’re going to experience lag because “the physics engine is constantly working to keep up with the amount of information it needs to calculate everything, and never ‘catches’ up.”

To conclude, if you want your beach or your club to be lag-free, don’t tell the attendees to take off their hair, jewelry, glasses, boots, capes, hats, or scripts—just tell them to not show up in the first place. That way, you’ll have a nice lag-free environment all to yourself.