The drip, drip, drip...

I have upgraded my computer, mostly because of SL, though to be honest I now wish I'd gone a bit closer to the edge and bought a socket AM2+ motherboard that supports PCI Express 2.0. (I look at the recent price cut for AMD three-core CPUs and sob to myself...)

Despite being well away from the bleeding edge, I run with the Windlight sliders cranked just about all the way, and still get reasonable frame rates. What does happen, though, is this:

1. I arrive.
2. The terrain slowly pops into view a piece at a time.
3. My surroundings slowly pop into view, again a piece at a time.
4. Avatars slowly appear as shimmering blobs of plasma, one at a time.
5. Avatars rez one at a time.

Sometimes I stand around for a minute or more, afraid to bump into someone and afraid that someone will TP in and land on top of me. (Sometimes the mini-map is helpful, sometimes not.)

Is this an issue of rendering, or of waiting for all the data for all the objects and people in the area to be shipped over? I tend to think it's the latter, and I hope that the bottleneck is being worked on.

P.S. Those of us who recognize the commercial alluded to in the title are, I fear, showing our age.