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How to reduce the VRAM of the client?


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Most clients have, usually in the Graphics section of their preferences, a setting just for this; in Firestorm, for example, it's located in Preferences > Graphics > Hardware. If you can't locate it, a kinda more universal way would be going to the debug settings (from the Advanced menu) and search for the parameter "TextureMemory".

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Then leave the settings you changed at their previous, default values, and try this other debug setting: RenderTextureMemoryMultiple. Since its default value is 1.0, meaning it'll use all the available memory, try setting it at 0.5 for example, or 0.25 (and, btw, I don't know if these settings take effect inmediately, so you might as well relog after changing them, to make sure they will).

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Aerith Lethecus wrote: [...] 
Sorry for bothering you this long, but where's that setting? I'm with the latest firestorm

All the better, since it's also the one I use. Go to the Advanced menu, find the “Debug Settings” option and, on opening it, type in the search box at least part of the name of the setting you're looking for. In this case, for example, if you type just “TextureMemory” (remember, no spaces), only the settings containing that will appear, including the one you want, which is “RenderTextureMemoryMultiple”. After changing its value, it's just a question of relogging to make sure it'll be in effect.

I also see that you're doing all this to try and get better framerates, but I'm not convinced that capping your max. VRAM usage will do the trick... in fact, it occurs to me that it may end up having the opposite effect, since less available VRAM would mean having to manage textures in and out of your graphic card's memory more often, which is an additional task the viewer would have to do; usually, changing these VRAM settings is done only to prevent texture overload (the viewer quitting or crashing because of too many of them) or “texture trashing” issues, which is damn near an ongoing bug some people have been suffering; otherwise, asking the most of your graphics card, rather than capping it, is usually the best strategy to get the most framerates, I think.

If you haven't gone deeper into fine-tuning other advanced viewer settings that also impact performance, I'd suggest doing so first.

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Hey thanks for the wonderful advices.

My specs are 

I5 2400 4 quad 3.1
GTX 560 1GB
12GB RAM
SSD


Tried your trick, but didn't work. My GPU-Z still shows that my VRAM is full 1GB. I think nothing can help, maybe it's better to get a new video card with 2 or 3G of RAM

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Aerith Lethecus wrote: (...) 
Tried your trick, but didn't work. My GPU-Z still shows that my VRAM is full 1GB. I think nothing can help, maybe it's better to get a new video card with 2 or 3G of RAM

Maybe, but your hardware doesn't seem all that bad. What graphics settings are you using, and what other steps have you taken to fine-tune Firestorm's performance?

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Video memory usage is being capped by LL at  512 MB, so your viewer  technically is incapable to  use 1 GB of video memory. Look for other stuff running that uses your video ram and close down these programmes. I wonder which operating system you use and how much video ram that system's user interface is using.

J.

 

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"Bad game! BAD GAME! *SPANKING SECONDLIFE*"

Sorry if I seem patronising but that quote suggests that you come to sl from a gaming background. SL isn`t a a"game" made up of optimised graphical content like others are so fps figures are largely moot, but 5-6 fps isn`t good I agree.

I`d suggest moving the texture memory slider back up to max ( it`s supposedly there for comps with low spec graphics cards), turning off gpu-z for a while and tweaking your graphics settings in preferences.

I get usable fps in any situation in sl with a 1gig gtx 650, so you should be able to with a 560.

Have a look at this vid,

It`s quite old and graphics prefs has changed a bit, also the lag meter is in advanced>performance tools, but the info is still relevant.

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"Video memory usage is being capped by LL at  512 MB"

I`ve read somewhere that that is a "soft cap", whatever that means, but I checked what my card was doing a while ago and it peaked at 1010mb memory with just sl running on firestorm.

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Windows 7.1 64 bit, I`m not techy enough to run linux :smileyhappy:

EDIT

Ahhh, found the link I was looking for,

"the max settable via the SL client is 512, however that is NOT the entireity of the VIDEO memory used, but rather the portion reserved for textures only.(some is also allocated to draw geometry and other operations. as well as what appear to be persistent memory leaks in the official client)

the specific debug setting looks to be clamped to [0.0, 1.0] internally so setting it higher would not seem to do anything at all

 

as far as I can tell, without actually changing the internal coding of the viewer, 512 is all you are going to get for texture memory."

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Technical/Max-Video-Ram-and-rendertexturememorymultiple/qaq-p/717013

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SaraCarena wrote:

"Video memory usage is being capped by LL at  512 MB"

I`ve read somewhere that that is a "soft cap", whatever that means, but I checked what my card was doing a while ago and it peaked at 1010mb memory with just sl running on firestorm.

That's true, as you said in your other post, the max 512 MB is reserved just for the textures. And it is what Linden Lab calls a soft cap. The viewer can and will exceed that cap when it needs to. And as you said too, video memory is used also to store other data besides the textures.

 

For GPU memory usage this is what I typically observe in my system:

• 98 MB - no programs running, just the OS running

• from 400 MB to 1005 MB - OS plus Firestorm 4.6.5 (64 bit) viewer running

The busier (i.e. lots of objects and lots of textures) the region is the more memory is used by the viewer. When I go to a less busy region the memory usage immediately goes lower.

 

 

My system info:

CPU: Intel® Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz (3411.19 MHz)

Memory: 8169 MB

OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560 Ti/PCIe/SSE2, with 1024 MB of memory

Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.3221

OpenGL Version: 4.4.0

I have set the "Viewer texture memory buffer" to 384 MB in the viewer preferences. I have read that "reducing this may improve performance but may also make textures blurry." Well, I have not not suffered texture blurriness with that 384 MB settings so I keep it there.

 

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Sorry Coby but I have to put my hands up and confess that the words in quotes in my 3rd post are`nt mine :matte-motes-bashful-cute:

There`s also an interesting discussion on texture memory over in the building forum, that`s where I read about the "soft cap"

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/forums/replypage/board-id/SLViewer/message-id/23902

Would be interesting to hear from the OP if they have solved the fps problem and how.

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SaraCarena wrote:

Sorry Coby but I have to put my hands up and confess that the words in quotes in my 3rd post are`nt mine :matte-motes-bashful-cute:

Anyway, you quoted a matter which indeed is the truth how stuff works. Good.  :smileyhappy:

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Since you goal seems to be to get better performance you need to understand the viewer settings. A good source of information is the SL Wiki's Debug Settings. While it is hard to relate each setting to the Preference's settings, it does provide the purpose of and limits of the various settings.

There is also a need to understand what the various concepts are and how they affect render time. An older but still good source of information is the article: http://blog.nalates.net/2010/12/17/graphics-tweaking-for-second-life/

If you really want to go all geeky try: http://blog.nalates.net/2011/11/30/how-to-get-a-faster-second-life/

Using GPU-Z will tell you how much graphics memory your computer system is using at any moment. How much is being allocated to a specific game gets fuzzy and then how much the game is actually using is even fuzzier.

You can get more detailed info using Geeks 3D Caps. This will give you specific Process ID's for various graphics processes running. Then those processes can be examined. Their GPU Shark will give you more detailed information and specifically a tally of memory swaps from VRAM. 

When you ask a tech question the easy way to include information about your computer and viewer is to get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need.  To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

You can get the info before logging in If the viewer will at least show the login screen, which can be handy for those times you crash just after login.

 

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