Low FPS...

[DJCryonic]

Got a rig upgrade....

And i still have max 30 FPS while using Firestorm or the standart viewer on Medium/High settings.

Hardware:

i7 4770K (3,5GHz, 3,9 boost)

gigabyte z87-hd3 board

8gb DDR3 RAM

Sapphire R9 270X OC Dual-X GPU (overclocked)

1920x1080 resolution

Software: 

Win7x64

AMD Catalyst 14.3 Beta driver

 

The stupid thing: AMD shows me only 20-30% load on the GPU while playing SL...

This rig should be able to run SL on high with 60FPS... what is going on, did i miss something ?

[Deej Kasshiki]

There are many factors that affect the FPS you get in SL. In your testing are you in a crowded sim with many complex items that need to be rendered? Are there a lot of mesh items in the scene? If you haven't already try testing in less crowded areas and/or areas with less content to render and compare your results.

The largest factor may be your ATI/AMD drivers. ATI/AMD's drivers are pretty notorious for not playing well with SL due to their less than optimal support of OpenGL, the graphics standard used by SL. You may need to test using different versions of the Catalyst drivers to see if that has any affect on your performance. Also, if your video card is a very new model, it may not be listed in SL's graphics card tables which wouldn't allow the viewer to fully understand the features and capabilities of your video card.

You'll need to do a little more testing and give us a few more details before we can give you anything more definitive.

[DJCryonic]

yeah the card is new but its using the same architecture as the older amd 78xx/79xx cards. only the amd 290(x) is brand new.

and AMD is supporting OpenGL really good, i use it for rendering videos and for games like minecraft. 

 

The strange thing is - the CPU load is 10-20% and the GPU-load is 30% max. 

I expect an actual online game to fully utilise my hardware until it hits the Vsync limit (60Hz = 60 FPS) or my hardware limit. 

I can render a video (CPU+GPU used) while playing SL and my FPS will not change at all...

The fastest i7 quadcore out there and a nice new midrange GPU should be more than enough to make SL look great and still hit the 60FPS cap...

[Rhys Goode]

I get anywhere bewteen 20 and 100 fps with my setup, depending on just where in SL I happen to be.  On "high" graphics, ALS on, shadows off.  I can get 20 or 30 fps on ultra in most places, but it drops below 10 in a busy sim, unless I turn shadows off.

The point is, fps depends a *lot* on what you are doing, and what is going on around you. Whenever I try to gauge these things, I tend to write down things like 20 - 30 for one locatione, 60 - 100 for another.  Anything but a fixed number for me.

Standing in a quiet sim alone in my house ....  ~28 to 35 on the ground, 45  to 50 on a platform 2000 m overhead from my house.

 

CPU: Intel® Core i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz (2195.09 MHz)
Memory: 16362 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560M/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.3489
OpenGL Version: 4.4.0

RestrainedLove API: RLV v2.8.0 / RLVa v1.4.10a
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1e zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.10.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.3.2
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.26
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.5.0009.17865

Settings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: MetaHarper Modern (AppalachianSky)
Font Used: Deja Vu (96)
Draw distance: 128
Bandwidth: 1500
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: High (5/7)
Texture memory: 512 MB (1)
Built with MSVC version 1600
Packets Lost: 1/1,793 (0.1%)

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Just a long shot, but the 10-20% CPU load might indicate the viewer is only using one thread out of the available eight.

I had this issue with my previous computer, well the low GPU load anyway.

It might just be the places you visit; low CPU and GPU load might mean they aren't processing a whole lot. Maybe your computer just isn't getting the data in fast enough because there is so much. The laggier a place is, the lower my fps obviously, but also the lower my GPU load. I have the predecessor to your CPU (i7 3770k) and a faster GPU (GTX670), in places that aren't crowded the fps can go over 100 on ultra settings. In laggy places it will max out at about 30.

Since recently, fps drop dramatically when there are a lot of particles on screen, no idea what's that all about. That didn't happen before to my best knowledge.

So try an empty sim, temporarily turn off your VSync and see if that will put your GPU under full load. That way you can at least rule out a problem with the video card.

[DJCryonic]

Trying an empty sim or staring at a wall is not what i want while playing. 

I need the stable high FPS under load...

And my GPU has a pretty high overclock so it can beat the GTX 670 (r9 270X 1165MHz GPU, 1525 - VRAM) in some cases. 

I just expect SL to use multithreading and work great with hyperthreading on 8 cores on my i7 and it should be able to use the amazing OpenGL power of the AMD GPU (its not highend, but SL is also not the newest and best looking game out there). 

Sure if i fly around and try different locations, crowded and empty, FPS will jump around. But i expect at least 60 FPS at maximum load that SL can produce. I mean i can play BF4 on ultra with 40FPS minimum, 60 average (with Mantle on), the rig is powerful enough.

The last thing i can do is to overclock my CPU (but not the best cooler on top, so it will be around 4-4,2GHz max if i`m lucky. Alpenfohn Brocken2 is quiet, but not so powerful) to get better singlethread performance, but come on...

Just tryed and monitored anything - CPU load is not high, none of 8 cores is even close to 50% load.. something is going wrong - my CPU and GPU dont get enough data to work with. 

Even installed the viewer on an SSD to provide maximum bandwith for loading things - still the same bad performance...

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

---

DJCryonic wrote:

Trying an empty sim or staring at a wall is not what i want while playing. 

I need the stable high FPS under load...

---

To figure out what's going on means you will have to do some testing, I didn't suggest to spend your days in an empty sim.

---

I just expect SL to use multithreading and work great with hyperthreading on 8 cores on my i7 and it should be able to use the amazing OpenGL power of the AMD GPU (its not highend, but SL is also not the newest and best looking game out there).

---

Again, without some investigation, your expectations will stay expectations. They might be spot on or they might be a work of fiction. Your CPU has 4 cores btw, 8 threads. AMD GPU's have far worse OpenGL performance compared to NVidia, going by every single post on these forums about that subject.

---

Sure if i fly around and try different locations, crowded and empty, FPS will jump around. But i expect at least 60 FPS at maximum load that SL can produce. I mean i can play BF4 on ultra with 40FPS minimum, 60 average (with Mantle on), the rig is powerful enough.

---

Never ever make the mistake of comparing SL to a professionally made game. SL puts, despite its looks, a far bigger load on your computer, I've seen plenty of places with over 2 million triangles on screen and a matching amount of texture data. However, your computer should be powerful enough for higher framerates.

 

 

---

The last thing i can do is to overclock my CPU (but not the best cooler on top, so it will be around 4-4,2GHz max if i`m lucky. Alpenfohn Brocken2 is quiet, but not so powerful) to get better singlethread performance, but come on...

Just tryed and monitored anything - CPU load is not high, none of 8 cores is even close to 50% load.. something is going wrong - my CPU and GPU dont get enough data to work with. 

Even installed the viewer on an SSD to provide maximum bandwith for loading things - still the same bad performance...

---

Can you give some more information about your internet connection?

Don't expect 60fps on a busy sim with any type of computer, that's, no matter how much you think your system should be able to handle it, simply not going to happen.

(btw I misread the type of GPU, I thought you had an R7, with enough overclock the R9 might be a bit faster faster than the GTX670, although going by the difference in stock performance I really doubt it)

[DJCryonic]

My internet connection looks like this:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3447325624

 

And its fast enough.

And yeah i expect SL to be even better at using the new hardware than all other new games like Thief, BF4, Watchdogs and what ever is coming out right now. 

 

P.S. just tested it again... 

CPU - 1-4 cores loaded with max 40% load on each while moving.

almost no load when standing - 10% cpu load overall.

GPU - 27% load max.

 

I can change the settings, it doesnt matter - i get 30 fps in a used sim with some people there and 60 when sitting on an empty sim. 

And the AMD r9 270(X) (the difference between 270 & 270X is just a higher clock of the 270X) is pretty fast, here some info:

http://www.ozone3d.net/gpudb/score.php?which=7089

http://www.ozone3d.net/gpudb/score.php?which=7090

 

Furmark is based on OpenGL/OpenCL and as you can see, the R9 270 is just a bit faster than GTX 760. My own score is 2611 points. Its a bit lower than expected, but still fast enough for rendering and other OpenGL/OpenCL based games & programms. 

So if the SL viewer can use the full power of the CPU and the GPU, i should be able to get my 60 FPS average...

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

---

DJCryonic wrote:

My internet connection looks like this:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3447325624

 

And its fast enough.

---

It is fast enough, but there's more to it. Is your connection wired or not, is your connection shared or not, do you get a lot of packet loss etc. I'm no expert at this by any means, but the more information you post, the more others might be able to help.

---

And yeah i expect SL to be even better at using the new hardware than all other new games like Thief, BF4, Watchdogs and what ever is coming out right now.

---

Then you have completely false expectations. SL content is built by hobbyists at best, and therefor completely unoptimised.

 

---

Furmark is based on OpenGL/OpenCL and as you can see, the R9 270 is just a bit faster than GTX 760. My own score is 2611 points. Its a bit lower than expected, but still fast enough for rendering and other OpenGL/OpenCL based games & programms.

---

I am not going to have a pissing contest over nothing, but I have a GTX670, not a GTX760.

---

So if the SL viewer can use the full power of the CPU and the GPU, i should be able to get my 60 FPS average...

---

I think you're right. The question is if SL in fact can use the full power of the processors.

 

 

If you ever figure it out, please post about it. My old computer has the same issue, the GPU at 50% max. This one reaches 100% when running SL, well, sometimes.

[DJCryonic]

My rig is wired (gigabit ethernet connection to the router), i`m the only one who is using it (laptop & smartphone connected too, but nothing that will use bandwith a lot). Packet loss is 0% as expected, i did a pingtest and tracert to the SL server - everything is fine. Every other online game is running great and even streaming works great.

 

And even BF4 will not use my CPU to 100% because my GPU is limiting it, but i can see the performance and if i change the settings i will get my 60 fps on medium/high.

 

And SL is a pretty professional game with Linden Labs behind it (the standart viewer at least, but the performance is the same), so i expect a game that is old but still active to be upgraded. Like World of Warcraft - it has some problems too but a DX11 API and other things improved performance, added support for the newer hardware and made it look way better than Vanilla WoW. And WoW is a CPU-heavy game, every midend GPU will be enough to run it almost maxed out, highend GPUs are too powerful and they sit @ 50% load usually.

[arton Rotaru]

Yeah, like Kwak pointed out, never compare SL with AAA Games. BF 4 is available for the PS 3 also. A PS 3 has 512 MB RAM in total. 256 MB VRam and 256 System RAM. Now try to make a SL Fullsim with 14000 Objects on ground level (with pretty much no effektiv poly budget restrictions), and like 10000 oversized texture maps, 40 overbloated Avatars, plus all the fuzz of openGL lights, and massive overuse of alpha blended textures, glow and particles, and a draw distance of 128 to 256 meters, or even more,  fit into these 512 MB of RAM.

I bet SL will drag even a GTX 780Ti on it's knees in the right places. (or better, in the wrong places :matte-motes-big-grin:)

However, I'm on a overclocked GTX 760, and get FPS from 20 to 100 with 128 DD, ALM on, Shadows of. It's pretty much the way it is.

I also have the impression that particles slow down the viewer much more than they used to be in the past.

[DJCryonic]

Yeah so i should not worry about my minimum 20-25FPS and average 40FPS if people with similar hardware get the same results.

I was hoping to get a way better performance with the upgrade - i replaced most parts in my rig to get the needed performance boost. Everything else is running great, but SL not... Its the worst performance of all my games...

[arton Rotaru]

Yeah, it's too much un-optimized content out there. In theory, you can torture a prim torus so that it will have 18900 polys.

Now take the 15000 prims of a fullsim. 15000 * 18900 = 283500000 polys. YAY Put a unique 1024x1024 alpha blended texture on each and we can be happy that SL is running at all. lol

[Nalates Urriah]

Your expectations are out of line for the reality of Second Life.

A couple of huge factors are basic differences in how SL and other games work. Most games do 4 to 6gb of predownload. SL consists of petabytes of data. We simply cannot pre-download it. That means when we enter a new region we have a huge amount work to do that other games do not have.

Additionally, there is a considerable amount of IP protection built in. I'm not sure how much good it does, but it is there. So, each time we render a JPG2000 texture we are decrypting it even when loaded from cache.

As to SL being an up to date renderng engine... not really. They are always working on it. But, it is an old render engine.

As to ATI having good OpenGL perforance... not really. Companies are know to build for the benchmark software. ATI has had weak OpenGL support for a long time. Search the forum here for ATI verses NVIDIA then search the net. 

Memory speed is also a big factor in SL performance. If your MB and CPU will use faster memory, upgrade to faster chips.

Internet spped in general is nice. But, you need to directly test your connection to the SL servers.

Also, if you put your Max Bandwidth over 1,500, that is likely slowing you down. Make your cache huge.

If you have played with Debug Settings, make sure your MeshMaxConcurrentRequests is 32 or less. Anything over that and the servers may be putting you on their this-guy-can-wait-list. 16 may acually speed things up.

Play with your Draw Distance setting. 128m is often all you need. If you are flying and taking pictures 256m works. Anything above 256 is slowing you down for little or no reason.

The SL viewer runs its AA. If you have AA maxed, you are likely to have problems. Use 2x or 4x and see if that helps.

My Core2 Quad 2.6ghz and GTX560 run 20 to 70 FPS. If other avatars are around, that can come down to 5 to 15... more than 15 avatars and my FPS sucks. That happens when avatars are nearby. I can save render time with impostures when they are out of chat range.

 

The system is complex. What works for one person will be a disaster for another. Experiement until you find what works.

I use the HIGH setting and tweak toward ULTRA. Some things I tweak down toward LOW. I now run with ALM enabled and shadows on. 20-70 FPS.

[DJCryonic]

I was expecting to crank it up to maximum and then turn it down a bit just like i do with other games if they dont perform good enough. 

Specially with a really fast CPU and a nice overclocked GPU (even midrange) it should run fine.

And the AMD OpenGL/OpenCL speed is really nice, i was using it for a long time for rendering and it did a great job (CUDA is a bit faster, but its still a huge bonus compared to the CPU rendering).

Looks like i have to spend some time flying around and teleporting with different settings to find the right one for my hardware. 

Sl should look good and run fast.. or at least one run fast.. But right now its ugly and slow as hell...

[SaraCarena]

Draw distance is a biggie if you tp around a lot, lower is better, I typically set to 60-100. Also if you use firestorm they have draw distance stepping peferences/firestorm/general " enable progressive draw distance stepping ", which minimises draw distance after a tp and gradually increases it to what your setting is. Also setting cache to maximum helps frequently visited sims load faster.

One aspect of sl that is very ugly is that on sims with a lot of avatars weraing a lot of mesh attachments some of those avatars will never fully load however high your comp specs are, but that`s sl not you.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-5414

 

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

Additionally, there is a considerable amount of IP protection built in. I'm not sure how much good it does, but it is there. So, each time we render a JPG2000 texture we are decrypting it even when loaded from cache.

---

the texture pipeline and cache are not using copy protection or encryption, it is simply a JPEG 2000 wavelet code stream.

JPEG 2000 offers a distinct advantage for an environment like Second Life. when one of these streams is partially read, a low resolution version of the complete texture is available. when a little more of the image is loaded, you get more detail, and so on. this lets Second Life have MIP mapping without creating special tiled textures, so textures on small or distant objects only have to be partially loaded into memory.

other image formats are faster to decode, but they are missing this property.

[Ormand Lionheart]

I have also noticed the effect of particles lately. Seems they are much more difficult or possibly the textures being used are more complex?