Grass lag

[Aethelwine]

I have been getting bad lag on my sim at ground level. People suggested too many buildings, too much furniture, scripted vendors. But none of these are excessive and yet lag was horrible.

I have now solved the problem by removing 8 grass sculpts from a japanese garden (felix) that was in the middle of the sim and now the lag problems have completely gone. I know I was not the only one with this problem and in the past people complained about some grass land I had lagging and even crashing them (mostly heart grass on that occassion).
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Before starting this thread I did a search and yes there is an answer relating to this, but it just blames the persons graphics card or their settings being too high.

Whilst my Radeon HD6700 is not top of the range it is no slouch either. 8 grass sculpts causing the amount of lag it was is a much bigger problem than script counts or complex textures, or something to be idly dismissed as a poor graphics card.

I would hazard a guess that there is a problem dealing with rendering the number of alpha textures overlapping or something.

But regardless of technical causes it is worth bearing in mind if your sim or land is suffering lag it might not be the horses your neighbour has or vendors or scripts but your grass.

[valerie Inshan]

/passes an illegal pipe. Smoking the grass should reduce the lag. Or I can lend you my sheeps and goats. Sorry, Aethel, just in a silly mood today! Hugs you!

[Dilbert Dilweg]

My guess is the sculpts are way too high density thus causing your video card to bog down when rendering them

 

LOL @ Val. I almost came off with the same silly comment.

[valerie Inshan]

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Dilbert Dilweg wrote:

My guess is the sculpts are way too high density (High Poly) thus causing your video card to bog down when rendering them

 

LOL @ Val. I almost came off with the same silly comment.

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HAHAHA!!!! *shares my shilom with Dil*

[Darren Scorpio]

It is well known for many years that some sculpted grass and trees etc. cause lag. Every time I go someplace where I know I will spend many days in for long periods of time, the first thing I do is derender all grass and bushes. Today I derendered a whole offsim mountain thingy that surrounds the whole sim and my fps shot up to double what it was before.

[leliel Mirihi]

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Aethelwine wrote:

I would hazard a guess that there is a problem dealing with rendering the number of alpha textures overlapping or something.

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This is actually the problem right here, it's know as overdraw.

 

Basically the problem is as such, in order to keep from drawing things that won't actually end up on the screen the application and your gpu use all kinds of neat tricks. Things such as frustum culling, occlusion culling, and generally just trying to draw things front to back with depth culling.

 

Now as you might imagine, alpha textures throw all that right out the f'ing window. You can't do [almost] any culling of alpha textures, you have to draw all of them, then do the alpha blending (an expensive operation itself) before you will know which actually end up on the screen. So when you have a large number of overlapping alpha textures your gpu has to spend a lot of time drawing them all when 90% of it will never end up on the screen. This is why ALL sims with a large number of plants have horrible render lag.

 

The moral of this story is don't use alpha textures unless you have a signed note from god saying it's ok in this one special case.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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leliel Mirihi wrote:

The moral of this story is don't use alpha textures unless you have a signed note from god saying it's ok in this one special case.

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Do you have a PO box or email address by any chance?

[leliel Mirihi]

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

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leliel Mirihi wrote:

The moral of this story is don't use alpha textures unless you have a signed note from god saying it's ok in this one special case.

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Do you have a PO box or email address by any chance?

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Yeah, it's doesnotexist@example.com. If you think you might need to use an alpha texture contact me asap. While you're waiting for my reply rebuild your object with opaque textures since we all know it didn't really need alpha textues anyway.

 

But in all seriousness; user made content...try to use some common sense...failing that don't do it. Blah, blah, blah, etc., et al.