Graphics issue, Card maxing at 70% useage

[Darius Vayandar]

ok, so here it is. My graphics card is having an issue with getting to a proper setting so it can run sl. Here is an example of what my normal fps and graphics card levels are.

 

 

Now this is how my graphics load and card normally work when its not too stressed and things are smooth. Then suddenly when more avis come around, its fine at first. but then after a while suddenly, the area i am turns into this.

 

 

Im sorry but for a 560 ti gtx overclocked with an i7 processor and 16 gigs of ram, most of which is unused and the cpu is taxed maybe to 20 - 25% this is silly as hell. 

 

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 870 @ 2.93GHz (2933.65 MHz)
Memory: 16375 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

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.1407
OpenGL Version: 4.2.0

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Welcome to the wonderful world of user generated content where each avi carries around more geometry and textures than your average first person shooter.

[Cincia Singh]

Do you have threaded optimization turned off in the NVidia control panel?

[Darius Vayandar]

no threaded optimization is on

[Nyll Bergbahn]

It's not clear from your question whether this is a recent issue or has been a constant with your Nvidia 560Ti. If recent, perhaps your card is failing.

If a constant issue, perhaps send an IM to the reporter in this Jira to ask if he ever sorted this same issue out with his Nvidia 560Ti:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-28594

Another person having the same problem with his Nvidia 560Ti but again no solution:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Technical/1-yr-old-gaming-rig-getting-low-fps/qaq-p/1667737

I assume you do have the card connected to your computer's PCI Express 16x slot and that it is fully powered.

ETA: I have a 3-year old ATI HD 5850, a card with slightly less performance than a 560TI, paired with an i5 750 (i7 with hyper threading removed), only 4MB RAM and running Windows 7 and get 30-60 fps in Ultra with deferred rendering enabled so yes, there is something seriously amiss with your system. Do you by any chance know anyone with a Nvidia 560Ti or 560 who would be willing to let you temporarily swop it in to test?

[Darius Vayandar]

This is my current power supply, i was told it might not be enough. 

 And this is a constant issue

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182044

[Nalates Urriah]

You can check the size of power supply needed here: http://support.asus.com/powersupply.aspx They tend to over state what you need by some percentage. So, if you are close, its good. Your GTX560 does seem to be running hot. Mine usually stays in the 40's when working and 30's when idling. But, I stopped overclocking because it just was not helping enough.

I haven't checked for awhile, I'm away from home now, but my GPU load with SL seldom goes over 40% and averages 20-30%. Once textures render I get 30 to 50 FPS on my Quad Core2. But, I did replace system RAN with faster memory, no over-clock.

One of the biggest slow downs for SL is slow general RAM, system memory. You can use CPU-Z (free) or System Explorer (free) to check the installed memory and current operating frequency. You might get more performance over clocking your system memory than the GPU.

You should be able to pick up some FPS by having your 560 do the Anti-aliasing. You can turn it off in the viewer. However, the video card WILL anti-alias the various panels like inventory and chat, making them a bit fuzzy.

There are more tips on tweaking SL graphics settings here: Graphics Tweaking for Second Life

Don't expect to get the same performance for SL that you get for WoW or Skyrim. The scenes in those have been professionally made and optimized. That is NOT the CASE in SL. For most of SL 15 FPS is considerred good enough... pay no attention to those annoying combat players that say we need 60+ FPS... they are right, but...

 

[Nyll Bergbahn]

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Darius Vayandar wrote:

This is my current power supply, i was told it might not be enough. 

 And this is a constant issue

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182044

---

550W or 600W may be advisable but 500W is the minimum recommended power requirement for the 560Ti so no issue there. That's not the cause of your low fps in SL. 

Have you tried reinstalling your Nvidia driver? The SL KB does mention that Nvidia drivers sometimes do not install correctly the first time but invariably do if reinstalled.

Other than that, all I can think of is to run some stress tests on the Nvidia card and see if any problems show up.

http://www.3dmark.com/

http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/

ETA: Do you usually get such a wide variance in your Ping Sim time? It's 102ms in your first image and 228ms in your second one?

 

[Darius Vayandar]

I have used all stress tests before, all passed with flying colors. The ping is just cus im on wireless and the sim was laggy. But i was informed recently that i should try to turn on texture compression cus SL requires a 2 gb card, and mine is 1. It seems to be working so far but will keep updated.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Darius Vayandar wrote:

But i was informed recently that i should try to turn on texture compression cus SL requires a 2 gb card, and mine is 1.

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I wonder who told you that. Texture memory in SL is limited to 512MB. Even with some memory leaks 1GB should be plenty to do all the rest as well, it never hurts to have some overhead of course. I have seen vid memory use around 1G, but when things are normal, it doesn't get above 700MB or so.

Maybe you are confusing system RAM and video RAM? In that case I think 2GB is on the low side. Minimum is 512MB, recommended by LL is 3GB.

[Nyll Bergbahn]

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Darius Vayandar wrote:

I have used all stress tests before, all passed with flying colors. The ping is just cus im on wireless and the sim was laggy. But i was informed recently that i should try to turn on texture compression cus SL requires a 2 gb card, and mine is 1. It seems to be working so far but will keep updated.

---

A 1 GB card is fine for use with Second Life. I wasn't aware you were using wireless. Wireless can work fine for some with Second Life and horrible for others and no doubt a range of experiences in between. If possible, an Ethernet cable would give you a faster and better connection for use with Second Life and your issue may just disappear.

[Cincia Singh]

Turn threaded optimization off and switch from sireless to an ethernet cable. These two changes will improve your SL experience.

[Darius Vayandar]

But this seems to be the case. If you look at the numbers of my card in the picture there, it caps out at 70% when it hits 990 mem useage. Now with texture compression on it dosent go above 920, i have no more issues. I think whats going on in reality is sl does need a 2gb card, or maybe its a vram thing, honestly i dont know how to measure it i just know what im seeing

[Darius Vayandar]

Unable to switch to a cable, but i have a super powerful wireless adaptor that i spent over 100 bucks on just to make sure it was as good as can be.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833281006

 

And this thing is connected to two usb 3.0 ports

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Darius Vayandar wrote:

But this seems to be the case. If you look at the numbers of my card in the picture there, it caps out at 70% when it hits 990 mem useage. Now with texture compression on it dosent go above 920, i have no more issues.

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If that's the case it sounds like it's possible. Either way, if enabling texture compression solves your "70% ussue", and the fps go up, that's great. However, I often see my 2GB card at far less than 100% and fps not as high as I like them. Video memory use is nowhere near its limit in those cases. So the two might be related, that doesn't mean one is the cause of the other.

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[...] or maybe its a vram thing, honestly i dont know how to measure it i just know what im seeing

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You either need an external tool to measure VRAM, which one depends on your brand of graphics card. You can also see it in SL, Develop Menu -> Show Info -> Show Render Info. On the right side of your screen you'll see a whole lot of numbers, the very bottom one shows your available VRAM. Don't leave the console open, it's a real fps killer, like a lot of the debug/info consoles.

[Nyll Bergbahn]

I don't think there has been any change to what Linden Lab always said, i.e. "We now cap the amount of texture memory used at 512 MB to prevent some driver bugs when using more than that.  512 MB should be adequate for now."

Also, refer to Bao Linden's comments in https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2547

"As Kouta Ruska pointed out, 512MB is the cap. But we do not think it is a bug. Here are the reasons why we set this cap: 1, this cap is a soft cap. It tells viewer it is good to make the total amount of textures to follow this cap. But if this cap needs to be overflown to make all necessary textures sharp enough, and viewer has resource to overflow the cap, viewer will do it. Of course viewer will immediately remove unneeded textures to follow the cap if the situation changes. 2, vram is used to hold all stuff for GPU. Textures are just part of it. VRAM needs space for VBO, render targets, and other necessary stuff. 3, When a texture is created, it has a copy in the vram and a copy in the main memory. Normally when vram can not hold all textures for rendering, drivers should do texture swapping between the main memory and vram. This is why we reserve 1.5 times of texture memory cap in the main memory. So say if the cap is 512MB, 768MB is reserved in the main memory. SL is built with 32-bit system. So the max address space it has is 2GB, which includes program space and heap space. Considering the fragmentation issue, the actual max memory (or heap size) for SL is no more than 1.6~1.7 GB. Among that, 768MB is a large enough portion to be reserved for textures only. 4, 512 MB cap is also sufficient for performance. Texture itself is hardly the reason causing FPS drop unless GPU is busy in doing a lot of texture swapping while rendering. This is not the case when we have 512MB texture memory. If you open the texture console by "ctrl+shift+3", and watch the total amount of textures to be bound at an instant, it is very rare that that number is more than 512MB.

Instead of increasing the 512MB cap, we unfortunately might have to do the opposite changes: to shrink this cap, for certain cards. For instance, some ATI cards are not good at texture swapping. So textures eat up all VRAM quickly in some regions which causes FPS to crawl, and eventually crashes SL."

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