Are graphics issues impacting on the SL experience

[cibernut]

Never looked at it like that before, must admit I used to think that increasing the b/width would be better, but what you say makes a lot of sense, so I'll reduce it in future.

[Parhelion Palou]

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Vivienne Schell wrote:

"I'd say LL is handling SL pretty well."

They certainly handle it sufficiently. But obviously not well enough to escape the niche or even keep the customers they have. Which isn´t exclusively a Linden generated failure, but they contribute decisively. Talking about "performance hits", to stay on topic: Allowing something absurdly excessive like "sculpts" and almost unrestricted resource abuse by avatar attachments is the reason for the flood of nice looking but performance killing items on the grid. Such things never were and never will be online game compatible in a technical sense, unless someone invents the affordable supercomputer and free LAN broadband for everyone. That´s not what i call a good handling.

"Starting anew (the next generation) is the way to go."

What leads you to the conclusion that they are able to handle this "next generation" thing in a better, more successful way as they handle SL? Imagine someone builds a car which breaks down any 100 km and then this company comes up and promises that the next one will be better, faster, next generation and whatever. Would you believe in such a company?

"An $800 (US) computer can run SL well"

Oh yes, on a fairly well built sim with not more than 10 other high poly mesh, sculpt, script and monstertexture cladded avatars in the 96m viewer range, without shadows and probably windlight disabled and LOD set to zero it will riun fine, as long as your avatar does not move. 2006 revisited. That´s true progress for the masses. Unfortunately not everyone on the planet likes to watch her little high poly mesh avatar in the non-existing mirror while dropping tons of highest poly attachments onto it. Tho, I must admit, these dolls look cute on the blog screenshots. They only look kinda lonely there.

" I think an automated process to determine efficiency would be hard to build."

Not at all. They implemented the "land Impact" meter in the mesh upload functionality, which is quite helpful. Unfortunately land impact does not matter for attachments. And why they do not finally stop further uploads of sculpt maps, i have no idea. And of course they have a problem with abusive content now, but only because they allowed it. And that´s not a graphics engine problem, it´s a 100 percent user handling problem.

"An NVidia 650 card (approximately $100 US) would work well."

No. But i must admit, it depends on what you do in SL. It can be enough, but if you don´t wanna bath in your very own lil metaverse, forget it.

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U.S. auto manufacturers got along well with carburetors until the 1980s when emission requirements and fuel economy requirements came into effect. They tried to make carburetors meet the new requirements, but the car ran terribly. Would you say that since they couldn't make the carburetors work, they shouldn't be trusted to build cars with fuel injection and engine computers?

On an $800 computer: Per Newegg as of today, including shipping costs but ignoring the rebates that were offered:

motherboard:  GIGABYTE GA-B75M-D3H LGA 1155                                                                  $ 76.09

memory:           G.SKILL Value Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)                   $ 79.99

processor:       Intel Core i3-3220 Ivy Bridge Dual-Core 3.3GHz LGA 1155                            $124.99

case/power supply:  Cooler Master Elite 311 - Mid Tower Computer Case w 420W PS     $ 67.98

video card:       MSI N650-MD1GD5/OC GeForce GTX 650 1GB                                               $ 94.99

hard drive:       Western Digital WD Blue WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM - OEM                         $ 59.99

optical drive:    ASUS DVD-Writer Black SATA Model DRW-24F1ST - OEM                             $ 19.99

o/s:                    Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit - OEM                                $102.98

Total: $627

That leaves plenty to go to a better video card (650Ti, 750, 660, 760...), but assuming you don't have a monitor or keyboard/mouse:

monitor:            BenQ GL2460HM 24" Widescreen LED Backlight LCD Monitor                    $149.99

keyboard/mouse: Logitech Desktop MK120 Mouse and keyboard Combo (920-002565)   $ 13.99

 

Total  790.98

I've run SL on a NVidia 650. You can do shadows if you wish, but you can't run ultra mode. Think the high setting with some settings turned down. If you're in a crowded area you would have to reduce settings some -- turn off shadows for sure. My main computer has a 660 Ti. I run in ultra mode (with some settings turned up) with draw distance set to around 300m. Frame rate does drop to 20 fps in really crowded areas if I'm moving around, but it's not bad.

 

[Vivienne Schell]

"I think you are seriously underestating one's ability to customize, and optimize, his or her own experience, and viewer."

No, I don´´t. But fact is that one is forced to fiddle around a lot with these settings in order to get at least some kind of acceptable performance (on an average PC).  And fact is that some issues, like the notorious "running out of texture memory" crash cannot be fixed by the user at all.

All this and more might not matter much for the dedicated and kinda addicted Second Life user, but it´s not very convincing to anyone else out there.

Why do journalists still post unfavorable screenshots which look like 2006? Because their laptops can´t render Sl in all it´s high end glory.

[markkemp]

Yep, you're right about the journalists.

They log into SL on their office laptops, see a pixelated poorly rendered mess, take a screenshot and then pretend to know everything about it :matte-motes-sour:

[SaraCarena]

Not maybe, definitely. Think of dd(draw distance) as a sphere around you, whatever you set it to in meters will be the radius (think it`s radius not diameter) of that sphere. Your graphics card will draw what`s inside that sphere and ignore what`s outside, doubling the dd actually increases what you potentially have to render 8 fold. Quite often I set it to 50 meters if I`m indoors at a club and raise it if I`m in a pretty outdoors region.

There`s also a feature on a number of viewers that auto lowers dd when you teleport and raises it over time to what your actual setting is which can help to draw scenes a bit better.

[cibernut]

Right, I've looked at my settings and bandwidth was already set to 512 so even less than 800, draw distance is 120.  I couldn't find any framerate settings in chrome and also didn't find anything for lossy texture compression.  Basically nothing's changed and it's still taking a long tme for some things to render.  My gfx card is a 1gb mainly intended for HTPC use which could be a factor, but then again a certain other game using ce2 rendered ok. There's no av created content in that one, but still...

[SaraCarena]

Bandwidth is a very user specific setting I think, 500 is recomended for wireless 1200-1500 for hard wired but there was  LL advice some time ago saying push it all the way up. You could try different settings and see if any work better than others.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tips-and-Tricks/QUICKTIP-Get-less-lag-in-seconds-by-increasing-your-Maximum/ba-p/670217

You have`nt said what your gfx card is, if you start your viewer click help > about second life and copy and paste that info here.

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

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SaraCarena wrote:

Bandwidth is a very user specific setting I think, 500 is recomended for wireless 1200-1500 for hard wired but there was  LL advice some time ago saying push it all the way up. You could try different settings and see if any work better than others.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tips-and-Tricks/QUICKTIP-Get-less-lag-in-seconds-by-increasing-your-Maximum/ba-p/670217

You have`nt said what your gfx card is, if you start your viewer click help > about second life and copy and paste that info here.

 

 

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I thought that video had been taken down.  There was a lot of 'negative' feedback on it when it was originally posted.  Torley was right, adjusting your Bandwidth could be a very postive thing but it was shown that "cranking it up" was not a good idea.  Of all the videos Torley ever did that was the only one I can remember ever getting negative feedback.

We also need to keep in mind that there have been a lot of changes to how SL works and how the Data is streamed since that video was made.

Right now the recommendation from the Firestorm team, based on their experience, is to set it at 80% of you measured speed to the SL servers, maximum being 1500 Kbps.

http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_speedtest

It's also not a bad idea to do a ping test also.  A high packet loss might indicate a problem your ISP would need to deal with. 

 

[SaraCarena]

Okies Perrie, promise to never post that link again :smileyembarrassed: though I did test it ages ago and didn`t really notice any difference good or bad but I keep my bw at 1500 now. And yes have been lots of changes since then, isn`t it true that bandwidth setting only affects udp fetch and not http fetch?

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

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SaraCarena wrote:

Okies Perrie, promise to never post that link again :smileyembarrassed: though I did test it ages ago and didn`t really notice any difference good or bad but I keep my bw at 1500 now. And yes have been lots of changes since then, isn`t it true that bandwidth setting only affects udp fetch and not http fetch?

 

 

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That is my understanding of how it works.

[cibernut]

Right, so 512 kb might be too low, I only went for this as someone said I shouldn't go higher than 800 so I'll try a higher setting.

My setup info is:

Second Life 3.7.13 (292225) Jul 22 2014 00:31:11 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 250 Processor (3013.75 MHz)
Memory: 8192 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5450

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0010.1065
OpenGL Version: 4.1.10524 Compatibility Profile Context

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.0
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.31
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Built with MSVC version 1600

[SaraCarena]

Well bandwith is a tricky one coz it`s really down to your connection and what works for some, well, works for some. The 80% that Perrie suggested is a good rule, I think you`d be best to find what seems to suit you within the figures people have suggested.

Your gfx is a bit low spec for sl and ATI cards seem to perform worse than nvidia cards of a similar spec with sl. I think I`d set graphics and dd pretty low and then gradually increase some settings 1 at a time to see what your happy with. It`d be handy to be able to save a few different graphics settings like you can save outfits and be able to switch with one click coz different regions can be more demanding than others, but not possible as far as I know.

A 64 bit viewer would make use of all of your memory whereas the sl viewer doesn`t, it`s 32 bit. Not sure if that would improve your draw speed though. Firestorm and singularity have 64 bit viewer versions.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory

I know it can be a bit fiddly and frustrating finding out what to tweak for best results but good luck and have fun in sl:smileyhappy:

EDIT:  ohhh btw you could name your ISP to see if other people rate them or not or use dnsbench (google it) to see how your ISP`s dns speed compares to others such as google public dns

 

[cibernut]

Perhapps a bit low spec gfx card, but in another game that had ce2 and generally higher gfx all-round (AVs, items) I had very few issues.  Ok, the content wasn't AV created, but even so...  I've now set my bw to 800kb and the dd is 120 which gives a slight improvement but not much. 

I suppose using building tools in future would pose even more probs

[SaraCarena]

Well I`m not much of a gamer but Madelaine explained very nicely the differences between games and sl and and why it`s so demanding of a computer. I agree with her that the uniqueness of sl makes that worth it. I also totally get your point that the extra demands may put people off sl. I also agree with Qie that render speed has increased over the last 18 months or so and optimistic that it will get better still. The http pipeline viewer is still being tested

Anyways, try a 64 bit viewer it was noticeably better when I switched from 32 bit and set your sl cache as high as you can if you have the space on your hard drive.

[cibernut]

Thanks  Where would I get a 64 bit viewer from.  When I went through the download process I wasn't aware there was a 32 bit and 64 bit one - I thought there was just one viewer for everyone  I realise how that reads, but you know what I mean...

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Firestorm and ctrlaltstudio (a viewer based on firestorm, but lighter) both have 64 bit viewers - other tpv probably do too.  Note that you have to have a 64bit operating system to use them.

[Qie Niangao]

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cibernut wrote:

I suppose using building tools in future would pose even more probs

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Not really. The in-world building tools don't really cause much extra demand on rendering performance, and very little on network because as much as possible is done within the viewer before syncing with the sim.

I'll be surprised if you see that much difference with a 64-bit viewer on your rig. Increasing cache may help, but it's not going to be night-and-day for you either.

Looking at your machine spec, it's really your graphics card that's going to be a bottleneck, assuming you have enough network to keep it fed. That HD 5450 isn't too dreadful at 2D graphics (like video), but it's pretty gawdawful at 3D.  Check it out on http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php and compare it to even the GeForce GTX 650 mentioned earlier: your card is like nine times slower on 3D operations.

None of this is to say Second Life doesn't suffer by making such heavy demands on graphics hardware. It's a problem, and not one with any easy solution.

[SaraCarena]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

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I'll be surprised if you see that much difference with a 64-bit viewer on your rig.

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Graphics wise yes but just having that much more memory availiable makes a difference I think... and OP has 64 bit os so why not

[cibernut]

Well that's something then, at least I won't have any extra rendering issues when building things.  Again, at risk of contradict - I can't honestly totally agree that the HD 5450 is completey useless at 3D stuff, so it just seems to be a bottleneck where SL is concerned.  I played a highly graphics intensive MMO for years without real issues...

[cibernut]

In the end I didn't go for a 64 bit viewer, instead I changed the compatability mode via properties for XP-sp3  which o.c is 32 bit and there has been some improvement with the draw rate since doing this

[cibernut]

Thx  I have Win 7 64 bit so might try a 64 bit viewer and see if that improves over playing in XP compat' mode...

[Sparks Racecourse]

I doubt if the 64 bit viewer will matter that much.   I have Win 7 64 bit, but i been running 32 bit viewers for years.  I ran SL on a variety of hardware.  Including an Ivybridge HD4000 chipset.  I never have any issues.  i also have other computers setup with Nvidia 680 GTX, but I can run at ultra settings on that one. 

Although, I do find that most new users tend to play with the bandwidth setting in the viewer.   So, they match the bandwidth speed to their internet connection.   I have a 50 Mb/sec connection, but I leave that setting at 750 kbps.   If you have a lower bandwidth connection, then leave it at the stock setting of 500 kbps.  In my groups in the past, I gave a notecard on the recommended settings for viewers.