Hardware Upgrades for SL

[Pardus Tungsten]

Hey folks,

I have been considering doing some hardware upgrades and I wanted to take SL perfomrance into consideration while doing so. I know SL has some hard limitations with regards to video memory use and so on, plus it may be more GPU or processor intensive depending on how its put together.

With that in mind I was hoping those of you with much better knowledge of the viewers could take a look at what I'm running and let me know, with respect to SL, where I have the greatest opportunity for improvement (if I do at all). My video card isn't top of the line but it's pretty recent. The Motherboard and processor are a few years old now.

 

What I'm running currently:

GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R LGA 1366

Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield Quad-Core 2.66GHz

12GB DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Triple Channel

GeForce GTX 760 2GB

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

Hmmm, bigger screen?

[Ren Toxx]

As a plug-in question more than a suggestion of my own, would an SSD disk help?

[Pardus Tungsten]

I'm sure that one depends on what you're working with already, but in my case I don't think so. I'm mainly dealing with framerate slowdowns in high detailed mesh / lots of large textures areas. I'm not dealing too much with drive read slowdowns, as far as I can tell.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

You need to chase the lag, see link below

[SaraCarena]

People who max their sl cache on ssd do report much better load times than conventional hardrive so it would be good for sims you visit regularly. With 12 gig of ram you could try a 4 gig ramdrive which is even quicker than ssd and free. You`re right that viewers only use 512meg of video ram atm but I`ve heard that LL are working on getting rid of that cap, no idea of the timeline though. Plus there are other performance enhancements that LL are working on such as http pipeline and CDN (content delivery network). You`re comps pretty good as is :smileyhappy:

[Ren Toxx]

In that case, a more powerful graphics card may be the foremost consideration; I refrained from mentioning it because, considering what you have, moving to a sufficiently higher model would land you in top of the line -and therefore rather expensive- models; not to mention, such an expense may only yield results for SL itself, unless you also use other 3D-demanding applications.

[Pardus Tungsten]

I actually also use Maya and am thinking of something that might also cut down my render times but I figured to focus on SL here (though I'm sure a lot of you also have good experience with 3D rendering as well).

In any case, I grabbed open hardware monitor as suggested and did some tests with puzzling (to me) results.

The scene is heavy mesh buildings and objects and about 15 - 20 visible avatars, running the latest Firestorm viewer.

 

FPS: 8

CPU Load: Combined 16% with 40% max spike on initial scene load, pretty evenly distributed over all 4 cores

Memory Usage: 6GB of 12GB, 50%

GPU Load: 50%

GPU Memory Use: 93% (of 2GB)

 

Now here's another interesting piece of data. This scene is much simpler. 2 Avis, skybox with few mesh objects

FPS: 50

CPU Load: 9% - 30%

Memory Usage: 4.3GB of 12GB, 35%

GPU Load: 95%

GPU Memory Use: 52% (of 2GB)

 

A couple of interesting things there that surprised me. Looks like in the complex low FPS scene the CPU and GPU aren't working that hard but still very low FPS and the GPU memory is near maxed out. In the simple scene the GPU is working hard but with low GPU memory use.

It's looking like somehow the bottleneck is the GPU memory. Possibly the slow FPS is coming from the textures being swapped in and out of graphics memory. It's not surprising with the way people make things in SL (so many non-optimized textures) that a lot of GPU memory would be eaten up, what is surprising is that I thought SL could only take advantage of 512 megs of it, so how is my 2GB card maxing out?

Anyone have any insight on this? It's got me really curious now.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

If you open the texture console (Develop/Consoles/Texture Console [Ctrl + Alt + Q to display the Develop Menu]) you will get an idea of the amount of work being done loading textures. You have to sit around on the sim for a while for it to settle down.

It is very difficult to compare two sims because you are changing so many variables at the same time. Try doing some of the tests in my article staying in the same sim.

Also make sure that nothing else is happening on the machine. That GPU memory usage looks very high to me.

[SaraCarena]

Sorry but forgot to mention that the 512 cap is a "soft cap" and isn`t the whole story.

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

There was also a thread about texture memory in the building forum a while ago.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Building-and-Texturing-Forum/PROPOSAL-Texture-memory-increase/td-p/2733630

 

[Pardus Tungsten]

I tried a few more tests this time with the texture console up. I don't fully understand the texture console. The important information regarding texture memory seems to be GL Tot which is some number / 1024MB and Bound which is some number / 512MB. In the scene I'm testing now I've got GL Tot as 681/1024 and Bound at 443/512. I'm getting 12 FPS.

The behavior from the console seems to match with the above referenced threads where it is letting it overflow the texture memory cache then trying to pull it back down after the fact. I also see that GPU memory gets hit for mesh geometry data and that hit is outside the 512 cap. So, since this mostly happens in areas with large amounts of mesh objects, I wonder if it is the mesh geometry that is doing it, and causing low FPS again due to data swapping in and out of GPU memory.

My GPU memory is still getting nearly pegged at 90% whenever i expereince slow FPS. When the viewer is closed and nothing else besides this browser running I'm at about 15% GPU memory use I presume mostly the Windows 7 UI. I have nothing else running using GPU memory besides the browser and the testing software.

All and all, I'm still at a loss to really explain what's going on. With neither the CPU nor the GPU ever really working very hard in these low FPS situations. all i can think of is that the slowdown has to do with bussing the data around in some fashion.

[Perrie Juran]

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Pardus Tungsten wrote:

<snip>

All and all, I'm still at a loss to really explain what's going on. With neither the CPU nor the GPU ever really working very hard in these low FPS situations. all i can think of is that the slowdown has to do with bussing the data around in some fashion.

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I think you are hitting the nail on the head here, all this "bussing around data."

I'm a complete and total amateur on this stuff but from everything I've read it comes down to SL had and has a Memory Management problem.  And for all due and intent purposes until the recent Firestorm meeting  Ohjiro quotes in his blog (see sidebar next to "the effect of particles"), LL has virtually acted like there wasn't one (see Bao Linden's comment).

I like many have long suffered from the Texture Discard Crash Syndrome.   But with the introduction of "Project Interesting" we are also seeing a new problem on top of this.  As we pan around a scene we are actually seeing our computers clocking and having to wait until that clocking is done before we can do anything else.

I know this does not help anyone with a solution.  I've been following this problem for a couple of years now and I have yet to see anyone offer any real solution that works for everyone.  It's all been hit and miss trial and error and what works for one may not work for another.  I've tried all the solutions in the Texture Discard thread I linked and not one has helped me.

The bottom line is that we are at Linden Lab's mercy on this and I can only hope OZ and the Lab treat this with the highest of priority.  Otherwise all the bells and whistles they want to do are worthless if we don't have a Viewer that works.

 

 

eta:shpelling

[SaraCarena]

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Console