Texture Loading

[Buffy Latzo]

I have been having issues with Textures being grey especially when i walk out of one room into another, not all of them just a select few, even more annoying is i get the same thing even if i zoom away and back right away texture is grey and has to reload, Is this a viewer issue or could it be the sim? I do not recall this happening on my other parcel, Puzzled,  

[Buffy Latzo]

well i did a clean install of Firestorm and all my issues are fixed, Whoot, Guess i should have done that to begin with ,Thank goodness it was driving me crazy

[Rolig Loon]

It's very common, and it has to do with the textures and your computer and your graphics settings.  Some people (designers, not you) have the mistaken idea that images are better if they cram a lot of pixels in them than if they go for as low a pixel density as they can, without compromising clarity.  They'll load 1024 x 1024 pixel images, which take an age to load and use up a lot of your graphics card cache memory.  That makes them, and a lot of other textures around you, look gray for a long time.

Then, if your graphics card is not really designed for the heavy demand environment of SL (or if you don't even have a graphics card but are using an integrated chip on your mother board), you simply can't handle image loading very fast, and you may not have enough cache memory to save images temporarily.  That means again that they will be slow to load and that your poor graphics card has to keep loading them fresh each time you see them ( as in, when you leave the area, or even when you turn around and look the other way).

Them, on top of everything else, if you have your draw distance set high enough that your viewer is trying to show you every blessed texture in the entire region, you're asking way too much.  Textures, especially at a distance, will take a looooong time to load.  The same thing will happen if you have set preferences to show avatars with high complexity (or lots of non-imposter avatars) or have your graphics quality slider set higher than your graphics card can handle comfortably.

Edited March 27, 2017 by Rolig Loon

[Buffy Latzo]

Thank you for your comment Rolig,  I have an excellent Graphics card and yes i did lower my draw distance and that seemed to help a bit, I still see some textures as grey but not as many as before,  my draw distance is set at 98 now and my graphics can handle high but i have them set on mid as not to overload, 

Edited March 28, 2017 by Buffy Latzo

[Buffy Latzo]

Where exactly would i go to check preferences to show avatars with high complexity ? i have looked through my graphics settings- Don't see anything about that and thanks so much Rolig for your help!

[Madelaine McMasters]

SL Viewer: Preferences->Graphics->Avatar Maximum Complexity (just below Draw distance)

Firestorm:  Preferences->Graphics->Maximum Complexity (just below Max particle count)

Drag the slider to the right to see more complex avatars. The highest setting before "No Limit" is ~ 350,000. That's enough to render even the most egregiously decorated avatar, without exposing yourself to the graphics card crashing antics of griefers. Say "no" to "No Limit".

;-).

Edited March 28, 2017 by Madelaine McMasters

[Buffy Latzo]

Thank you so much Maddelaine

[Buffy Latzo]

What seems to be odd to me is i only see grey textures at my home, this makes me wonder if its the sim as i have been having other issues here as well, script warnings and flying objects, Can something on the sim cause Grey textures? so confusing

[Rolig Loon]

As I said in my reply earlier, your region may easily have way too many high-res images for your graphics card to handle comfortably.  That happens a lot in regions that have shopping malls, for example.  Clothing stores, in particular, display hundreds of images on their walls, and some owners insist on using an insane number of 1024 x 1024 textures when they could do with ones that use a quarter of that resolution or less. Shops can be incredibly laggy, dragging down the entire region with them.  So can places that use a lot of mesh or sculpty grass, or buildings with overly detailed textures.

Or, it's possible that the servers themselves need attention.  You could submit a support case to ask Linden Lab to investigate if you have some specific detailed observations for them to examine.

[Nalates Urriah]

Yours is similar to the problem discussed here:

In your case the textures have been completely discarded and the reload is taking so long the video card has to skip rendering the texture until it can be loaded. So, you see gray.

The solution is the same as dissed there.

[Buffy Latzo]

Thank you and yes our Landlord has issued a ticket with Linden Labs we shall see if it helps, i did have a friend over and she said nothing was grey for her so that is why i assumed maybe it was me or something to do with my viewer, Firestorm chat did suggest to do a clean install if things dd not get better,  I have the NVIDIA GFORCE GTX 750 GRAPHICS with 2 GB of dedicated memory, i have my texture memory buffer set at 1024 things are not blurry at all just grey for a second but sometimes certain things are not even there at all then they pop when i get closer, its never the same thing tho which i could blame on the item itself, just frustrating, ty everyone for your feedback! Appreciate it

Edited March 29, 2017 by Buffy Latzo

[Nalates Urriah]

Check the size of your main viewer cache. Larger is better.

Firestorm and Linden have a default cache size of 512MB. I use a 4GB ram drive to house my Linden cache, it is full. Scene render is fast once an area as rendered an been cached. But, I do get some cache thrashing. With FS I use a larger SSD drive and a cache size of 9GB which currently has 7GB in it. As it isn't full, it is almost as responsive as the ram drive.

If you have not increased your cache size... give that a try.

[Buffy Latzo]

Thanks Nalates, My Landlord did ask me if i was using a different house and yes i am, that is when i noticed the grey textures, I did a test, walked all over my land on the outside of the house front to back no textures turned grey then i walked inside the house soon as i turned back to look at the other room some textures were grey again, Could my house be causing the problem?

[Rolig Loon]

Not really.  It's just that as everyone has explained, your graphics cache is so small that it can't hold all of the downloaded textures that you are seeing. As a result, when you look in a new direction the system has to remove older textures from your cache to make room for new ones.  Until a new texture is downloaded, it's gray. You have been able to ease the problem a bit, but 2 Gb of memory on that graphics card is just not enough to prevent all of the texture thrashing when you are in an area that has a lot of complicated textures.

Read http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/cache

[Buffy Latzo]

what i don't understand is my parcel is very private, when i go to big stores or sims with lots of textures i have no issues at all, i see no grey objects so if my graphics card was the issue i would be having problems i would think at these other sims with way more textures than what is at my Home, I did find out today my landlord said they have had issues with our sim for awhile, an Sl GLitch something to do with the memory, i assume now this may be the issue, i had taken my whole house to a sandbox as a test, it was perfect, no grey or slow loading objects, i stayed for about an hour to make sure, all was fine,,  

[Chic Aeon]

Well you did a great job testing and that was certainly the thing to do.

I have a GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2 with 4 Gb of ram and I have issues with BLACK areas (not pink or gray but they are on mesh so maybe that is the difference) just on a VERY FEW things. One of them was something I made and so I made the texture lower resolution as a test and that didn't help a thing.  It still often loads black while everything else in the room on a good running sim is fine.

 

So you know it is your sim and I hope that gets resolved.  My issue is still a mystery but I am guessing it is only MY issue as both my products and the house I am in that someone else made but that I see parts of as black have sold very well :D.    

Still, a pain. 

 

PS. Unfortunately the "clean install" advice rarely works. It's a bit like tech support telling you it is YOUR modem and not them *wink*.

 

 

[Buffy Latzo]

Thank you Chic, i knew it couldn't be my graphics as this is a new computer my old lap top had a lesser memory and i never had issues on it even being older, i sometimes see Black too like my partners mesh head will be black for a few seconds then load fine but i only notice that happening on our sim lol,  I did have some textures that were a 1024 so i changed them to a 512 that seemed to help alot but we may be relocating as it is very annoying at times,

[Buffy Latzo]

I have 16 GB of SdRAm and one TB of Hard drive & 6 Mb of shared cache ,, honestly i am  not even sure what that all means but i got this computer specifically for Second life - if it were my computer that was the issue  i would be very upset indeed lol 

[Nalates Urriah]

That it only happens inside the house suggests you are dealing with an "Interest List" issue. Often scenery is on huge prims that some part of remains in camera view, so they remain rendered.

The viewer maintains an 'Interest List', things the viewer is interested in rendering... the stuff  in front of your avatar, the stuff your camera sees. The process is not a simple  one. A year or two ago the Lab did a lot of work on the Interest List. The effort was to get nearby things in your view to render first. To speed things up they ignored the things behind you, those things the camera couldn't see. If you are turning 360 degrees, you force the system to load everything around you. When you start walking or spend time looking in one direction the system will start dropping the things behind you.

Inside a structure figuring out what can be seen and what is behind something else gets complex. So, we see odd things happen during the render process.

AFAIK, there are no settings to change the Interest List behavior. The Draw Distance affects it by controlling how much stuff can be in the list. Long ago it was common to turn draw distance down to 64m in shopping malls to reduce the amount of stuff the viewer had to deal with. Now good builders build areas with small areas/rooms inside the stores. That accomplishes the same thing as the viewer recognizes when something is hidden by something else (usually).

What you are seeing may be normal behavior. That you have machines that behave differently reveals how the viewer deals with different video cards. Newer cards may drop more textures sooner as they think they are more efficient at loading and unloading textures. Old cards may try to hold on to textures until forced to drop them. It is hard to know what is happening.

When it takes a long time to get those textures back (turn 180 and it takes for ever to render what was previously rendered) it is hard to pin down the problem. Textures and mesh should be in your cache. So, they should render quickly. But, from time to time I do see it fail.

[Buffy Latzo]

That is so funny you said that about turning 180 that seems to be when i have the problem, its odd that it only started to happen recently tho, same computer all settings are the same only thing i can think of is Doing a clean install of Firestorm- i was told in group chat that sometime your anti virus can block certain features of your viewer and that is the  thing i have not tried as of yet, was hoping the move would help but what i did notice was the more mesh items i put out on my land the more problems, not seeing grey now but i am having items not visible after doing a 180 then they pop and rez clear, i guess its a mystery and i will just have to get used to it