Mesh bodys vs lag and low fps

[Jerilynn Lemon]

For the longest time, I resisted the urge to buy and use mesh body on my avi. Simple reason was the amount of L$'s I poured into creating a decent, attractive person to my liking and others around me. I finally broke down and purchased a Maitreya Lara and was impressed. Not so much for the looks but also for the items specifically designed in clothing. I could step away from the "painted" on look with clothing and get properly fitted duds. A few weeks later, I sprung for a Catwa head. I purchased the required accessories and went on with my SL journey.

I eventually saw that my FPS was suffering as was my lag increasing in increments. I thought the usual reasons (crowded sims, poorly designed primage, regions close to others such as those on Mainland). I tweaked my settings to their utmost best results and saved.

With that said, here are my questions: Has anyone ever checked the added drag a mesh body could/will produce on an avatar?

I have friends who have faster machines that suffer the same problem. With some curiosity, I removed the Catwa head and saw my FPS rise and lag reduced. My loading time at sign up has also improved. I'm keeping the Maitreya body but placing the Catwa away until I get a more powerful machine.

One individual went as far as removing both and resorting back to the classic body. She tells me her lag and FPS improved dramatically. I don't want to go that far. Webbed feet just doesn't cut it for me.

Is there a way to tweak the settings so at the least, the Maitreya body will not affect the performance as much. I'm using a mid level laptop with an AMD A6-3420M APU Radeon graphics; 1.50 GHZ and 8.00 GB RAM, using a Firestorm viewer. I understand that LL recommends at the least, a 2.00GHZ. That by itself doesn't prevent me from signing in and wandering. I've had some great times with that set up here.

What else can I tweak to maximize my SL experience in the meantime, until I get a more powerful puter. I'm looking at some desktops with 3.00GHZ+ speed (I prefer a 3.50GMZ) with slots so I could install a better graphics card and step away from chips.

Could creators post a warning to those buying a mesh body and head, advising that system performance could degrade with use of the products?

Please don't think I'm saying not to buy and use Maitreya/Catwa (or their equivalents). These are great additions to some who want to improve appearance (see webbed foot comment) and get away from the noob look that some present themselves.

Perhaps creators could streamline future upgrades to help minimize any drag the additions could produce?

BTW, if you are wondering, I'm not using WiFI. I use an ethernet cable to the modem and restart the modem a few times a week. I use meduim settings with a low setting saved for those times the lag/FPS gets ridiculous. I use high/ultra ONLY when I want to photograph and immediately reset my settings back to med/low, depending on the numbers.

 

 

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

With that said, here are my questions: Has anyone ever checked the added drag a mesh body could/will produce on an avatar?

Yes but the results are inconclusive. One reason for that is that the formula for calculating render cost seems to udnerestimate the significance of flexible mesh quite a bit. Another reason is that the formula uses the nominal, rather than the actual size of a fitted mesh - that is the size the mesh was unploaded with, not the size it atcually has when it's fitted to an avatar. A third reason is that SL doesn't seem to handle worn alphas very well and a mesh body will always have lots of invisible parts.

I good rule of thumb is perhaps to multiply the official render cost by 1.5.

There is also the problem that SL doesn't really support AMD graphics cards and this is especially apparent with fitted mesh.

 

1 hour ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

One individual went as far as removing both and resorting back to the classic body. She tells me her lag and FPS improved dramatically. I don't want to go that far. Webbed feet just doesn't cut it for me.

How about shoes?

I'm part serious actually. Much of the problems with mesh bodies and body parts would be solved if people only used them when they were actually visible, not hidden behind clothes.

 

1 hour ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

Is there a way to tweak the settings so at the least, the Maitreya body will not affect the performance as much.

Reducing Draw distance and Objects & Sculpts LOD (aka RenderVolumeLODFactor) are the most obvious big savers.

With an AMD card, switch Advanced Lighting Mode on when you're in an environment with multiple mesh avatars. That will actually drastically reduce your fps but there's lag and there's lag. With an AMD card and no ALM you get all those constant render failures with fitted mesh blinking on and off and that can be far more annoying than low fps.

 

1 hour ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

I'm using a mid level laptop with an AMD A6-3420M APU Radeon graphics; 1.50 GHZ and 8.00 GB RAM,

I honestly think that if Second Life can't support that setup, it has failed because it excludes so much of its potential user base.

 

2 hours ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

Please don't think I'm saying not to buy and use Maitreya/Catwa (or their equivalents). These are great additions to some who want to improve appearance (see webbed foot comment) and get away from the noob look that some present themselves.

Oh yes but people in SL always forget about TAANSTAFL. Everything comes at a cost and the question is always, is it worth it?

 

2 hours ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

Could creators post a warning to those buying a mesh body and head, advising that system performance could degrade with use of the products?

...

 

Perhaps creators could streamline future upgrades to help minimize any drag the additions could produce?

They could and they could but why should they? They're here to make money. Your first suggestion would reduce their sales, the second would add a bit of extra work and not increase sales.

[LittleMe Jewell]

7 hours ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

I don't want to go that far. Webbed feet just doesn't cut it for me.

I can't bring myself to go the mesh body route yet - but I did finally get mesh feet to take care of the icky feet and ankles problem.

[Jerilynn Lemon]

I thank you Chic and ChinRey for the help.

As I mentioned in the original post, I'm looking for a better puter in the future. I'm hoping it helps me with the lagging/FPS loss while using a mesh body and head. I will stay away from any AMD graphics.

[Chic Aeon]

11 hours ago, ChinRey said:

There is also the problem that SL doesn't really support AMD graphics cards and this is especially apparent with fitted mesh.

Agreed.

SL has never played nicely with AMD. I had a 6900 long long ago and it was a TOP card at the time. MANY problems. No longer buy with AMD which is a very good card, just not for SL. 

[Monti Messmer]

Hi, it isn´t only the mesh body. With mesh bodies all clothes even underwear ... is a separate item. On the system avatars alot clothes, pants shirts .... were just textures that didn´t add much (except 3000x300 textures for gloves!) 

I´m still as old-style as old my avatar is. Hiding my feet 

Monti

[Jerilynn Lemon]

10 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Agreed.

SL has never played nicely with AMD. I had a 6900 long long ago and it was a TOP card at the time. MANY problems. No longer buy with AMD which is a very good card, just not for SL. 

For the most part, I lucked out with this edition of AMD chip. The only real problem I have noticed (maybe some slipped by me w/o noticing) was mesh spiking. It was suggested I downgrade to AMD catalyst-14-9-win7. For some reason, that version could handle any spiking, something to do with AMD not recognizing opensim (?). The spiking would return every time I upgraded to a current AMD version. As a matter of fact,now  when it suggests I go to a 15.x version, I simply skip it.

Edited June 10, 2017 by Jerilynn Lemon

[Lindal Kidd]

I find that my mesh body does not adversely affect my complexity.  In fact, outfits that include my Maitreya Lara body and mesh clothing are usually LESS complex than those using my classic avatar and texture/flexiprim clothing.  I can't speak to mesh heads, since I haven't got one yet.

However, if the main thing that bothers you about the classic avatar is your hands and feet, there are excellent mesh replacements for them, such as the ones sold by SLink.  You can use these without having to go the whole-body route.

The worst thing for my complexity these days is my jewelry.  So much beautiful jewelry has an insanely high complexity factor.  However, I'm finding newer releases from some creators that have much more reasonable complexity.

[LittleMe Jewell]

41 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

However, if the main thing that bothers you about the classic avatar is your hands and feet, there are excellent mesh replacements for them, such as the ones sold by SLink.  You can use these without having to go the whole-body route.

For some reason, while I absolutely love the feet, I don't like the hands at all.  Maybe I didn't play with the demo enough, but I also don't hate the system hands as much as I hate system feet - and I can more easily hide the awkward wrist joint with jewelry than I could the ankle joint.  The only downside to my new feet is that I need all new shoes, so I'm spending lots of time looking for decent freebies and bargains.

43 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

The worst thing for my complexity these days is my jewelry.  So much beautiful jewelry has an insanely high complexity factor. 

This is so true for me.  I've always had far more jewelry than shoes - I can easily get by with roughly a dozen pair of shoes - but I want lots of jewelry.  Since I came back, I've already trashed at least 1/2-3/4 of my collection just due to extreme complexity values.  Not only is it taking far longer to find acceptable jewelry, but I'm finding that lots of places do not have demos and do not give any information about prims/complexity.  While I realize that complexity is different for each person based on their computer, they could still give some info on the display weight.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

For some reason, while I absolutely love the feet, I don't like the hands at all.

You can also use the Maitreya hands separately without the whole body.

[Lindal Kidd]

I love my SLink hands, especially since they came out with the Bento version.  However, there are several other versions of mesh hands out there.  Check out the ones from Vista, for example.  If I recall, they're free.

[Nalates Urriah]

The polygon thing is not the likely cause of you drop in performance.

The GTX 1080 can render 11 billion triangles per second, as an example. The Classic avatar has 7,000+ polygons/tris. A mesh body like Slink or Maitreya has maybe 8 times more, say 56,000 for a difference of 49,000... which is rendered in 4.45x10^-6 (0.00000445) seconds in a game where we measure most things in milliseconds (0.001). Polygons just aren't your problem.

The classic avatar has one skin to which skin, tats, underwear, and clothes are baked, The server side baking takes all those layers can bakes them into 3 512x512 textures; head, upper, and lower. That is about 2.3MB of texture.

A mesh body and clothes can contain a staggering amount of texture data. Slink recommends nail textures be made at 512x512... The entire texture is used on each nail. Hands usually have a 1024 text, feet to and head and body. The tats, underwear, and clothes in the Applier layers can each be a 1024 texture. Then we get to the mesh clothes. Geting to 20 or 30MB of textures is easy. Having to deal with 10 to 15 times more textures is the more likely problem.

This is the reason the Lindens are working on a way to bake those mesh body textures just as they do for the Classic avatar.

Even with the increased lag, the ACI values for mesh stuff verses Classic stuff is less. My Classic out fits tended to run well over 150k. My mesh outfits are in the 50k to 100k range. So, what's up with that? The Lindens have been collecting render costs for stuff for months now. Many of those 'internal' changes to the servers are data collection changes. The Lindens are more about CPU cycles burned and data MB's moved than ACI. So, lots to collect, analyze, and eventually turn into a new ASI calculation. The thinking is they may have underrated texture load.

Penny Patton has an article in her blog and some posts here for how to reduce your avatars texture load. Read up on those for hints on how to get performance back.

[Chic Aeon]

24 minutes ago, Jerilynn Lemon said:

Could creators post a warning to those buying a mesh body and head, advising that system performance could degrade with use of the products?

Actually I just picked this sentence to quote to shorten the thread a bit :D.  But it is a pretty good one.

While I agree mesh bodies do add to rendering cost, most of the bodies (not all the heads) are well made and the designers have done a lot to keep that cost of being pretty down.  You can check the differences by putting them on and off AND the clothes (and accessories) you are wearing while having Avatar Rendering Costs turned on. I have done a few posts on this; here is the first one.

That little meter is an eye opener, but as you can see you can look pretty stylish and still keep your costs low. I am wondering if you have your jellydolls setting turned up (or down depending on how you look at it). That is covered in this post too along with info on some comparisons with non-mesh bodied avatars. Most of the issues are actually garments, not bodies and the older scupt items are still the worst lag offenders -- at least in all my tests. There is apparently one brand of mesh head that is really heavy mesh (not one of the most popular ones). 

Here is that post:  I did some tests both in Second Life and on two Opensim grids. My SL avatar did MUCH better than the Opensim ones -- mostly it seems because of sculpts which I never EVER liked much.  So, the idea of mesh bodies and heads being a huge contributor to viewer lag appears to be incorrect.

http://chicatphilsplace.blogspot.com/2016/08/jellydolls-and-avatar-rendering-costs.html

 

Edited June 9, 2017 by Chic Aeon