Best hardware to run two viewers simultaneosly

[Baccho Boa]

Hello there,

I am still trying to understand what is the  best hardware to run SL at high performance, and I have  a second question too: what about if I would like to run two viewers (Firestorm) simultaneously???

Is that possible?

Thank you in advance.

 

Best regards.

 

BB

[Quinn Lysette]

just buy a cheapo quadcore laptop at walmart with a simple nvida card and yr good  if u wanna use just 1 pc get a newer amd 6core cpu or more expensive  outdated intel quad i5 cpu and gtx 1070 add  32gigs of ram and u can use 2 viewers at the same time

 

 

btw im no expert i just like messin around so its best if you wait for somone who knows what they are talking bout to answer your question

[cykarushb]

Anything with more than 2 cores really, a decent mid tier GPU with enough video memory to share.

Pretty much any decent quadcore from even a few generations back + any mid tier GPU from a few generations back and newer will run multiple instances of SL. Though for firestorm you want a bare minimum of 8gb of ram, since FS can use 2-3gb per instance.

So older stuff, something like an intel i5 2500, GTX 750ti, 8gb of ram.

Or newer stuff, something like a Ryzen 3 1200, 1050ti, 8gb of ram (or more, in 2017 16gb isnt uncommon)

The key point here is CPU cores and single threaded performance. Something like an FX 8350, although its an 8 core processor, has kind of weak single threaded performance so it would be overshadowed by something like an i5 4460, with much better single threaded performance.

The best hardware for SL overall really just comes down to single threaded performance, since the big killer with SL performance is the physics rendering, which doesnt really take advantage of multiple cores that well. You might notice on here that a lot of users are hitting a performance ceiling of sorts, where it doesnt matter how good your processor is for other things, it wont get better for SL. Someone with a top of the line i7 7700k and dual GTX 1080ti's, 32gb of ram, SL on an SSD and all that, might end up seeing the same framerates as someone with a mediocre build of an i5 2500k, a single GTX 770 and 8gb of ram on a 7200rpm HDD.

[amywilders]

Sorry for jumping in here, but...

If I understand this correctly, it's no point in upgrading a decent PC. 8gb RAM and a good cable is good enough and no matter what I buy, it will still be a lot of lag when I go to a club full of dancing avatars, right?

/Amy

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

2 hours ago, amywilders said:

If I understand this correctly, it's no point in upgrading a decent PC. 8gb RAM and a good cable is good enough and no matter what I buy, it will still be a lot of lag when I go to a club full of dancing avatars, right?

It totally depends.  If you tend to run multiple applications at the same time (browsers, photo editing, mail client, etc...) and/or multiple viewer instances, then more RAM will definitely help. 

A new i7 CPU will usually perform better than an old i3 one.

A good quality graphics card with at least a few GB of memory on the card will also help a lot, primarily in getting things to rez quicker.

 

I can go to a packed sim event, with 40-50 avatars, many with a CI of 100,000 or higher, and I still don't lag very badly - at least not after I get there and give it a few seconds for everything to rez.  I can go to a different sim with those same avatars and feel like I'm walking in a tar pit.  My guess there is the difference in how much stuff is 'running' on the sim.

[amywilders]

Now the whole thing is making more sense to me.

Thank you LittleMe for explaining

/Amy 

 

 

[Creed Aldrin]

I gues it is where GPU onboard memory amount plays important part. Even with single viewer 4 GB might be just enough and more is better.

With 2 viewers that depends (to some degree) if they are on the same sim. But better to double amount if GPU DRAM.

If GPU DRAM is exhausted, GPU driver is able to swap to main system DRAM, but this is slower and affects FPS.

When GPU DRAM is not enough, you can fine tune viewer settings to get desirable FPS, but visuals will deteriorate. One idea is to set second viewer to low graphics and limit the amount of texture memory (in viewer settings) to minimum.

Edited January 15, 2018 by Creed Aldrin

[cykarushb]

GPU video memory? You dont need much. I think unless youre running max settings it tends to stick around 400-500mb usage? Ive played SL with two viewers on general medium settings on a 1gb GT 710 before and saw no performance issues. You can easily use a 2gb card like a basic GTX 1050, GT 1030, RX 550, etc and not run into a VRAM limitation with multiple viewers.

[Creed Aldrin]

We need right tool to measure and diagnose, rather than guess. Can you suggest a tool? In my experience, with very simple one, 3GB onboard VRAM is used fully at many locations . What it is used for, and what happens when it is exhausted, only graphics driver knows that.

Other thing, everyone has different understanding what is medium or high graphics settings, and what is heavy and light populated sim. Even screen resolutions vary wildly, HD to 4K.

So it is often question here in tech section.... I got latest top card and FPS is so low! (oh yes i have 4K screen, it is 8 Megapixel and i expect it redrawn 40 times per second).

And we have no reliable tool to diagnose this, like good old task manager for CPU apps, where you see cores load, DRAM amount, and swap to disk (if any). I guess those who develop SL viewers do have and shoud share their experience.

 

Edited January 17, 2018 by Creed Aldrin

[cykarushb]

Alright then

GPU-Z, on max settings in 1080p im running around 720-730mb of video memory usage.

Note that dropping to my usual medium/high settings brings that down to about 650. And that dropping down to a 1024x768 window doesnt effect vram usage beyond maybe 20mb.

2gb is fine.

The important thing with running multiple viewers is a processor with good single threaded performance and multiple cores to spread out the load.

[Creed Aldrin]

Here is my experience with 2 viewers. It never hits exactly 100% due to some reserve. And, since it is 95%, we no not know, how much is actually enough. But GPU load is 50% i suppose GPU DRAM amount is the bottleneck until we diagnose better.

 

I feel we need someone who knows inside kitchen and rule out our guessings.

Edited January 18, 2018 by Creed Aldrin

[Baccho Boa]

Hello there again,

finally I am going to buy a new PC, my old  "AMD Athlon II X64 640 + AMD Radeon HD7800 1 GB + 12 GB RAM" is going to be substituted by a new system:

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G 4 x 3600 Mhz

MSI A320M PRO-VD/S

16GB DDR4 2400 MHz

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti 4 GB GDDR5

SSD 240 GB Kingston

 

What do you think, am I going to have the chance to run two or more Firstorm viewer (or lighter clients like Cool Viewer) simultanously, better if at high/maximum graphic settings????‍♀️

 

It was simply impossible using my old PC, the clients did freeze, anytime!!

 

Thank you in advance again.

 

Regards.

 

BB

Edited October 12, 2018 by Baccho Boa

[cykarushb]

Very nice choice, though I would personally forgoe the 1050ti entirely and save up money for a better gpu. The integrated graphics on the 2400g are actually pretty capable and are around the tier of a GTX 750/GT 1030 in many games. It'll do SL perfectly fine (considering Intel HD620 can play this game at higher settings with decent framerates and that's quite a few tiers lower than the 2400g's integrated graphics)

If you go that route, make sure to get the fastest clocked ram your motherboard supports, APUs use system memory as video memory, faster ram = faster vram

You will definitely be able to run multiple viewers on that configuration. I've run multiple viewers on significantly lower specced pcs. Most of what you need is as I said ages ago, multiple cores with decent single threaded performance and ram.

[Ironman Dembo]

Don't listen to that guy above you. Second life with mesh will always uses your gpu ram more than the old days. You need 4GB ram for gpu n 8GB ram for cpu. 2-3 GB RAM will makes yo firestorm crashing with 20-30 people on screen.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

26 minutes ago, Ironman Dembo said:

Don't listen to that guy above you. Second life with mesh will always uses your gpu ram more than the old days. You need 4GB ram for gpu n 8GB ram for cpu. 2-3 GB RAM will makes yo firestorm crashing with 20-30 people on screen.

My gpu is set to use 2gb of ram, much as you can use on firestorm,  I think the other viewers LL and such only allow 512mb,  it's not going to use more than that,   and SL uses the cpu more than it will ever use the gpu.