Poor Utilization of Newer GPU's

[Belle Bouvier]

I'm going to stop responding in general, I'm not looking for a war between people, I was making a reasonable request.

 

[Belle Bouvier]

1 minute ago, Skell Dagger said:

Really? I have a long-in-the-tooth (6 years old) custom gaming rig running on a 6GB 1060GTX, no SSD, and I access SL via a crappy 8MB transatlantic ADSL connection that usually pings at around 190m/s. I run constantly on Ultra or (just a shade under it at busy events) with all settings maxed (the only things I have switched off are Avatar Cloth, and my AA is just 8 rather than 16), and my average framerates are much higher than that. More than double, in fact. Hell, I haven't even overclocked this thing. What are you doing to get such low results on a rig like the one you spec'd in your first post?!

People were saying that ten years ago, as you will no doubt recall since you've been active and paying attention since "the game first launched".

Second Life always had a reputation in the past as being something of a GPU-killer. In the near-eleven years that I've been active inworld I've rarely had a GPU (NVIDIAs all, with the exception of one poorly-chosen Radeon which was easily the worst card I've ever used) run at full-tilt for more than three to four years before it started giving up the ghost. (The Radeon lasted less than two.) Pull that number down to a year and a half when I was spending all my spare time inworld and stressing my GPU to hell and back.

And here you are, complaining that SL doesn't work your GPU hard enough?

I'm saying that headroom is wasted, playing on 4k alone drags frames or did you miss the part I said I played in 4k in a later post?

[Callum Meriman]

1 hour ago, Belle Bouvier said:

I7 3770k

Wow, that's really old, six years old in fact, a potato from 2012 by todays standards. We are up to the 8xxx series right now, and they make a huge difference.

1 hour ago, Belle Bouvier said:

This game while widely known as very poorly optimized

Not the "game" - although you would be better served by saying the rendering system -  but it's the landscaping within them. The biggest problem isnt'  the engine, it's the poorly made streamed assets created by hobbyists, as opposed to a pre-rendered scene created by professionals. Where a professional would have a triangle budget, in SL we have LOD hacks to squeeze more vertices into each and every scene.

Shadows are a frame killer, but I am still getting 60fps with shadows on my 1070 with an normal clocked 7xxx series I7. In one of my regions I built it with a triangle budget, and carefully masked most alphas and I get 120fps, in the ground.

If I head to a H&G sim full of little nicknacks, then my FPS drops to 20, worse, if I go to a sim full of blended alpha... 6fps.

Not the SL engine, the beginner-level work by the landscaper.

[Love Zhaoying]

OMG! I think I’m getting the gist of it. If SL doesn’t perform on max settings on non-top of line hardware, it’s the game designer’s fault. 

Did I get it right? This is spooky! I spend so much time in forums, it’s like I can comprehend the incomprehensible.

[Skell Dagger]

1 minute ago, Belle Bouvier said:

I'm saying that headroom is wasted, playing on 4k alone drags frames or did you miss the part I said I played in 4k in a later post?

Perhaps you should move to Sansar or HiFi, then. Both have been built from the ground-up and aren't running on 15-year-old code that's been so patched and darned its not even the same old sock you once knew and loved in your pre-Windlight days.

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

7 minutes ago, Belle Bouvier said:

  I was making a reasonable request.

 

But LL doesn't come to the forums to find requests.  They have a JIRA system for that.  

Posting anything in General Discussion is going to get ........... duh, DISCUSSION

[Callum Meriman]

Just now, LittleMe Jewell said:

Posting anything in General Discussion is going to get ........... duh, DISCUSSION

And cat gifs

[Patch Linden]

3 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

But LL doesn't come to the forums to find requests.  They have a JIRA system for that.  

Posting anything in General Discussion is going to get ........... duh, DISCUSSION

Are you sure about that?

[Callum Meriman]

1 minute ago, Patch Linden said:

Are you sure about that?

Only the bestest of the Lindens!

[Skell Dagger]

8 minutes ago, Belle Bouvier said:

or did you miss the part I said I played in 4k in a later post?

I read all of your posts and didn't 'miss' anything, but thank you for assuming that I didn't bother and only skimmed so I get enough of the gist in order to add to the 'war' you're now complaining about. Your post title is Poor Utilization of Newer GPU's, not Poor Optimisation for Those Wanting to Play In 4K.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

And cat gifs

I’m starting to think you’re a bit..catty!

 

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

Are you sure about that?

*has heart attack*

[Skell Dagger]

3 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

Are you sure about that?

Patch! Are you suggesting that residents don't need to follow official channels when it comes to feature requests/bugs/complaints/rants?!

[Patch Linden]

FWIW, I do run in 4K on my provided hardware and that's with 2 additional external screens.  It's not some super computer that we secretly optimized for SL, it's just a typical off the shelf gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 in it.  SL runs quite respectably on it.  I can run the Vive or Oculus with Sansar.  

New emoticon request:   SHRUG

 

[Callum Meriman]

We had the little rant dreaming of 1999 through rose coloured glasses yesterday, today someone trying to push 4K video out of a 2012 potato... wonder what's next.

[Skell Dagger]

I am so not chuckling right now. Nope. Not at all.

[Patch Linden]

4 minutes ago, Skell Dagger said:

Patch! Are you suggesting that residents don't need to follow official channels when it comes to feature requests/bugs/complaints/rants?!

Never would I do such a thing.   But we do watch despite popular belief, and yes even have maybe, possibly acted upon some sorts of requests we've seen pass through here.

We just can't be everywhere all the time, so having a common place to funnel everything seems logical.  

[Skell Dagger]

2 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

We just can't be everywhere all the time, so having a common place to funnel everything seems logical.  

Get away with your 'logic'. This is a forum, damn it!

[LittleMe Jewell]

36 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

 

  New emoticon request:   SHRUG

 

YES !!!

[Rhonda Huntress]

For the record, I have a 4K monitor with all setting maxed including shadows.  Well, draw distance is around 200 meters and max avatar complexity is 200K and 16 non-imposters.  I have had 2 instances running in the 40's FPS at the same time with about 20 avatars all in chat range. 

Taken just a moment ago.  Turned it up to ultra and stayed around 55 FPS. 
This is on a 4K monitor (3840 X 1260) with a GTX 1070.

 

I'm happy with the advances they have made in the past 12 to 16 months.  This is easily double the previous performance.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

3 hours ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

Maybe when people realize this all those 1080 cards will be dumped on ebay for cheap.

1080s aren't popular mining cards.

I'd be careful about future flood of RX cards on the second-hand markets, though...

2 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

Wow, that's really old, six years old in fact, a potato from 2012 by todays standards. We are up to the 8xxx series right now, and they make a huge difference.

Hope that's pure sarcasm.

[Callum Meriman]

19 minutes ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

Hope that's pure sarcasm.

While there was some in calling it a potato, it was not pure sarcasm. Those who start these threads claiming they have uber gaming systems, bemoaning they can't run SL in 4K usually always have a under-performing component mixed into their "Uber gaming rig that runs other games at 120fps in 4K", things they maybe should have upgraded before starting a complaint thread blaming the Lab.

There is actually a substantial performance improvement between the 2012 Sandy Bridge CPU and MB and the 2017 Kaby Lake,  or 2018 Coffee Lake, I had one. The improvement I saw was in the order of 20fps.

It's certainly something I would suggest replacing before buying the 4k monitor, I did, and don't regret it at all. A 2012 processor and motherboard/ram combo can't even come close to a 2018 processor and motherboard/ram combo for SL, especially if you are trying to squeeze 4K out of  unoptimised mesh content.

[lucagrabacr]

Check the usage level of your other components too. If anything else in your system is bottlenecking your performance, the 30% GPU usage doesn't mean SL is incapable of utilizing all  of your GPU power, it just means something else is bottlenecking the frame per second to a certain level and that certain level of frame per second only uses 30% of your GPU power.

Edited March 24, 2018 by lucagrabacr

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Frankly, I merely read like 1/8 of the posts last night. Sorry for skipping quite a lot.

But overall, I'm surprised that there's truly a case here where the CPU turned out as the limiting factor in a 4k scenario.
Usually, it is a common sight among benchmarks of modern games that the GPU is the limiting factor when it comes to highest details or ultra-big resolutions. However, emphasis the "modern games" part... engine-wise, SL isn't on par with those, which might explain the difference.

What I personally did observe: the more VRAM, the better, especially if you like to run multiple viewers. I switch between two different desktops on a regular basis... setup #1 is a Xeon E3-1231v3, 16 GB RAM and a GTX 1050ti with 4 GB VRAM feeding a FullHD display. Setup #2 is a Ryzen 5 1600x at base clock, 16 GB RAM and a RX 480 8 GB connected to a 2k FreeSync screen. 

Even if you use the graphic presets to lower the settings in the other viewers, I do notice much smoother transitions when switching the viewers on setup # 2 and my monitoring tools hint that a full VRAM limits setup #1. Well, I do consider refreshing that one with a new Zen+ build at some point later in April... might be interesting.

And sorry again, but 120fps in general 4k gaming ... pics or it didn't happen. LOL doesn't count.

Edited March 24, 2018 by Lillith Hapmouche

[cykarushb]

CPU bottleneck. SL is very single threaded so it will quickly max your processor out and leave your GPU with less work to do.

Its a bit more complicated than that to explain, but basically the better single threaded performance your CPU can do, the more of your GPU will be utilized.  So if you have something like an i7 7740x which has an insane single thread benchmark score you would see more work being left to the GPU, leading to increased GPU usage, which doesnt meant better framerates, it just means that you wont maybe cap out your framerate, it wont drop easily.

For example, i have 3 machines i can play secondlife on. One is an Acer Ferrari 3400 from 2004 but thats unrelated. One is my 2006 era workstation with a Core2Quad Q6600 and two Quadro FX 4600's. It is 12+ year old hardware, it gets the same performance as my current acer aspire with its i5 7200u and integrated intel HD620 graphics. Approximately 40fps on average in average complexity places with 10 or less people around on overall medium/high settings. However with that laptop what i can do is really crank up the settings without impacting my framerate too much, HD620 is about on par with one of those Quadros or an 8800 GTX. With the laptop i can start using advance lighting and the fancy water reflections and all that without losing more than maybe 10fps.

While on the q6600 system if i do that, i drop to single digits. And this is because of the CPU bottleneck. The Q6600 has similar multi core/thread performance to the i5 7200u, but the i5's single threaded performance is drastically better, and the fancy rendering features like the water reflections and lighting are actually handled more by the CPU than the GPU. SO when the CPU is able to do it better, it wont impact the framerate as much, meaning your GPU handling everything else will be utilized better and will result in a better framerate.

tl;dr, i know it sounds dumb, but its really the 3770k. SL is the only game where you're going to see that, the 3770k is plenty even in 2018 for anything else out there, and if it was 2012 still and you had a GTX 680, you would be seeing essentially the same kind of performance in SL, the game is just bad at utilizing multiple threads for certain aspects of the engine. And thats just because the game has been continuously built upon older versions from a time when dual core CPU's didnt even exist yet.