I am trying to find out why I have such bad FPS

[Disenfranchise]

20 hours ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

"Pretty sure" because you monitored its performance? Or happily guessing?

its only running 20 percent

[Lillith Hapmouche]

OK. Have fun sorting this out on your own, if you do not wish to provide proper information.

[Dean Haystack]

The amount of miss information around these is always depressing.

Before anything, lag is a loose term that more often than not is used incorrectly to label a problem that is no such thing.
Secondly, scripts don't impact the frame rate performance of the viewer... Scripts run on Linden Labs servers, they impact other scripts running on that SIM and on every SIM running on that CPU, it has nothing to do with the ability of your personal machine to render frames.
As someone else mentioned, SL is not a game, from it's inception on 2003 and without taking away from the amazing technical achievements, SL graphics engine was always sub par, and even with all the added on features is it sill subpar today, couple that with the liberal use of texture and you have a real problem in your hands.

With all that said, LL is partially at fault here as well as GPU manufacturers to a lesser degree, I can tell you for example at least 2 AMD GPUs that I've owned in the past get artifacts for no good reason.

That could, at least partially, explain the problems your GTX 1080 is having, it's not the first time I've heard Pascal GPUs delivering sub par performance compared to older lesser cards, like someone mentioned here the Maxwell GTX 970.
I can tell you that right now I am not using the latest drivers for my GPU, because they make shadows flicker like a Christmas tree.

So your problem might just be compatibility issues, Nvidia won't even look at it because SL has such a small audience, and LL is too busy spending SL profits on Sansar and Blockworld to do anything about it.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

4 hours ago, Dean Haystack said:

Nvidia won't even look at it because SL ...

Psst! There's that never-dying rumor around here that Nvidia is benefactor and the Green Knight upon an OpenGL steed. Don't you go staining that myth ... 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 4/26/2018 at 5:01 AM, Disenfranchise said:

mainly because arma 3 server optimization is terrible

That makes absolutely no sense, framerate is completely clientside.

SL is massively CPU bound by the way.

On 4/28/2018 at 9:50 PM, Drake1 Nightfire said:

I'm gonna say it, because its this thinking that causes so many of these threads.. 

SL IS NOT A GAME!!! 

It is like nothing else. It isn't optimized like CoD, God of War, GTA V or WoW. People put 1024 textures on a micro prim. And then use dozens of them around their builds.Piss poor texture management and mesh optimization causes more drain on your GPU than any other thing out there. 

I'm getting tired of reading this for the better part of my 14 years in SL. Yes SL doesn't PLAY as a game. Does it use realtime 3D graphics, sounds and physics and is  the same as any game out there from a systemic point of view? Absolutely.

Piss poor detail and texture management is on the content creator side, they don't care and unfortunately people keep making them richer instead of putting them out of business and kicking them out of the grid as they should be, if they wheren't all just trying to lay the blame on Linden Labs as has always been the tradition.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Drake1 Nightfire]

1 hour ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

I'm getting tired of reading this for the better part of my 14 years in SL. Yes SL doesn't PLAY as a game. Does it use realtime 3D graphics, sounds and physics and is  the same as any game out there from a systemic point of view? Absolutely.

No, it really isn't. Gamers come to SL thinking it will run just as well as COD, WoW or any other mmorpg, which it will NEVER run like.  Just because it uses the same type of software does not mean it is the same thing. A boat has an engine, drive shaft and exhaust, does that make it a car? Hell, a plane has an engine, wheels, a drive shaft, brakes, steering, seats, and a whole slew of the same components as a car, doesnt make it one.. 

MMORPGs and SL have nothing in common as to how they run. I can run Skyrim on ultra on my kids dinosaur pc with intel graphics. It refuses to even boot up SL. "Games" are optimized by the creators. SL is not. Stop calling it a game. 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

It doesn't mean it HAS to run this poorly. Don't have such low expectations.

[Theresa Tennyson]

15 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

It doesn't mean it HAS to run this poorly. Don't have such low expectations.

Most other games don't have objectives that involve taking ultra-closeup high-resolution photos of your character's face or photos of extremely cluttered static scenes with complicated lighting. Second Life does, because people set their own objectives and those are things that people want to do. There are products on the market that work really well for those objectives but horribly for other more traditionally "gamelike" activities. Taking thirty different heads (from four mesh makers and eighteen different texture makers) designed for ultra-closeups and putting them all together in one place while animating them (i.e. dance club?) Terrible idea. The question is - how much do you want to protect people from their own decisions, or other people's decisions, when those decisions might be perfectly appropriate for other parts of Second Life?

[Disenfranchise]

ive been in SL 12 years. I know its not a game, I know textures are optimized poorly. But mine is all viewer related issues. not in game content. my gpu has no problem rendering.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

4 hours ago, Disenfranchise said:

ive been in SL 12 years. I know its not a game, I know textures are optimized poorly. But mine is all viewer related issues. not in game content. my gpu has no problem rendering.

Yeah sorry we went a little off topic.

I'm not sure what could cause this your system vastly outmatches mine (Ryzen 5 & gtx1070).

Drivers up to date?

Edited May 19, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Disenfranchise]

seems fairly up to date, notice the issue only when around 3 or more avatars which would bring me to the entire creator optimization thing, im assuming my only option is to turn down avatar impostors

[cykarushb]

On 5/17/2018 at 4:37 PM, Drake1 Nightfire said:

MMORPGs and SL have nothing in common as to how they run. I can run Skyrim on ultra on my kids dinosaur pc with intel graphics. It refuses to even boot up SL. "Games" are optimized by the creators. SL is not. Stop calling it a game. 

Off topic but this sounds entire fake. I dont think even HD 620 can do more than 1080p medium in Skyrim, and it could hardly be called dinosaur tier. Dino tier would be like Intel GMA x3100 or something which wouldnt even be able to display the video ads on steam, let alone play skyrim at all, or ultra for that matter.

And SL can at least start on hardware below its minimum requirements, related, and theres no way Skyrim would even start on there, i had trouble getting Steam to open to install Hotline Miami...

But as i said, off topic.

Same with this

On 5/17/2018 at 5:08 PM, Kyrah Abattoir said:

It doesn't mean it HAS to run this poorly. Don't have such low expectations.

This is a good point though, just because SL isnt laid out like other games, doesnt mean it has to perform this bad. This game looks average, its nothing special anymore, its not that advance and its not really that intensive, its just that it utilizes hardware so poorly. "This ferrari is performing bad because of cheap gasoline i put in it, not because 5 of the 6 cylinders arent working".

Its built off an engine that came from a time when single core processors were the norm, its terrible at using the CPU for CPU tasks, and it likes to offload rendering of certain things to the CPU instead of the modern GPU's that can handle it. Video cards have come a long way from the early to mid 2000's, the best example i can think of is how a Core2Quad Q6600 came out in 2007, where the highest end GPU of the time was the Geforce 8800 Ultra. That CPU can be paired with up to a GTX 670 without a CPU bottleneck occurring (widely debated on forums, most say 660ti but if you OC a little its fine with the 670). That GPU is roughly... well simply look at this:

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-670-vs-Nvidia-GeForce-8800-Ultra/2181vsm14944

Now we're getting to the point where a high end GPU is actually pairing well with the high end CPU's. There was a time when the GPU didnt need to do that much because the CPU could handle it all, that time is gone, we have GPUs that are incredibly powerful and are capable of a lot more and LL hasnt done any optimization to properly use them.

SL is still a game, it is an electronic experience, whatever the hell you want to call it. Smallworlds was also just a game and it was basically the same thing, just a social avatar game. SL in its purest form is just another social avatar game. Theres a lot more features for sure, and you can do just about anything compared to say, Habbo Hotel. But its in the same category and is. a. game.

 

19 hours ago, Disenfranchise said:

seems fairly up to date, notice the issue only when around 3 or more avatars which would bring me to the entire creator optimization thing, im assuming my only option is to turn down avatar impostors

It might be an issue with just extensive avatar detailing, i sometimes have decent framerates in crowds until someone joins with a complexity of like 500k+ and it just bombs my FPS. Disabling avatar Cloth tends to help a bit. If theres lot of flexi hair around, which for some reason people still use flexi hair, turn down flexi detail. These are CPU bound tasks, and even a high end processor is going to be absolutely wrecked by those details if lots of them are going on at once.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Yes SL is old, and yes the engine isn't the best. But good content creators have to work WITH the engine to try to get the best out of it, ever game engine in the world has flaws and quirks.

And today's quirks are nothing compared to lets say a PSX where the memory (2mb of ram 1mb of vram) was so minuscule and so aggressively maintained that you had to make all your textures in small square tiles to minimize ram usage.

On SL they go "I'm just gonna completely ignore the problem and pretend I'm not contributing to it" and then just blame the user for having a slow computer.

7 hours ago, cykarushb said:

It might be an issue with just extensive avatar detailing, i sometimes have decent framerates in crowds until someone joins with a complexity of like 500k+ and it just bombs my FPS. Disabling avatar Cloth tends to help a bit. If theres lot of flexi hair around, which for some reason people still use flexi hair, turn down flexi detail. These are CPU bound tasks, and even a high end processor is going to be absolutely wrecked by those details if lots of them are going on at once.

I've noticed something in my region, my client will just FREEZES when some people teleport in (sometimes long enough to disconnect me). Since they typically aren't griefers, I'd like to know what the hell they are wearing because it sounds like there is a creator out there that needs to fix something.

I do wish avatar impostor would do a better job at derendering people because my experience is that it's still loading "too much" sometimes as even someone's impostor can be taxing.

Edited May 20, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[MaxCraxster]

On 5/20/2018 at 5:57 AM, cykarushb said:

Its built off an engine that came from a time when single core processors were the norm, its terrible at using the CPU for CPU tasks, and it likes to offload rendering of certain things to the CPU instead of the modern GPU's that can handle it.

I agree with this point of view. I've built my own pc's for decades and I've never seen a piece of software that utilizes hardware as badly as Second Life. Unfortunately, this is a fact.

I keep wondering what the community can do to resolve the issue. Can we form some sort of advanced SL hardware user group or something so that we can work with LL to request enhancements to the product that will utilize GPU hardware more efficiently?

Or is the engine so lost that the only way to help it would be to throw it out and start all over?

Can Black Dragon get around some of the limitations in a major way?  I've been using BD for about a year or two and even it provides me with slow frame rates in places with more than a few avatars running top of the line hardware. I would imagine that BD would be bound by many limitations of the regular SL engine but I'm not positive.

I realize the content people build can be to blame, but seriously, how hard would it be to have a piece of code in place that could detect bad content and streamline it on the fly? I wouldn't think that would be hard at all. So I'm left wondering what is wrong with the SL engine that causes it to hog the CPU and not utilize the GPU as it should like just about any other piece of software does?

 

 

Edited February 7, 2019 by MaxCraxster

[Theresa Tennyson]

18 hours ago, MaxCraxster said:

I realize the content people build can be to blame, but seriously, how hard would it be to have a piece of code in place that could detect bad content and streamline it on the fly? I wouldn't think that would be hard at all.

Here's the source code - have at it:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Get_source_and_compile

ETA  - I see Whirly sent you the source code link about a year ago. How's it coming?

Edited February 7, 2019 by Theresa Tennyson

[MaxCraxster]

8 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Here's the source code - have at it:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Get_source_and_compile

 

 

That's the common response I've see quite often. Not really that helpful though. My coding level isn't that high and sometimes just reading someone else's code that you didn't build yourself can be a *major* nightmare plus I'm nowhere near Niran's level and don't claim to be. I would think that there should be other settings similar to Jelly Dolls or the like that could help for all the content issues though.

I am curious if SL uses the very latest OpenGL or DirectX versions for starters. I know that info is somewhere out there I just don't have the link at the moment. Might even be on Niran's site. Anyone know where the official link is about the SL OpenGL and DX versions currently being used? In the standard viewer I thought it used to be available right on one of the Systems Info pages. Not sure where that would be in BD though. I've seen it years ago but don't recall exactly where it is.

 

In BD under Help About it lists what looks like the version I am running on my machine but I don't know if that is the same version SL is using or not:

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 1080 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 25.21.14.1722
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 417.2

Edited February 8, 2019 by MaxCraxster

[NiranV Dean]

Last info i got was Second Life uses OpenGL 3.2.

But really the thing is Second Life can use anything as long as it is available. Your GPU supports OpenGL up to 4.6. So in theory the Viewer could make use of all additions made until that version and would still run for you. Whether SL uses newer or older OpenGL is solely dependent on whether it actually uses newer available commands to do its stuff.

Performance has sadly dropped over the past years and i'm sure i've done everything possible to not cause this myself with any of my changes, though that's where it ends already. SL is complex and going to a place with many avatars around is hard to analyse the performance of, while standing in a place with many avatars, many systems are running at the same time, doing a lot of work at the same time, many systems of which are slow if heavily used.

Shadows for instance, in empty places shadows make hardly any difference in framerate, in heavy places it makes the difference between having single digit framerates and 40 fps in some cases. This could be due to many things, one being BD using a different shadow projection shader as well as a different smoothing algorythm, it could be fancier but slower and since shadows are also highly dependent on the complexity of the scene because shadows technically render the scene a second time in a super basic version with a transformation to create a shadow texture that tells the viewer where to shadow and where not to, imagine it like you're looking from the sun's angle down at the ground, now project a huge black/white texture over the entire viewable area, whenever you see an object you start drawing the shape of said object into the texture, lighter the further it is away, basically like a depth map. This texture now tells the Viewer which parts of the world are shadowed and it does this in such a way that the texture contains 3D info. (It's also used for volumetric lighting, essentially just brightening unshadowed parts). Now if said scene contains a lot of high poly avatars, these need to be rendered into the projection as well, so the higher their complexity the more impact they will have, this adds up if you have multiple avatars with 1+million polygons standing around. Ontop, there's also the resolution of shadows which can cause major framedrops too, the shadow resolution in BD is slightly higher by default (2048x2048 rather than your screen resolution, 1920x1058 in my case) which does have a small impact too (actually it improved framerate because only 2 of 4 shadow maps are 2048 while the other two are 1024x1024, though on a complex scene this might look completely different especially when the complex things are close to you where the 2048x2048 shadow maps are used).

Personally i'm more concerned about the overall stability of your framerate though rather than the max performance. I've noticed a much more sensible framerate, it's much easier to get massive framedrops, especially when moving around. Sadly there is nothing i can do about that, the performance is only going to be worse unless content gets optimized in a large scale, throwing better hardware at it is not going to help much either anymore, we're at a peak point of single core performance, if you're using an Intel or Ryzen you're pretty much decked out on performance in SL.