Issue with textures

[SubZeroWins]

Hello all,

Im using firestorm and have a problem with textures.

When zooming far out and then zooming back in, the textures in world become grey or sometimes blurred and then they start again to load, until they all are fully rezzed.

Im sure it has to do with the viewer's settings, can somebody tell me which one?

[LittleMe Jewell]

5 hours ago, SubZeroWins said:

Hello all,

Im using firestorm and have a problem with textures.

When zooming far out and then zooming back in, the textures in world become grey or sometimes blurred and then they start again to load, until they all are fully rezzed.

Im sure it has to do with the viewer's settings, can somebody tell me which one?

It could just be that when you zoom out, you are filling your texture cache with whatever new stuff the viewer tries to rez and then when you come back in close those specific textures have aged out and need to be reloaded.  Does it happen everywhere or only places with lots of stuff?

If that is the situation, increasing your texture cache (if possible) would help. 

[Chic Aeon]

3 hours ago, SubZeroWins said:

Hello all,

Im using firestorm and have a problem with textures.

When zooming far out and then zooming back in, the textures in world become grey or sometimes blurred and then they start again to load, until they all are fully rezzed.

Im sure it has to do with the viewer's settings, can somebody tell me which one?

Asking the inworld Firestorm group is your fastest answer. Whirly likely know but faster asking FS support. You can get there from HELP in the top of the FS viewer bar.  

[SubZeroWins]

30 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

It could just be that when you zoom out, you are filling your texture cache with whatever new stuff the viewer tries to rez and then when you come back in close those specific textures have aged out and need to be reloaded.  Does it happen everywhere or only places with lots of stuff?

If that is the situation, increasing your texture cache (if possible) would help. 

It happens everywhere, though I havent try it in places with less stuff, your suggestion might help I think, going to try it now.

[SubZeroWins]

Yeah thats it, thank you

[SubZeroWins]

Damn, I got back at my home and the problem persists, even I slide it up to 9984 mb

[LittleMe Jewell]

11 minutes ago, SubZeroWins said:

Damn, I got back at my home and the problem persists, even I slide it up to 9984 mb

That would imply that your connection is playing a role in the problem - or possibly, if  'back home' is a different computer, then the computer or viewer settings there.

Maybe post viewer help info -- Help / About in the viewer.  That will tell us a bit about your system and settings.

Edited August 15, 2018 by LittleMe Jewell

[SubZeroWins]

Im using 50mbps connection and always the same computer

When mentioned "back at home" I meant in sl home lol

 

Firestorm 5.1.7 (55786) Jul 13 2018 20:00:04 (64bit) (Firestorm-Releasex64) with Havok support
Release Notes

You are at 97.4, 37.2, 22.8 in Belle Fox located at sim10476.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.51.182:13019)
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Belle Fox/97/37/23
(global coordinates 210,785.0, 245,797.0, 22.8)
Second Life Server 18.07.20.518086
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4170 CPU @ 3.70GHz (3691.48 MHz)
Memory: 12189 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 64-bit (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GT 710/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 23.21.13.9101
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 391.01

RestrainedLove API: RLV v3.2.1 / RLVa v2.2.0.55786
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.0.2l zlib/1.2.8 nghttp2/1.25.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.4
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 1.10.05
Dullahan: 1.1.1080 / CEF: 3.3325.1750.gaabe4c4 / Chromium: 65.0.3325.146
LibVLC Version: 2.2.8
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Settings mode: Phoenix
Viewer Skin: Vintage (Classic)
Window size: 1920x1033 px
Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)
Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 1024 m
Bandwidth: 500 kbit/s
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: Medium-High (4/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: Yes
Texture memory: 1024 MB (1)
VFS (cache) creation time (UTC): 2018-8-14T15:43:13 
Built with MSVC version 1800
Packets Lost: 21/312,433 (0.0%)
August 15 2018 15:34:53 SLT

Edited August 15, 2018 by SubZeroWins

[LittleMe Jewell]

20 minutes ago, SubZeroWins said:

Draw distance: 1024 m

First thing I'd do is drop that down drastically.  A sim is 512 m.  If you are at a sim edge, you are telling the viewer to draw 2 sims worth of stuff for you.  I typically run with a setting around 128m, adjusting based on where I'm at and what I'm trying to see.

 

20 minutes ago, SubZeroWins said:

Bandwidth: 500 kbit/s

You can also play around with increasing this a bit (a little at a time, depending on what the above draw distance changes give you).  I think average setting is more like 1000, with a recommended max of 1500.  I think mine is currently at 1200.

Edited August 15, 2018 by LittleMe Jewell

[Rolig Loon]

LittleMe is right on about the draw distance.  There's rarely any reason to set it that high.  I doubt that your graphics card can handle all of the images that it tries to draw over that range, especially since that is a rather underpowered card.  I'd suggest dropping draw distance to no more than 256m.

[SubZeroWins]

Thank you all again, I will set it like that and keep an eye for a while.

[SubZeroWins]

Unfortunately it doesnt help

https://gyazo.com/7953946a873b6cc26a4ed1963005cea6

https://gyazo.com/61a3a9a9d104750f6062c36d0e912425

[Rolig Loon]

It may not do anything to solve this problem, but you really should set the Max Number of Non-imposter Avatars a lot lower than 16.  With that weak graphics card especially, you can be using a lot of your card's rendering time displaying avatars at the expense of other things.  I normally have mine set at 6, and I have a GT 1070 card, which is a lot more powerful than yours.

[LittleMe Jewell]

4 hours ago, SubZeroWins said:

Unfortunately it doesnt help

https://gyazo.com/7953946a873b6cc26a4ed1963005cea6

https://gyazo.com/61a3a9a9d104750f6062c36d0e912425

I can't get to the photos from my work location, so can't see them at the moment.

 

When you say "it doesn't help", are you talking about the reduction in your draw distance or the playing with your bandwidth settings or both?

[SubZeroWins]

Ok I lowered the impostor avatars to 4, still nothing

[SubZeroWins]

1 hour ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I can't get to the photos from my work location, so can't see them at the moment.

 

When you say "it doesn't help", are you talking about the reduction in your draw distance or the playing with your bandwidth settings or both?

Yes, changed them as you said.

[LittleMe Jewell]

You can try clearing / deleting your texture cache so that it repopulates fresh.  I don't remember if Firestorm has an option for clearing 'just' the texture cache - there is no need to clear your inventory cache.  If you can't find such an option while poking around in the settings, you can manually delete the "texturecache" folder at the following location -- be sure Firestorm is NOT running when you do so:

 

More info can be found here:  http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_cache_clear

After clearing/removing the cache, I'd log in to home and wait to see how the textures load before going off to other locations.

 

[SubZeroWins]

Oh I did that yesterday before trying anything else.

I guess Ill have to live with this...

[LittleMe Jewell]

Okay, now that I'm home, I can see the pictures you've linked.  I'd suggest you tune down your graphics settings drastically to try and speed up rezzing.  If you can get the settings such that things will rez better for you, then you can slowly start upping the various settings.  Based on the picture you showed of your settings, I'd recommend the following to start with.

If there are others around when you are having rezzing issues, then definitely drop Maximum complexity a lot -- I keep mine anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 in most cases.  Likewise, if others are around, drop the Max # on non-imposters.  For now, turn off Advanced Lighting and Atmospheric shaders - just until we maybe figure out if those are adding to your problem.

What do the settings on your 'Hardware Settings' tab look like?  Also, maybe screen print your Renderings and Depth of Field tabs, just so we can verify nothing got accidentally changed that you wouldn't typically want.

[Nalates Urriah]

What you are seeing happen is the viewer and video card shuffling the card's cache content. As you zoom out the card only needs the lower resolution textures inside the JPG2000 file. It discards the higher rez stuff to have room for the additional textures in your expanded field of view. As you zoom back in, the video card has to retrieve the higher rez parts of the images it just discarded. Until it does, you see gray.

Increasing the viewer's cache size will help a bit in the speed with which gray renders to color but it isn't that cache that is filling up. It is the cache on the video card.

There is no setting to change how much of the cache on the video card can be used. There used to be in Firestorm. I think it is gone in 5.1.7. Video card caching is complicated and no one really understood how to use the setting. Most set it at max, which generally was a good idea. Now the viewer handles it automatically and does a better job on unique video card/machine combinations. You can decrease the overall quality of textures used and enable texture compression (all in Prefs). That will decrease the number of gray textures... maybe. But, the overall texture quality will suffer.

You can remove HUD's and reduce Draw Distance to reduce the number of textures the viewer finds in your field of view. OR buy a video card with more video ram... Getting rid of the gray is a matter of reducing the number of textures the video card needs to render.

[Nalates Urriah]

Oh... I found it. Viewer Texture Memory Buffer. Pref->Graphics->Hardware

[LittleMe Jewell]

10 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Oh... I found it. Viewer Texture Memory Buffer. Pref->Graphics->Hardware

Yep, but you are limited to 2 GB regardless of how much memory you actually have on the card - though it is still better than the 512 MB that the SL viewer limits you to.

Edited August 18, 2018 by LittleMe Jewell

[SubZeroWins]

This setting is up to 1024 mb

Strange thing is that 2 months ago I didnt use any graphic card but just an on board one, there wasnt such issue

[Fionalein]

3 minutes ago, SubZeroWins said:

This setting is up to 1024 mb

Strange thing is that 2 months ago I didnt use any graphic card but just an on board one, there wasnt such issue

Not up to par with current technology, but can it be your onboard card just used the CPU RAM? There were some which did upon a time...

[Lindal Kidd]

2 hours ago, SubZeroWins said:

This setting is up to 1024 mb

Strange thing is that 2 months ago I didnt use any graphic card but just an on board one, there wasnt such issue

That's interesting.  Can you switch back to the on board chip?  You should be able to do that simply by plugging your monitor into the motherboard's graphics port instead of the video card's, and possibly changing a setting in your BIOS.

If the problem occurs only when using the Nvidia 710, it may be a setting in the Nvidia Control Panel, or an actual problem with the card itself.  Check the card's fan to be sure it is running, and use a program like GPU-Z to check its performance and temperature.

[SubZeroWins]

I dont think the card causes this. I should have many other problems too...