Why is Second Life so laggy now compared to the past?

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Or maybe it's just the prim limit increase that occurred a few years ago.

 

[Syo Emerald]

I have no illusions: Its probably my PC. It was never the fastest horse in the stable (budget reasons) and now its...uhm...4-5 years old? And SL isn't getting less demanding as time goes on.

[Cackle Amore]

19 hours ago, Syo Emerald said:

And SL isn't getting less demanding as time goes on.

It certainly isn't. I got a 1070, 16gb of ram, AMD Ryzen 7, and I'm still having to turn down graphic settings when I end up in any place that's heavily crowded, mainlands, and/or a full sim that's got nearly every inch of LI space filled.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Digit Gears

[kiramanell]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

You mean they should supply the hardware? I'm all for that!

But seriously, how do you define visual quality X? Which factors are significant? To me fast loading, smooth frame rate and long draw distance with no annoying distortions are the most vital parts of high visual quality because I want to travel around in big landscapes that feel as real (but not necessarily realistic) as possible. Other SL users who spend most of their time in the same small confined space (I think they are the majority these days) will have completely different priorites.

Even if we agreed on the criteria for visual quality, there's still a question how high we should aim. There is no limit to how great we all want SL to look but there is a limit to how much even the biggest render farm in the world can possibly handle.

 

For me, there's no immediate need to agree on criteria for visual quality per se, as there's simply the Law of diminishing returns. In economics, diminishing returns is the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased (while other factors stay constant). In our case, for instance, this means that, at some point, extra, superduper high-res textures simply no longer yield enough of a visual increase to justify the cost of using them. 4K textures, for example, would require a whopping 16x the amount of Vram as a 1K one (assuming true 4K, not 2160p). Using those would be insane, and I'm glad LL abandoned that idea very soon.

More texture memory would be my easiest way to improve on things quickly. Why limit the official viewer to only 768 MB? That makes no logical sense (they do have a 64-bit viewer these days, right?). It took the FS people quite a while to finally agree to a 2G texture memory buffer. But why even limit it at all?! Every other game I've played, be it GTA V, or Tombraider, or what have you, simply lets you use however much you have to spare. If I go shopping, then TP home, and need to go back to the store, because I forgot something, my viewer needs to start loading half of their sim textures again (because textures for my own region were loaded in their stead). This is simply wasteful, and far more conducive to 'lag' (although I don't like to use that term for texture loading) than just letting me use what's already in my, say, 8G texture memory).

[steeljane42]

30 minutes ago, Digit Gears said:

It certainly isn't. I got a 1070, 16gb of ram, AMD Ryzen 7, and I'm still having to turn down graphic settings when I end up in any place that's heavily crowded, mainlands, and/or a full sim that's got nearly every inch of LI space filled.

Depends how you look at it. Should SL be that demanding? No, probably not. Then you are correct, it's not the PC, unless it's some ancient machine. But yes, it is that demanding, in this case the "horsepower" helps a lot and budget mid-range PC from 5 years ago will be a lot slower than a higher end current gen ones.

For example going from overclocked 2500K@4.8GHz with slow (1333Mhz) DDR3 RAM to OC 9700k@5GHz on all cores with 32GB of 3600Mhz DDR4 (still working on lowering the timings or pushing 4000+Mhz, need more testing to see what works better with my kit) gave me roughly 50-60% fps boost depending on the place (GPU is an overclocked 1070). And while 2500k is pretty ancient, the 4.5Ghz OC of it is comparable to stock 6600k in most tests/games, which is a mid-range CPU from 3-4 years ago.

Note: no, I'm not stating that high-end reqs hardware should be normal for SL, just saying that if you happen to have one, then even with all bad optimization and the rest it'll be pretty smooth. At least how smooth you can expect the nearly 100% user created platform with downloadable assets and terrible cache system that relies on constant decoding to be.

[Cackle Amore]

1 hour ago, steeljane42 said:

 

Oh, I was mostly replying to that last line of their comment "SL isn't getting less demanding"

[steeljane42]

8 minutes ago, Digit Gears said:

Oh, I was mostly replying to that last line of their comment "SL isn't getting less demanding"

Ah, I see. That makes sense.

But yeah, it also makes sense why some people might think SL should be less demanding, or rather how new hardware should have much easier time with it and how every modern PC from the last 5 years could run it with a few hundreds of fps regardless of scene's complexity. Which is sadly not the case and won't be, not until LL somehow manages to write a new viewer so it would take advantage of all those extra cores we've got since 2003 at the very least. Which probably won't be happening anytime soon, if ever. I doubt they even started to work on the cache changes that I heard about a year ago (give or take a few months), which also completely kills performance.

I'm still very much against the "putting all the blame" on creators or forcing some silly limits, though. It's the wrong approach. Actual fixes first, the rest (if fixes weren't enough) second.

[Cackle Amore]

18 minutes ago, steeljane42 said:

Ah, I see. That makes sense.

But yeah, it also makes sense why some people might think SL should be less demanding, or rather how new hardware should have much easier time with it and how every modern PC from the last 5 years could run it with a few hundreds of fps regardless of scene's complexity. Which is sadly not the case and won't be, not until LL somehow manages to write a new viewer so it would take advantage of all those extra cores we've got since 2003 at the very least. Which probably won't be happening anytime soon, if ever. I doubt they even started to work on the cache changes that I heard about a year ago (give or take a few months), which also completely kills performance.

I'm still very much against the "putting all the blame" on creators or forcing some silly limits, though. It's the wrong approach. Actual fixes first, the rest (if fixes weren't enough) second.

Nothing really wrong with limits though as long as they're reasonable. Like for example, Textures are technically capped at 1024x. Sure, having larger size could be handy, but sadly, a lot of other creators wouldn't use that properly as there's already so many giving 1024x textures to things that shouldn't have a sole 1024x texture. So, it's for the best, that cap remains as is.

Lil old Gold Source has a rather strict tri limit for it's models [I a max of either 1k or 5k tris, don't recall off the top of my head, and can't have any blended weights, only full on 1.], which reflects it's age of course, but regardless, people have been making due just fine and it's still got a decently little lively niche community of people making stuff on it.

To some extent, can even add a fun little bit of challenge. Either way, limits keep a game world consistent and running smoothly, and it'll be good for peoples skills in the long run as they get better at making things proper for an old game engine like SL. Things can still look nice with less polygons.

I do my best to try and keep to a lower polycount, Most of the avatars I've made rarely stray far from 5k. A current avatar I'm working on that's a bit more detailed hovers around 16k tris. And the only 1024x texture on it is for the body while the head is around 512x, and then ears and tail and eyes all around and under 256x.

You would have to manually derender me if you got the complexity slider at the lowest it'll go 😉

 

While it would be unfair to put all the blame on creators, we still share a good half of it because as I said, we're the main ones making all the stuff people use and see on SL, everything we make will need to be downloaded by possibly hundreds of computers a day along side dozens of other content of varying quality.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Digit Gears

[TiaShaw]

IMO if you bought the best gaming pc. 3 years ago, for example  I7-7700k with 16gigs of ram DDR4 3200mhz and nvidia geforce gtx1080 8gig. You wont run ultra settings in 1080p with 128m draw distance and still maintain over 30fps without tinkering with reducing settings  draw on dropping to high and reducing draw from there. SL is a totally Different animal to build an optimal PC for .. I Obsessively am testing cpu/gpu combinations AMD Ryzen vs Intel cpu and graphics AMD Radeon vs Nvidia Geforce cards i have everything gtx from a gtx570, gtx960,4gb, gtx1050ti, gtx1060 6gb, gtx1080 8gb, and 2x  gtx1080ti 11gb, .. then on AMD rx580 8gb, vega 56, vega64, i have 5 different desktop platforms i7-3770  i7-7700k overclocked 4.8ghz not delidded, i9-9900k overclocked 5.1ghz 8cores/16 threads.. AMD Ryzen R5 2400g and AMD Ryzen R7 1800X . I have tested everything mixed and matched cpu/ gpu. Optimised ram timings ..overclocks coolers air and water, cinebench Etc Etc as well as streaming to Twitch while recording on OBS, everything tested at 1080p and 4k uhd in secondlife and sansar in VR oculus Rift and desktop... ext. there are so many variations but my conclusion (my opinion) gtx1060 6gb or Rx480 8gb minimum spec., 16 gigs of ram, not hdd storage,  bty (stop deleting your cache it’s there for a reason)., cpu- intel quad core i5 or i7 with 4 fast cores over 4ghz.,  secondlife doesnt use more than 2 cores . Every instance of firestorm you log into uses about 4.1gigs or ram. So 8x Alt accounts = 32gb ram needed.   if you are overwhelmed by lag . Check your task manager, click on performance.. you can see in realtime what is using your pc resources and see what can be upgraded... nvidia has new graphics drivers every 2weeks. Did you switch from a nvidia graphics card to amd? Or vise versa? U have to use a free program DDU (display driver uninstaller)  the drivers will conflict and lower performance. I have been typing this at work on my phone. Rambling. i hope I helped someone somehow if you have a question about upgrading or need help. email me tiashaw.sl@gmail.com.i help people for for free and i never sell anything. Fact. I gave away 2x gaming pc’s in the last year. To friends i made in sl . In oregon and in california.. my  RL certifications  CompTia A+ Plus (pre2000) also MCSE (microsoft certified solutions expert)

 

[TiaShaw]

9 minutes ago, TiaShaw said:

IMO if you bought the best gaming pc. 3 years ago, for example  I7-7700k with 16gigs of ram DDR4 3200mhz and nvidia geforce gtx1080 8gig. You wont run ultra settings in 1080p with 128m draw distance and still maintain over 30fps without tinkering with reducing settings  draw on dropping to high and reducing draw from there. SL is a totally Different animal to build an optimal PC for .. I Obsessively am testing cpu/gpu combinations AMD Ryzen vs Intel cpu and graphics AMD Radeon vs Nvidia Geforce cards i have everything gtx from a gtx570, gtx960,4gb, gtx1050ti, gtx1060 6gb, gtx1080 8gb, and 2x  gtx1080ti 11gb, .. then on AMD rx580 8gb, vega 56, vega64, i have 5 different desktop platforms i7-3770  i7-7700k overclocked 4.8ghz not delidded, i9-9900k overclocked 5.1ghz 8cores/16 threads.. AMD Ryzen R5 2400g and AMD Ryzen R7 1800X . I have tested everything mixed and matched cpu/ gpu. Optimised ram timings ..overclocks coolers air and water, cinebench Etc Etc as well as streaming to Twitch while recording on OBS, everything tested at 1080p and 4k uhd in secondlife and sansar in VR oculus Rift and desktop... ext. there are so many variations but my conclusion (my opinion) gtx1060 6gb or Rx480 8gb minimum spec., 16 gigs of ram, not hdd storage,  bty (stop deleting your cache it’s there for a reason)., cpu- intel quad core i5 or i7 with 4 fast cores over 4ghz.,  secondlife doesnt use more than 2 cores . Every instance of firestorm you log into uses about 4.1gigs or ram. So 8x Alt accounts = 32gb ram needed.   if you are overwhelmed by lag . Check your task manager, click on performance.. you can see in realtime what is using your pc resources and see what can be upgraded... nvidia has new graphics drivers every 2weeks. Did you switch from a nvidia graphics card to amd? Or vise versa? U have to use a free program DDU (display driver uninstaller)  the drivers will conflict and lower performance. I have been typing this at work on my phone. Rambling. i hope I helped someone somehow if you have a question about upgrading or need help. email me tiashaw.sl@gmail.com.i help people for for free and i never sell anything. Fact. I gave away 2x gaming pc’s in the last year. To friends i made in sl . In oregon and in california.. my  RL certifications  CompTia A+ Plus (pre2000) also MCSE (microsoft certified solutions expert)

 

Sl will never be less demanding  on your pc . Everything will progressively became more demanding on your hardware . Just like every new version of windows . I think it is sad that alot of people are complaining about a free game that their outdated hardware wont play.

[TiaShaw]

Test your PC https://www.userbenchmark.com/Software 

free test can show if your hardware is underperforming as it compares your performance results to their database and helped me find the problem on a pc 1800 miles away.. results showed the cpu  was underperforming at 32%  as it needed new fan on cpu cooler it was full of dust

[Kyrah Abattoir]

12 hours ago, kiramanell said:

More texture memory would be my easiest way to improve on things quickly. Why limit the official viewer to only 768 MB? That makes no logical sense (they do have a 64-bit viewer these days, right?). It took the FS people quite a while to finally agree to a 2G texture memory buffer.

The thing is that this memory limit is ONLY for textures, SL loads a lot of ohter things into vram (meshs, prims, etc etc...), I'm not sure why these don't have a limit either, but I assume there is a design reason somewhere that makes sense.

Your vram is also used by everything else that runs on your computer and does even modest 2D/3D operations, so the vram is not for the SL client's exclusive usage.

7 hours ago, TiaShaw said:

Sl will never be less demanding  on your pc . Everything will progressively became more demanding on your hardware . Just like every new version of windows . I think it is sad that alot of people are complaining about a free game that their outdated hardware wont play.

I love those people who always consider that problems that don't affect them are "other people's personal problems".

10 hours ago, Digit Gears said:

Nothing really wrong with limits though as long as they're reasonable. Like for example, Textures are technically capped at 1024x. Sure, having larger size could be handy, but sadly, a lot of other creators wouldn't use that properly as there's already so many giving 1024x textures to things that shouldn't have a sole 1024x texture. So, it's for the best, that cap remains as is.

Exactly. Limits have to exist because computers are not limitless. Anyone who does at least a little bit of programing knows this.

• Variable limites: they all have maximum values, (we just hope that we never hit those).
• Diminishing returns: The larger a data structure becomes, the slower it performs.
• Clock speed: There is only so much that can be processed per second.
• Parallele processing: double the cores is not the same as doubling the speed, you can only parallelise processes that do need to be executed in a specific order, otherwise you gain nothing, it's easy for a GPU to process each pixel in parallele, it's what they where made for. Not so much for CPU-type instructions that are typically executed in a sequential fashion (if X, then do Y and Z). Some games outsource things like physics calculation, AI pathing, or file loading on separate cores but that's typically the extent of it.

I'm hoping that the new cache system they are working on will be intelligent enough to only load the requird texture resolution to obtain a consistent image. This would at least mitigate large texture usage in SL, by not loading the ram with more than the needs of the current scene (oh those 1024x1024 wedding rings...)

10 hours ago, Digit Gears said:

Lil old Gold Source has a rather strict tri limit for it's models [I a max of either 1k or 5k tris, don't recall off the top of my head, and can't have any blended weights, only full on 1.], which reflects it's age of course, but regardless, people have been making due just fine and it's still got a decently little lively niche community of people making stuff on it.

To some extent, can even add a fun little bit of challenge. Either way, limits keep a game world consistent and running smoothly, and it'll be good for peoples skills in the long run as they get better at making things proper for an old game engine like SL. Things can still look nice with less polygons.

I agree, the problem is to figure out what the right incentive is, the current mesh limitations encourage people to dump lods because they get a lower complexity & LI out of it, animesh attempted to solve the issue by making lods "free" as long as they are reasonable, but it doesn't solve the main issue:

• Lod models are important for a quality experience, but remain the submerged part of the iceberg, people don't realize they are looking at a purposely bad lod model, they just blame Linden Lab instead and crank up object details to "make it go away".
• Making Lod models is work and even if they come with a free triangle budget, unless customers begin demanding them, only a handful of creators will actually bother.
• In the end, Lod models can also cost prims, and that's another incentive for creators and their customers not to care.

And yeah I enjoy working within limitations as a creative challenge too. But I also create because it's a neverending source of enjoyment and pride, the money is just an added bonus.

[Penny Patton]

14 hours ago, Digit Gears said:

It certainly isn't. I got a 1070, 16gb of ram, AMD Ryzen 7, and I'm still having to turn down graphic settings when I end up in any place that's heavily crowded, mainlands, and/or a full sim that's got nearly every inch of LI space filled.

 

12 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

it's not the PC, unless it's some ancient machine. But yes, it is that demanding, in this case the "horsepower" helps a lot and budget mid-range PC from 5 years ago will be a lot slower than a higher end current gen ones.

 

7 hours ago, TiaShaw said:

Sl will never be less demanding  on your pc

I'm still using the desktop I bought around 2011 with these specs:

• Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
• System Memory: 12GB RAM
• Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (The only part of the computer to get upgraded, back in 2015 or so)
• Video Memory: 4GB RAM

In certain, optimized, locations in SL I get a consistent 30fps (or better) at near Ultra settings. I'm running shadows, DoF, Godrays, all the shiny. And when I say "consistent" I mean I almost never experience the visual "stuttering" or freeze-ups that are so common in SL even on modern gaming hardware. I never see any texture thrashing. And these places are no slouch in the visuals department, either. They look like this:

(Yes this top image is filled with animesh. Around a dozen animesh characters between the front and back rooms. I still get a consistent 30fps there.)

So, SL can be a lot less demanding than it typically is. If content creators are just a little smarter regarding the content they create.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

3 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

So, SL can be a lot less demanding than it typically is. If content creators are just a little smarter regarding the content they create.

The problem is the motivation.

[Penny Patton]

That's why I say LL needs to step in. There's a variety of ways they can apply the right motivation to content creators.

• Give residents tools to know what content is lagging them and how.
• Make the marketplace listings show more information like VRAM use, polygon counts and LOD.
• Better, smarter in-client notifications about laggy content and bad habits like setting Object Detail too high. ("Setting Object Detail to this level will result in a severe performance drop.")
• Give us tools to see what attachments we're wearing may be impacting our performance.
• Give landowners the tools to quickly identify problem content they have rezzed.
• An official content creation blog including articles about what does and does not cause performance issues. (SL users believe the craziest things when it comes to this, but maybe if there's an official source they'll believe that more than what they read people posting to the forums.)
• Begin tying new features to new resource caps for avatars. Want to wear animesh? BoM? That shiny new feature that we here in the past haven't imagined yet? You'll need to adapt to the new, reasonable but not super strict, caps on VRAM and polygon use. (Doing it this way preserves existing content while pushing content creators to optimize new content. Time takes care of the rest.)

No matter what LL does there will be grumbling, but if they do it right then said grumbling will be short lived and quickly forgotten as content creators adapt and begin to optimize more.

[Qie Niangao]

My PC is quite old and slow (I'll upgrade when Intel manages to catch up with fixing their pipelining vulnerabilities faster than new ones are uncovered), and I'm fine with low framerates; those who want high framerates and buttery smooth responsiveness can buy new computers every year for all I care: those cases just aren't that essential to the overall viability of SL.

But I'm nonetheless concerned that creators are not incentivized to produce efficient content.

Here's why: All the unnecessarily heavy-lifting represents major opportunity cost for SL. We should be able to run a full-featured viewer on mobile devices now; we can't because the content is stupidly heavyweight when it doesn't need to be. Same with VR: the claim is that SL must be replaced for VR because it can never support adequate framerates to keep users from barfing -- a silly claim because computing and networking are always advancing but a very practical claim, not silly at all, because such advances can never advance fast enough to catch up with SL content creators whose only incentive is to out-compexify the competition.

[KanryDrago]

7 hours ago, TiaShaw said:

Sl will never be less demanding  on your pc . Everything will progressively became more demanding on your hardware . Just like every new version of windows . I think it is sad that alot of people are complaining about a free game that their outdated hardware wont play.

 

28 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

 

I love those people who always consider that problems that don't affect them are "other people's personal problems".

 

 

People who insist on holding onto ancient computers and saying SL should run fine on them are doing exactly that though, they dont want upgrading to be their problem so they want the experience to be degraded so they don't have to. Which reduces the experience for those of us that have more recent computers (ie the last 5 years). They very much want it to be not their problem and become others problem

[Penny Patton]

Qie hit the nail on the head. Dismissing calls for optimization and instead making the unrealistic demand that people simply upgrade their computers is not only short sighted but misses the point. We all win when SL is more successful. We all lose  when SL fails to draw in new residents and hold on to the residents it has.

An SL that runs better while looking better, an SL where more people can run SL at higher graphics settings, an SL that runs smoothly on tablets and mobile devices is obviously going to be more successful than an SL that doesn't even run all that well on modern gaming hardware.

A more successful SL means more successful content creators, higher traffic and more people to meet, as well as more new locations to check out in SL.

[KanryDrago]

1 minute ago, Penny Patton said:

Qie hit the nail on the head. Dismissing calls for optimization and instead making the unrealistic demand that people simply upgrade their computers is not only short sighted but misses the point. We all win when SL is more successful. We all lose  when SL fails to draw in new residents and hold on to the residents it has.

An SL that runs better while looking better, an SL where more people can run SL at higher graphics settings, an SL that runs smoothly on tablets and mobile devices is obviously going to be more successful than an SL that doesn't even run all that well on modern gaming hardware.

A more successful SL means more successful content creators, higher traffic and more people to meet, as well as more new locations to check out in SL.

No one is saying optimisation is bad unless it affects quality. However it is also true that quite a few complain that sl doesnt run smoothly on hardware that is 10+years out of date.

Where optimisation can be done without affecting things then it should be done....there is however a caveat....too many times we get claims that suggested optimizations don't affect the QoL in sl because the one pushing the optimisation doesn't see the degradation as particularly important to them. Others may well look at that degradation and say no I find that unacceptable. As someone pointed out before people come to SL for different reasons.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

13 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

No one is saying optimisation is bad unless it affects quality. However it is also true that quite a few complain that sl doesnt run smoothly on hardware that is 10+years out of date.

Where optimisation can be done without affecting things then it should be done....there is however a caveat....too many times we get claims that suggested optimizations don't affect the QoL in sl because the one pushing the optimisation doesn't see the degradation as particularly important to them. Others may well look at that degradation and say no I find that unacceptable. As someone pointed out before people come to SL for different reasons.

Because there would be no degradation if it was done properly to begin with. Most content I inspect can easily be slashed in half if not to a third and you will be unable to tell the difference.

And before you reply: I'm not calling you blind, it's just that badly optimized.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir

[KanryDrago]

7 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Because there would be no degradation if it was done properly to begin with. Most content I inspect can easily be slashed in half if not to a third and you will be unable to tell the difference.

And before you reply: I'm not calling you blind, it's just that badly optimized.

Normally when people show pictures of their "Optimised content" here I have found that I look it at and shrug because while it doesn't look much different to the "unoptimised" version it is not of a quality that I would consider worthy of rezzing. So forgive me when I take that opinion with a pinch of salt. In fact I think Chin Rey did earlier in this very thread and it was exactly the comment I made

[Kyrah Abattoir]

22 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

Normally when people show pictures of their "Optimised content" here I have found that I look it at and shrug because while it doesn't look much different to the "unoptimised" version it is not of a quality that I would consider worthy of rezzing. So forgive me when I take that opinion with a pinch of salt. In fact I think Chin Rey did earlier in this very thread and it was exactly the comment I made

I have this payphone made by a creator i will not name:

• Uses 24 1024x1024 textures. 8 faces, diffuse + normal + specular.
• The UVs are dreadful and clearly look auto unwrapped,
• Some parts of the texture are extremely blurry because they have been sourced from a photo and enlarged before adding it to the diffuse map.
• Most, if not all of the specular maps contain barely any information and i was able to replace most of them by some of my generic 16x16 specmaps.
• A good half of the normal maps again, barely contain any details, so i was able to strip them or replace them by generic (16x16) noise.
• Some of the diffuse could probably be reduced too but I did not test that since I don't have access to the textures.

Overall I can relatively easily drop the texture usage by 50% and all the people I've shown the before/after to have been unable to tell which is which. But that's a worst case scenario.

Also, this is a payphone. It isn't scripted, it doesn't do anything. So it's really just a background prop, it exist to be there, and forgotten.

Edited August 11, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Cackle Amore]

2 hours ago, KanryDrago said:

it is not of a quality that I would consider worthy of rezzing. 

Well ya sure, of course things made properly for a game won't be as photo realistically detailed as something made for a rendered image or movie, but we aren't playing a rendered image or movie, we're playing a video game.

["Is SL a video game?!" topics aside, at it's core, it's a video game, running on decade old game engine]

And video games need limits, specially for an old engine. Most games as old as SL would be playable at ultra by 90% of it's playerbase by now, but we can't, because lots of other creators don't want to even bother help making it run better.

[kiramanell]

3 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

The thing is that this memory limit is ONLY for textures, SL loads a lot of ohter things into vram (meshs, prims, etc etc...), I'm not sure why these don't have a limit either, but I assume there is a design reason somewhere that makes sense.

Your vram is also used by everything else that runs on your computer and does even modest 2D/3D operations, so the vram is not for the SL client's exclusive usage.

 

Riiiiight. That was about as weak a retort as you could make.  Which, of course, tells me you have no real rebuttal against why the LL viewer oddly limits texture memory to only 768 MB. Tombraider lets me use, like what, 8G? (out of my 11G Vram). GTA V, almost 4G. And no, not because they need the rest for 'modest 2D/3D operations', LOL.

Also, try and have an object look at things. Texture memory was limited to 512 MB. Then materials arrived, potentially tripling texture memory needs overnight. So, the logical thing to do, would have been to increase texture memory to at least 1.5 G (which the FS viewer eventually did, btw, going to 2G). 

 

Quote

I love those people who always consider that problems that don't affect them are "other people's personal problems".

 

Why do you always say these bizarre, abrasive things to ppl?! All TiaSway literally said was: "Sl will never be less demanding  on your pc . Everything will progressively became more demanding on your hardware." Hers is about as true, and evenhanded a comment as it gets. And yet you manage to turn it into a personal insult.

 

Quote

Exactly. Limits have to exist because computers are not limitless. Anyone who does at least a little bit of programing knows this.

 

Another fine strawman. Nobody said computers are 'limitess'. Nor did I hear anyone say creators should waste recourses (like using 1024 textures on areas that absolutely don't need it). But it goes without saying (but needs saying anyway, it would seem, as you're protesting the fact so loud), that SL will, indeed, only get progressively more demanding on our hardware (much like every other 'game' out there); and, conversely, that SL looked considerable crappier 10 years ago. It baffles me why such an obvious observation stirs so much anger in you.

[KanryDrago]

35 minutes ago, Digit Gears said:

Well ya sure, of course things made properly for a game won't be as photo realistically detailed as something made for a rendered image or movie, but we aren't playing a rendered image or movie, we're playing a video game.

["Is SL a video game?!" topics aside, at it's core, it's a video game, running on decade old game engine]

And video games need limits, specially for an old engine. Most games as old as SL would be playable at ultra by 90% of it's playerbase by now, but we can't, because lots of other creators don't want to even bother help making it run better.

I can find plenty of stuff at a quality that I find acceptable so not my issue, if however you insist SL items must be restricted because you want to run it on a pc that could of been found on the ark then you are trying to make your problem (not wanting to get a reasonable pc) into my problem. I find SL runs just fine as is, it is others asking for that to be changed because they don't want to spend any money bringing their pc into the 21st century yet somehow I am the selfish one for saying I prefer things as they are.

The problem with all the things suggested is that to work they can't be voluntary. If I can go on buying what I like and find good regardless of optimisation then its not going to help you at all. I don't in the least object to things being optimised, I will buy them if they are good enough, if not I will buy the unoptimised stuff. It is the element of coercion I object to where for you to have the experience you want I have to be forced to accept my experience might change.

If you play SL it's a hobby , if you take up golf you expect to spend money on the equipement needed to pursue your hobby. If you don't want to spend the money then perhaps not the hobby for you and you don't need to spend much compared at least to a reasonable set of golf clubs. Maybe 600$ would get you a pc more than adequate enough to handle most of sl.