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

[rasterscan]

Quick Prefs to lower lag ...

Draw distance makes a handy anti lag quick fix. lowest for clubbing, I whack it to 256 when sailing. Also Avatars slider helps me. 4 max, the rest rendered in 2D if its packed oh and name tags off. Lastly, for some weird reason this PC like working in 'Atmos 6' mode and its pretty too. I just keep the slider around 'noon'

Lastly I've spotted a 'low lag' button in this pic I never noticed inworld ! Wonder what it does !

 

Edited February 27, 2019 by rasterscan

[ChinRey]

On 2/26/2019 at 4:26 AM, Tarina Sewell said:

Do you realize how many user profiles you have violated by turning off advanced lighting!! You will not see them as they wish you to see them!!! You MUST enable all the bells and whistles so you can see these people's avatars properly!

Here's a question for everybody: Who cares how other avatars look in SL?

[Love Zhaoying]

22 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Here's a question for everybody: Who cares how other avatars look in SL?

May it was sarcasm? Sometimes when I see a ridiculous statement, that’s my first guess.

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

May it was sarcasm? Sometimes when I see a ridiculous statement, that’s my first guess.

 

Quote

Den som kun tar spøk for spøk,
og alvor kun alvorlig,
han og hun har faktisk fattet
begge deler dårlig.

(Kumbel)

 

 

Edited February 27, 2019 by ChinRey

[sirhc DeSantis]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Here's a question for everybody: Who cares how other avatars look in SL?

 

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

May it was sarcasm? Sometimes when I see a ridiculous statement, that’s my first guess.

 

No, seemed a genuine question there. So with a little change - no I don't care insofar as apart from the obvious in world designed to annoy - it's an expression of the individual. Do I like certain over others ? Oh yes. Does that imply caring? Nope. Our World Our Imagination. Hey, invisible pony riders are still a thing - cool, if that is your thing.

I get the D space A space Z daily for a laugh. Now theres a thing.

Besides, all you hooms and Lions look the same to us cats.

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, sirhc DeSantis said:

No, seemed a genuine question there. 

I meant the person Chinrey quoted.

[ThorinII]

On 2/25/2019 at 3:15 PM, RaniStonesoul said:

Ok so I know little about computers and especially computers working with SL.  If I wanted to upgrade something in my computer to make SL run smoother, would it be more memory or and upgrade to the graphics card.   I have 8 GB of RAM now and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 8GB graphics card right now.  

I have a rather old-ish, relatively low-budget system:

CPU: AMD FX-6100 Six-Core Processor (3.2 GHz)
RAM: 16 GB
Graphics Card: NVidia GeForce GTX 950 (4GB)

And I run SL on High-Ultra, with ALM and basic shadows (sun and moon) on. Worst FPS have been when I was in clubs or in busy places like for example HBC, with "only" 10fps -- which I think is still bearable.

So I think more RAM might be the way to go for you

 

Edited February 27, 2019 by ThorinII

[arabellajones]

On 2/25/2019 at 11:38 AM, Lindal Kidd said:

One of the biggest frame rate hogs around is the Advanced Lighting Model (ALM).  (I mean, frame rate hogs that you have some control over.  You generally can't change what people wear, how many people there are around you, or the textures in the region.)

ALM makes things look really, really nice.  I love it.  But if I am somewhere and I am getting miserable performance, going into Preferences/Graphics and unticking its box will speed things up a lot.

It's certainly worth comparing the frame rates you get with ALM on and off, but it depends a lot on the graphics card. It did hit things badly when it was new. With a good card, one from the last couple of generations, I think you might be surprised.

[RaniStonesoul]

On 2/27/2019 at 1:13 PM, ThorinII said:

So I think more RAM might be the way to go for you

 

I think it might be but also Thursday night I found out the fans on my graphics card had quit and it was overheating, so there is that.  I ordered a 1060, which is all I could afford at the moment but it should make my experience better.  And yes when get a chance I'll probably get more RAM as well 😄

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

On 2/27/2019 at 6:57 AM, Love Zhaoying said:

May it was sarcasm? Sometimes when I see a ridiculous statement, that’s my first guess.

well, yes... I think you know me by now..

[JupiterFlambay]

I played this game back in 2007 and really liked it and it ran on a PC with less grunt than i have now. I tried to play a couple of times since and no go, too laggy. Other games I run fine, like GTA 5 (online version), Borderlands and other fps games, so why not SL ? Sorry, not paying money to upgrade hardware when this is clearly a problem that SL developers should address. Until then I just play other games.

[Selene Gregoire]

1 hour ago, JupiterFlambay said:

I played this game back in 2007 and really liked it and it ran on a PC with less grunt than i have now. I tried to play a couple of times since and no go, too laggy. Other games I run fine, like GTA 5 (online version), Borderlands and other fps games, so why not SL ? Sorry, not paying money to upgrade hardware when this is clearly a problem that SL developers should address. Until then I just play other games.

Strange. I'm running a GTX 1050 OC with graphics set half way between high and ultra with 64 DD and I don't have a lot of lag. Quite often I'm seeing 100fps which in previous years I was lucky to get 15fps on an excellent day. Been around since 2004 so I've seen the place grow. Sorry dude, but the truth is, you're doing something wrong.

And I should mention I do play a few MMOs... some old, some not even out of alpha yet. So yep I know how it goes.

Edited July 30, 2019 by Selene Gregoire

[Aethelwine]

SL seems better now than it did when I started. My internet connection is the same but my PC has improved, but always been a few years behind the best a gaming PC has to offer. Back in 2008 I could barely move at starter island, but managed to find my way to a teleport where my graphics all got corrupted and I lagged off the end of a pier and couldn't fly out. I gave up for 2 years came back and things were better but clubs horrendously laggy, lots of grey avatars without textures, lots of rubberbanding where you walk through treacle across the dancefloor and then find yourself back at the start. Lots of people you haven't seen complaining about you bumping them etc. Still laggy today and mesh parts flying around the place a comparatively new novelty, but none of the bad rubberbanding I used to get.

They have maybe fixed whatever was causing the rubberbanding, I remember going to sims with hardly anyone on it and having those problems in the past. I can't remember having that problem for a long time now.

Edited July 30, 2019 by Aethelwine

[Skell Dagger]

3 hours ago, JupiterFlambay said:

I played this game back in 2007 and really liked it and it ran on a PC with less grunt than i have now. I tried to play a couple of times since and no go, too laggy.

Second Life in 2007 -

Second Life in 2019  -

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Skell Dagger said:

Second Life in 2007 -
[...]
Second Life in 2019  -

and those scenes make it pretty evident whence much current lag arises: huge, non-repeating textures. Technology is in this weird, temporary state where it's still cheaper to bake lighting into fantastically numerous and complex downloaded textures than to let the renderer do anything more than the most basic lighting. Given the state of even high-end graphics hardware, even the best real time lighting (far beyond ALM) is still crazily primitive. Similarly, if everybody enabled shadows* as glitchy as they are, it would be possible to trash all baked lighting textures and cut scene download lag by an order of magnitude at least. Unfortunately, though, not everybody has hardware capable of even that minimal level of real time lighting, so the only way to get pleasing (if unnatural) results is the current practice of cranking up texture complexity and waiting for ages while scenes ooze from CDN to viewer.

____________
*Ideally we'd have more powerful and precise ways for dynamic scene lighting to modulate repeating textures beyond SL's "Materials" tricks of normal- and specularmaps, but even what we have already would be an improvement over baked lighting with wildly inconsistent sources in the same scene, horribly distracting once one starts noticing it.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Yeah, I mean SL looks a lot better than it did in 2004, but I'd wager that scene complexity has gone in the 100-1000 times heavier.

@Qie Niangao you also get the "self fullfilling prophecy" that as long as people use non-alm non-shadow non-ssao rendering, there will be pressure on creators to bake one-time-use-prelit textures for everything, which makes the experience of using alm/ssao/shadows even worse, thus detracting people from using it... goto 1.

Also the "little lie" of passing baked shadows for quality... or work.

 

The reason AAA games look gorgeous is not so much that their game engine is magic, a lot of it is down to efficient content and smart level design that minimizes waste, so that more ressources are available to get that "high fidelity" look.

That requires compromises.

Compromises that we SL creators struggle to make.

Edited July 30, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir

[kiramanell]

32 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

and those scenes make it pretty evident whence much current lag arises: huge, non-repeating textures. Technology is in this weird, temporary state where it's still cheaper to bake lighting into fantastically numerous and complex downloaded textures than to let the renderer do anything more than the most basic lighting. Given the state of even high-end graphics hardware, even the best real time lighting (far beyond ALM) is still crazily primitive. Similarly, if everybody enabled shadows* as glitchy as they are, it would be possible to trash all baked lighting textures and cut scene download lag by an order of magnitude at least. Unfortunately, though, not everybody has hardware capable of even that minimal level of real time lighting, so the only way to get pleasing (if unnatural) results is the current practice of cranking up texture complexity and waiting for ages while scenes ooze from CDN to viewer.

____________
*Ideally we'd have more powerful and precise ways for dynamic scene lighting to modulate repeating textures beyond SL's "Materials" tricks of normal- and specularmaps, but even what we have already would be an improvement over baked lighting with wildly inconsistent sources in the same scene, horribly distracting once one starts noticing it.

 

I respectfully disagree.

Textures themselves don't cause lag. Lack of memory, however, does (personally, I have a GTX 1080 Ti, with 11G memory. And 32G machine RAM; so, not an issue for me). The only thing that really matters about a texture is its size. Too many big textures won't cause lag either, though (even though loading times may slightly increase). It will result in blurring, though (aka, the viewer will either apply a bias, to make it use less video memory, or it will simply throw out the texture altogether, which leads to continual loading of textures, whenever you walk to an another area). Strangely enough, video memory usage appears to be down to a max of 2G (which is really kinda odd, as every moden graphics cards will start at 4G). But with 2G, and all materials-enabled scenes, you can still manage comfortably in SL.

Also, textures with backed in shadows are actually highly preferred over enabling shadows, perfomance-wise. In fact, the single most dramatic drain to your FPS will be your shadow quality setting. Try setting it to 4.0, and see what happens.  Real shadows are way prettier, of course; and, indeed, you get weird effects when a baked shadow starts to interfere, visually, with the way the shadows are actually cast by the render engine. But shadows are a performance killer, really. Still, a drop in FPS is not necessarily the same as lag: on a busy sim, your FPS may drop drastically, for sure, because of lag; but with too much graphics candy enabled, your video card may simply have to work too hard.

In GTA V, for instance, if you examine a typical ymap, you'll see they're using some form of faux ambient occlusion:

      <artificialAmbientOcclusion value="255"/>

That's clever. After all, ambient occlusion tends to be pretty uniform. Like where a wall meets the floor (and vice versa), you know you'll get a rather standard gradient from light to darker. Adding faux ambient occlusion like that to SL would already all but eliminate the need for baked textures, as the absence of ambient occlusion is really what makes older builds look so 'off.'

[Qie Niangao]

Oh, different kinds of lag, and I realize I'm a bit idiosyncratic here. For me, scene loading is the only thing that matters and I just don't care at all about frame rate: if I get one fresh frame a second, I'm fine, and any double digit FPS is pretty much indistinguishable from any other. But make me wait even a split second to see what's in front of me when I rotate my cam: total killer break in immersion.

[Cackle Amore]

On 2/25/2019 at 5:38 AM, Lindal Kidd said:

One of the biggest frame rate hogs around is the Advanced Lighting Model (ALM).  (I mean, frame rate hogs that you have some control over.  You generally can't change what people wear, how many people there are around you, or the textures in the region.)

ALM makes things look really, really nice.  I love it.  But if I am somewhere and I am getting miserable performance, going into Preferences/Graphics and unticking its box will speed things up a lot.

 

On 2/25/2019 at 5:50 AM, Alyona Su said:

This. Turn off Advanced Lighting and your frame rate will double instantly. 

Are you two sure you don't have shadows left turned on, cause shadows is by far BY FAR, the absolute biggest greediest resource hog of a graphical feature in SL.

And it doesn't help that LL decided to leave it turned on default when you freshly install their viewer, making a lot of peoples first time in SL the mountain peak of lag upon leaving the newbie island.

[ZennyRose Balhaus]

I never have had any issues with lag, even on my old computer that was practically steam powered...I recently got a new computer and I am super happy. I find most of the folk who complain about lag, are the ones, who have every scripted object under the sun attached..are using a computer that never had the specs to run SL and are running with the graphics on ultra, when you try and help them they don't want to know

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

On 2/25/2019 at 2:27 AM, Rohan Dockal said:

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

I don't know what the hell you are talking about.

[Cackle Amore]

So, long story short, and I don't mean ill will towards fellow creators but when it comes down to it, people need to hold content creators to better standards, same for CC in holding themselves to those standards.

Unoptimized mesh with over 100k polygons, excessive amount of 1024x textures on things that shouldn't have 1024x textures. Honestly imo, the only thing that should probably have that big of a texture size is mainly buildings and avatars. AND you need to try and shove everything you reasonable can into those for the specific item. And the smaller you get and more split apart the items become, the lower the resolution should be.

So for an avatar, if you got the whole body in a UV, that can reasonably be one 1024x. texture

If you got the body's UV's split apart though, like the standard body is, 512x is perfectly fine. Ideal, the head's portion should probably be closer to 256x since it's the smaller chunk of the body, but since it's a main focal point of a character, it's not entirely unreasonable to use 512x for it as well.

On the other side, high poly mesh.I know people like making themselves look like high end super models, but it's still a video game engine, now an animation program. 

While it's true that Texture size has a bigger impact than polygons, having 20-40 people covered in a million polygons together isn't exactly good for the system either. You can easily get attractive looking, shapely models without bloating it with a few layers of subdivide that doesn't try to crash out your viewer just because you right clicked on it.

 

Hell, just look at my own avatar, you would have to manually derender me with how low my complexity score is.

The only thing on me that has a texture size of 1024x is the body. The head is in the 512x range. Ears, tail, and eyes are down around 256x.

And same goes for the accessories I've got on me , all around and under the 256x range.

 

As for scripting, while it can also be an issue, that's a skill set that's probably a bit harder to optimize in than just resizing a texture.  Sadly not being a scripter sort myself, I'm not really sure what sort of main issues plague the scripting side of SL v:

 

We must all do our part to help make SL a less laggy place!

http://pennycow.blogspot.com/2019/06/just-how-much-does-unoptimized-content.html

http://pennycow.blogspot.com/2018/09/optimization-tutorial-creating-your-own.html

http://pennycow.blogspot.com/2018/08/simple-performance-tricks-anyone-can-do.html
 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

1 minute ago, Digit Gears said:

I'm not really sure what sort of main issues plague the scripting side of SL

People carrying tons of scripts on their avatar attachments, teleporting into a new region is the nemesis of any combat sim and the absolute number one reason sales events are like walking through peanut butter.

[Drayke Newall]

I'm sorry, I must say it is a pet peeve of mine that people think FPS is the same as Lag. Its not. Any drop in FPS is solely due to your PC nothing more nothing less. If you don't have a good enough PC to handle game settings then don't run everything on high. This includes shadows and max number of imposters. Now I will say one could argue that the SL graphics aren't well optimised but that will only reduce your FPS. Yes, large textures like 4k will drop your FPS and that is one reason to not use them in SL. Even high end gaming systems cant handle 4k texture graphics for everything even in modern games.

Lag on the other hand, in SL's case, is the speed in which the data is transferred over the internet. So @kiramanell I respectively disagree with you. High res Textures do cause lag as does high poly meshes, multiple textures etc. as these are all needing to transfer to your computer from LL's servers. In the case of Second Life, lag would be purely defined as what you say it isn't, blurry textures.

If your in a large populated area it can be both FPS and Lag causing the issue. Lag due to the sims slowing down due to the heavy load, including having to download multiple people etc to your home and FPS due to your computer having to render all of those people, objects, scripts etc.

As to @JupiterFlambay post, second life is completely different to your GTA 5 game. GTA 5 and all the other games have all the textures on your system ready to go. It's why when you download the game you have a 40gb download if not more now. Second life on the other hand is like an internet browser. You use it to view the content and it downloads all the content each time you visit a new sim (in the internet browser analogy a sim would be a page). This then gets stored in a cache on your system by which each time you revisit the sim (or page) it fetches the relevant data from the cache. This only speeds up the area somewhat. The sim (or page) will still take time to load.

/rant

Edited July 30, 2019 by Drayke Newall

[Alyona Su]

1 hour ago, Digit Gears said:

 

Are you two sure you don't have shadows left turned on, cause shadows is by far BY FAR, the absolute biggest greediest resource hog of a graphical feature in SL.

And it doesn't help that LL decided to leave it turned on default when you freshly install their viewer, making a lot of peoples first time in SL the mountain peak of lag upon leaving the newbie island.

Turning off Advanced Lighting also disables shadows. I run on Catznip at full Ultra 100% of the time (as it's the best-performing of all viewers) - but a simple switch-off of Advanced lighting in crowded place (dance club, shopping events, etc.) does wonders. As for newbies... the context of most of this thread have nothing to do with them.

Edited July 30, 2019 by Alyona Su