Alpha Trees Causing Overheating

[Jimmy Nino]

As the title says, my pc runs fine in SL, however when I am at a sim with big alpha trees, the fans kick in real loud. My graphics card is a GTX 1060 6GB.

I have tried different settings but none work, I'm not sure what to change in the Nvidia settings.

Any help please, I'm really frustrated?

[Fritigern Gothly]

You... have a problem with your fans doing exactly what they are supposed to do?
Also, if your graphics card were to ACTUALLY overheat, your problems would be bigger than just a noisy fan.

[Qie Niangao]

Have you checked to be sure there's no dust accumulating on the fans or heatsinks? Also, if you haven't already, you may want to install one of the hardware monitoring tools to check temps inside the box.

It would be weird, though, if big alpha trees cause a problem and crowds of complicated avatars, fully rendered, do not. Do avatars do it too, or is your GPU possessed by demons?

[Jimmy Nino]

Hi thanks for replying.

No I have no issues with anything else, no lag on busy sims, my pc is perfectly quiet. It is also a new PC, 3 months old. Ironically my old PC never had this problem.

Its just frustrating that my PC becomes noisy at the sight of big alpha trees, I wanted to use a tree at my home, but soon as I rez it,  the fans go to max.

I know it's the alpha, because if I turn off alpha in the render settings it stops, but of course I see no leaves then.

What causes that to happen, and is there any setting I can try?

Edited August 4, 2019 by Jimmy Nino

[Lillith Hapmouche]

You could try to monitor the load on your GPU and when exactly the fans start to spin rapidly. There might be a too aggressively set rule set for them by default. Chances are that the fans sit idling for 99% of the time with your card at 60°C, hence why you hear no noise at all, but fully kick in at 61°C.

You might be able to fine tune it with a tool like MSI Afterburner to a more moderate speed, while still maintaining a carefree temperature.

[Qie Niangao]

I do think this is an unusual problem. Plants are in general pretty bad about many overlapping layers of blended alpha, and that's a very costly thing to render, but still it seems strange that it should be uniquely difficult.

I understand you want to solve it for other trees you may encounter so focusing on the PC is the right thing to do, but one thing you might try for your own trees would be to change the "alpha mode" of some of the surfaces from Blended to Masked, and then see if you can find a tolerable masking threshold, maybe starting around 128. Masked alpha is much easier to render than is Blended. (Oh, if these happen to be prim or sculpty trees instead of mesh, best to try this first in a sandbox because setting Masked alpha triggers the Mesh accounting rules for Land Impact, which can be wildly unpredictable with Prim physics type.)

Oh, hmm... if they are mesh... have you adjusted the RenderVolumeLODFactor debug setting above 1.0? Some trees have a tremendous amount of geometry... if it's all fully rendered with all those alpha textures, I guess maybe that could be enough to trigger the fans. While we're at it, I wonder if there were any other special changes made either to the SL graphics preferences or the video card's control panel. It's not obvious to me why any of those would trigger this tree-specific response to alpha surfaces.

[Jimmy Nino]

Thanks for the replies.

Well it seems to be just big sculpted trees, no problems at all with mesh even at the same size scale.

I run my graphics at mid/high, that covers my needs in SL, lowering to lowest does make the fans turn to normal again and ironically the tree still looks the same, but the rest of the world looks terrible. I will just avoid the older sculpted trees that's all.

Render Volume I reset at 1.

Many thanks.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

You do know that you can fine-tune the settings...

[Jimmy Nino]

Hi Lillith, can you recommend what to change, I'm using regular SL viewer, I tried random changes, but nothing I did had any effect?

[Jackson Redstar]

You might want to take it to see a PC Doctor. It could be allergic to trees!