Low GPU Usage with Nvidia RTX 2060

[ElJaviLuki]

I don't understand why Second Life doesn't use my graphics card as It should do... [See image]: I have low GPU usage which obviously affects my FPS and performance in Ultra Settings.

Some help pls?

 

[Lillith Hapmouche]

1) When you tab out of SL to check the task manager, it's only natural that the usage will drop immensely.

2) There are plenty of threads about the very same topic in the Technical forums. Just with 1080 (Ti)s instead of a 2060, but the same tenor... please start with reading those.

[Jackson Redstar]

There is also that some sims will be CPU high, GPU low and FPS very low and other sims will be GPU high and FPS high. Why? beats me! just the way it can be

[Extrude Ragu]

When the viewer isn't focused, you'll notice the FPS drops dramatically, it actually dramatically reduces activity when not the active window.

SL does use the GPU a bit. I'm also using an RTX 2060 and when Firestorm is focused in ultra settings I see about 35% GPU usage (although my sim is more optimized than most as it's all made by me)

With that said, I'm told a lot of stuff in the code base is a carry over from technology from the early 2000's due to SL's age. I'm sure there's a lot that could be modernized for today's hardware.

[NiranV Dean]

I suppose i'll have to repeat myself here:

GPU usage highly depends on a few aspects such as used rendering features and your resolution. The Viewer naturally does a lot of rendering on the CPU because A: some of the Viewer code parts are quite old and B: some information needs to be prepared to be used by the GPU. Currently however the CPU prepares a lot more than necessary. A lot of things could still be pushed over to the GPU but that would require even more extensive changes than probably EEP did (which basically just shuffled stuff around a bit).

Your GPU mainly gets used whenever shaders come into play. Rendering features running on shaders for instance are: Shadows, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (in LL Viewer just named Ambient Occlusion), Depth of Field, a whole lot of lighting such as specularity, materials etc. Basically everything that is "fancy" is being done on the GPU. However that fanciness is not very expensive to do (partly because we don't have much fanciness to waste GPU resources on) which means the GPU is just idling most of the time because whatever little it has to do is usually done pretty quick. If you want to see your GPU being utilized more, use Deferred Rendering (Advanced Lighting Model), enable Shadows and Ambient Occlusion, this alone should drastically raise your GPU usage and make SL look a lot better. That's sadly where it stops though for most people. Unless you have a Viewer that offers more graphical features running on the GPU (like Black Dragon with Volumetric Lighting and Screen Space Reflections) you'll only ever see your usage spike whenever more calculations need to be done, such as with low sun angles which will have the shadow shaders run rampant and nuke your GPU with 100% usage, resulting in sharp FPS drops. Before that happens however you'll most likely see your CPU bottlenecking due to the sheer amount of stuff the CPU has to do.

My GTX 1060 currently runs at 50-60% average usage most of the time when not in above mentioned edge case. That's quite okay and leaves some room up for Screen Space Reflections, Depth of Field and Volumetric Lighting to work without impacting my framerate.