FPS and Lag... Why is it Directional?

[Cari Soulstar]

Does anyone know what causes FPS to change the most when changing the view angle of your viewer?  For example, face one direction and FPS is 20...turn 90 degrees and it's 10. Etc.  Even when standing in an empty box with the same textures all around, FPS changes depending on direction faced. What causes this the most!  Hoping to get some insight.

[Odaks]

Your viewer will actually compute and draw everything within your draw distance, whether you can see it or not. So not only does what you see affect fps, what you can't see does too. Unless your draw distance keeps everything that is drawn confined to within your box, it's anyones' guess how stuff outside will affect things.

[Cari Soulstar]

yes. this was helpful. THANK YOU!!!

[Bree Giffen]

I think it has something to do with texture loading and unloading in the client viewer. When you are looking in a direction, all the textures load within your screen. Everything off screen is not loaded. Like a flashlight, you can see what you shine a light on but everything around you is dark. If someone walks into your view, their texture gets loaded but since it's just one avatar's texture it isn't much of a load. When you turn your head the viewer begins loading the textures of everything that comes into view all the way out from a few meters to a thousand meters depending on your settings. If you don't have a large cache set in your viewer, the textures are loading from the nearest Amazon server which may be a city away, a state away, a country away. Loading textures from a server is much slower than loading from your hard drive which is how nearly all video games do it. The textures can also be large in file size and there can possibly be thousands of textures needed to render one screenful of SL. I think that avatars are a big culprit to slowness because you can have a regular looking avatar that contains a huge amount of textures. When I turn all other avatars into jelly dolls, turning off all textures from them, my lag goes away.

There's a little more complexity to the answer because there is also some caching of textures, texture compression, pre-loading of textures, object occlusion, LOD rendering, loading of things other than textures, etc. 

[Rowan Amore]

Unless I'm out exploring, I always keep my draw distance around 72.  Even at home, I have no need to see the neighbors place 2 parcels away.  Turning down draw is the first thing I recommend when someone somewhere says they're lagging.

[Lindal Kidd]

Yep, it's the stuff you see, which has to be downloaded and your graphics card has to render.

The most powerful example of this is to check your fps at ground level, then go up to an altitude over 1000m. Nothing on the ground is rendered when you're above this level, and your fps will take a big upward jump.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Going back a few years, some places had a "clear visible cache" barrel at their arrival point which you sat on and went sky-high. Similar in a way to the red rose that stopped all animations.

[Karl Herber]

OOh yes I noticed this very significantly in Bellisseria. In one particular house I had (briefly) my FPS would drop to 25% when facing west than it did facing any other direction. 

It's largely due to over-complex objects within your draw distance. If you lower your draw distance in steps and watch for when the FPS jumps back up to normal, you can get an idea of how far away the offending property/object is. In my case it was two houses down the street. I didn't stay long enough to figure out what the actual object was, I just abandoned the house and re-rolled for another one.

[Rowan Amore]

What I've done at my Horizons home was to walk down the road to the extent of my draw distance, then blacklist the offending objects.  One parcel was an old ugly prim build with old furnishings.  I found out the owners name, found all objects he owned in area search and blacklisted everything.  Made a huge difference.  Gotta love Firestorm for that feature!

Edited January 28, 2021 by RowanMinx

[Cari Soulstar]

all of this is such amazing info! and good ideas as well. i had no idea the textures within view distance came into play, and certainly that is the issue we are running across where i am at. now time to ponder.  🙂

[Vivienne Schell]

3 hours ago, RowanMinx said:

One parcel was an old ugly prim build with old furnishings.  I found out the owners name, found all objects he owned in area search and blacklisted everything.  Made a huge difference.  Gotta love Firestorm for that feature!

Don´t insult me! Wrah!

/me points at her profile picture

Joke aside, the prims most probably were sculpties, which - for a while - really rendered SL close to unusability. Prims, usually, are less complex as most meshes are, cut torusses and the like aside. The predominant lag factor in the old prim days were textures.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

if you are on mainland drop it as low as it will go,  it's connecting upwards of 4 to 6 sims, even if they are not visiable and yanking/ganking everything at once.

[Rowan Amore]

3 hours ago, Vivienne Schell said:

Don´t insult me! Wrah!

/me points at her profile picture

Joke aside, the prims most probably were sculpties, which - for a while - really rendered SL close to unusability. Prims, usually, are less complex as most meshes are, cut torusses and the like aside. The predominant lag factor in the old prim days were textures.

The main points were old and ugly regardless of whether they were prim or sculpty.

2 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

if you are on mainland drop it as low as it will go,  it's connecting upwards of 4 to 6 sims, even if they are not visiable and yanking/ganking everything at once.

I do tend to keep it lower than normal if I'm spending any amount of time at home.

[Karl Herber]

I usually keep my draw distance at about 90 to 120, I drop it as low as it will go (32 I think) at clubs and busy events, and raise it to 256 or more when I'm sailing - which isn't as bad as you might think, because the region I'm in at the time is usually mostly open water.

20 hours ago, RowanMinx said:

What I've done at my Horizons home was to walk down the road to the extent of my draw distance, then blacklist the offending objects.  One parcel was an old ugly prim build with old furnishings.  I found out the owners name, found all objects he owned in area search and blacklisted everything.  Made a huge difference.  Gotta love Firestorm for that feature!

I love that. I often use it around my mainland homes when there is ugly stuff within view. Turn off "select only my objects" then drag to select around the entire offending parcel, and blacklist the whole lot at once. 

Edited January 29, 2021 by Karly Kiyori

[Cari Soulstar]

amazingly useful tip Karly. tY!!!

[Extrude Ragu]

On 1/28/2021 at 3:18 PM, Odaks said:

Your viewer will actually compute and draw everything within your draw distance, whether you can see it or not. 

Is this actually true? I thought that if a prim cube occludes an object behind it, the object behind is excluded from being drawn.

I know that Sinespace has this behaviour because if you clip your camera halfway into a wall objects disappear 

[Odaks]

11 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I thought that if a prim cube occludes an object behind it, the object behind is excluded from being drawn.

I was keeping my answer as simple as possible and, yes, occluded items won't  be displayed. The point is, however, all items within the draw distance have to be computed, and effectively drawn, in order that the viewer can decide what is occluded and what is not. That is the substantial loading for the graphics. Others have already pointed out that this process is actually far more complicated than the simplified picture I've tried to paint. The fact that some items will not be displayed at the end of this process is insignificant by comparison - the "damage" has already been done at this point.

 

Edited January 30, 2021 by Odaks