Running SL on old hardware (4G RAM upper limit)

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

In the general forum, somebody mentioned they were running SL on a 10-year old PC, and with several limitations, could access SL in a "serviceable" way. Things like rendering friends only, avatar skinning and cloth...

I have a couple of machines quite a bit older than that, limited to 4G RAM, but I can run with graphics set to high, ALM on, render everybody, draw distance 64 metres, and have very effective performance. There in't one magic button to achieve this, it's a collection of things, but one key to it all is using 32-bit viewers. 

I can use 64-bit viewers, but they will sometimes choke on the graphics in sims with lots of mesh and materials. I suspect that the 64-bit software somehow overruns the 4G RAM limit, possibly when it's using temporary ram as it piles stuff into the graphics or hauls it out of the cache, but developers are, quite understandably, not going to waste their time trying to make their code run in a thimble when they have pint glasses on their desks.

Fortunately, some of the TPVs ,and LL themselves, still supply 32-bit viewers. Yes, I appreciate you aren't going to be doing high-resolution closeup pictures showing the blood-flecked veins in your loved one's eyes or the hairs up their nostrils using my approach, but you'll be able to go around SL seeing everything and everyone with quite acceptable performance.

Key to it all is getting a passably good graphics card, and again here the age of the hardware is going to play a part.

GT520 cards are very cheap to pick up second hand (I suggest you goo for the one that has the on-board fan as the passive one does seem to heat up more), GTX460 cards are also very good although you will need a PSU with  pair of 6-pin connectors, and the GT1050 also works very well.

These cards don't have a massive amount of onboard RAM, and this is where the 32-bit viewers help because many of the TPVs have an option for you to clamp your texture sizes to a maximum of 512x512 , which can help in regions with lots of mesh and materials.

Use as large a cache file as you can.

In Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender or whatever, exclude the cache file location from the real-time protection scan, and also exclude all the processes associated with your viewers, not just the viewer itself but SlPlugin.exe. Also exclude the locations of your IM and chatlogs, because the RTP is going to otherwise scan a bit aggressively when these files are opened or appended to.

Lastly, and I suspect this is going to cause more fuss than using 32-bit programs on a 64-bit machine, don't try this with Windows 10, go back to Windows 7. The difference in memory and CPU usage by the OS is only part of the reason (Windows 10 seems to use 15% over and above what windows 7 use), the main reason are the drivers. Windows 10 insists on updating your graphics card drivers to ones it believes you should be using, and the older cards I have listed above do not work happily with the latest drivers, (Code 42, Windows has stopped this device because it caused a problem, but we're not going to tell you hat that problem is...) , whereas Windows 7 will let you chug along with one of the earlier drivers you have established works fine, and it doesn't forcibly override your choice and upgrade like Windows 10 will do.

So , now go ahead and bite me

Edited December 2, 2021 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Coffee Pancake]

Just be aware that the 32bit viewer isn't magically lighter on memory, it will try to do everything the 64bit viewer does .. and then run out of memory and just crash for entirely nonobvious reasons.

If you have any actual bugs don't expect any devs to take your reports seriously. 32 bit viewer testing is limited to "it runs? cool beans, ship it."

The best thing you can do is avoid all multitasking. Especially a browser, and relog frequently (like every 30 minutes).

 

I would still advise everyone run a 64bit client and a 64bit OS under all circumstances.

Don't take it for granted TPV's will always ship a 32bit viewer, right now our singular motivation is an overly nostalgic sentimental attachment to little nettybooks with ATOM processors.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

17 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Just be aware that the 32bit viewer isn't magically lighter on memory, it will try to do everything the 64bit viewer does .. and then run out of memory and just crash for entirely nonobvious reasons.

If or when I get a crash on a 32-bit viewer that wasn't due to me stupidly opening up Opera or Firefox at the same time as having a couple of 32-bit viewers running then I will most definitely agree with you.

Actually, as you know from a recent conversation about using the latest Catznip beta, I do now run 64-bit versions on the "hot HP" machine I got hat has 8G Ram, and yes, it's nice, but I'm posting this advice for people who are stuck with what they've got until they win the lottery.

An occasional crash will be, what, as annoying as the more frequent crash to-desktop trying to TP somewhere (I had nearly a dozen of those over the weekend), and strangely enough, the only graphics crash I've had recently is on my "new" 64-bit 8G Ram PC. Nvidia drivers can be a tad flaky even on 64-bits.

24 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Don't take it for granted TPV's will always ship a 32bit viewer, right now our singular motivation is an overly nostalgic sentimental attachment to little nettybooks with ATOM processors.

If a survey were to show that 20% of the userbase were using 32-bit viewers, would that cause you to review the situation?

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

If a survey were to show that 20% of the userbase were using 32-bit viewers, would that cause you to review the situation?

No.

We make 32bit builds because it is easy to do so, if that changes, we will tap out. That's a whole rabbit hole we do not have the resources to go down.

The vast majority of crash reports come from a tiny few 32bit users, some of which crash dozens (as in actually dozens) of times a day. There is literally nothing we can do to help these users out. 

Every CPU going back to a core 2 duo can run a 64bit OS.

If SL is your primary entertainment medium, then refusing to upgrade ever is entirely self defeating. If reading was your hobby and you needed new glasses, you would go get new glasses.

We will keep making 32bit versions for as long as it remains practical to do so, with the intention of giving people as much time to upgrade as we can., but there will come a point.

[ValuedAndSelective]

Well, my computer isn't literally exactly 10 years old, but I'm using a Radeon 6670 card. I have whitelisted exes and folders, have a huge cache allotment, and 8GB of RAM. 

 

Yes, I know I'm a bit weird having a 1TB SSD in an old machine. I make do with what I can, but I'm not using an HDD as my main drive ever again. Lol

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, ValuedAndSelective said:

Well, my computer isn't literally exactly 10 years old, but I'm using a Radeon 6670 card. I have whitelisted exes and folders, have a huge cache allotment, and 8GB of RAM. 

Yes, I know I'm a bit weird having a 1TB SSD in an old machine. I make do with what I can, but I'm not using an HDD as my main drive ever again. Lol

I have more than a few old machines, some very vintage, all with SSDs instead of mechanical drives. Perfectly normal.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I have more than a few old machines, some very vintage, all with SSDs instead of mechanical drives.

I am interested to know if you have seen any sign of early failure in these due to the heavy cache-write activity? Henri made the point that each time a texture i accessed, even read, it's last access time is updated to allow detection of older textures for swapping out as cache fills, therefore every cache texture read requires a corresponding write, which will mean a 512-byte strip write rather than just a 4-byte field.

So far I haven't gone for SSDS for SL, just for the Auran train simulators.

I use 7200 rpm disks in preference to 5400 rpm, although I have to say I couldn't discern any improvement when upgrading to the faster disks

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

10 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If SL is your primary entertainment medium, then refusing to upgrade ever is entirely self defeating. If reading was your hobby and you needed new glasses, you would go get new glasses.

When you arrive at the dreaded pensionable age you will learn that some things such as replacing glasses, hardware, cars.. have to be balanced against food and fuel. I looked into the possibilities of subsidising my income by selling either my body or my partner's but the idea didn't go down very well.

 

Correct me on this but I believe one of the biggest problems with keeping 32-bit viewers going is not in your code as such but in the surrounding libraries and subsystems, such as dotNet? Linux appears to be even harder than Windows in this respect.

[Henri Beauchamp]

32 bits viewers are a thing of the past. Period.

Even I, who is known for being very conservative with regards to ”novelties that are not so great”, ended up abandoning completely 32 bits platforms for the Cool VL Viewer. The reasons are many:

1. A simple poll (and the subsequent abandon of the 32 bits compilation support which did not raise any protest) demonstrated that not a single user of my viewer (which is known for being used by many people with ”old” hardware, for it is easier on them) is missing it (i.e. no one was using a 32 bits Cool VL Viewer when I dropped support for 32 bits).
2. All viewers need SSE2 support, and now (because of CEF v89+) SSE3: the latter is not available on any 32 bits CPU, and very few 32 bits CPUs offered SSE2.
3. Even when running on a low memory system, and even though the 64 bits viewer binary does use more memory than the 32 bits binary one, the 64 bits binary is way stabler. Why ?... Because of virtual address space fragmentation. Keep in mind that, even on a 64 bits OS, the virtual address space is limited to 4GB for 32 bits binaries (and 3GB or even, horror, only 2 GB (for some 32 bits Windows systems) for programs running on a 32 bits OS: the rest is reserved for the kernel memory). Whenever the virtual address space gets too fragmented, some memory allocations will fail, because the memory manager will be unable to find a large enough contiguous *virtual* address space block. This got nothing to do with physical memory fragmentation (which is easily solved via MMU paging), but it affects all 32 bits programs (while the 64 bits address space being virtually illimited, it is never a problem for 64 bits programs). Over time and as the session lasts, your 32 bits viewer will end up crashing (or, in the case of the Cool VL Viewer and thanks to its memory safety checks and allocation failure fallback code, to notify you to please relog at once before it will crash !).
4. The boost::fiber code now in use in all modern viewers (and which replaces a LL-brewed/forked boost::dcoroutine class) is totally bogus under Linux 32 bits and crashes immediately the viewer (so, I had to maintain a dual-path code just for 32 bits, with the use of an outdated boost library for it). Since, obviously, no other project is using boost::fiber in Linux 32 bits code, no one cares about that (or those) bugs...

Don't take me wrong: 32 bits viewers were a better solution in the past (when there was no or few meshes, no materials, no Bento avatars, no animesh, etc, when having/buying 8GB or RAM was a luxury, and when some 64 bits CPUs were actually faster at running 32 bits code, which is no more the case), but now, they are simply deprecated.

Conclusion: install a 64 bits OS and use a 64 bits viewer, even with only 4GB RAM: you will get a stabler SL experience, but of course, you will have to limit your texture memory to something reasonable (512 to 1024MB at most), and draw distances at 256m or less (depending on the complexity of the scene and the amount of neighbouring sims).

Edited December 3, 2021 by Henri Beauchamp

[Coffee Pancake]

4 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I am interested to know if you have seen any sign of early failure in these due to the heavy cache-write activity? Henri made the point that each time a texture i accessed, even read, it's last access time is updated to allow detection of older textures for swapping out as cache fills, therefore every cache texture read requires a corresponding write, which will mean a 512-byte strip write rather than just a 4-byte field.

So far I haven't gone for SSDS for SL, just for the Auran train simulators.

I use 7200 rpm disks in preference to 5400 rpm, although I have to say I couldn't discern any improvement when upgrading to the faster disks

I've yet to have an SSD fail on me, even the bargain bucket sub $20 ones from micro center just keep trucking along, I certainly don't baby them either.

I like a good samsung one for my main boot drive as they have a little cache ram on them and smarter controllers, but for everything else, including scratch drives for SL cache, swap files etc etc, the cheepo ones are fine.

For older or vintage hardware (right down to 486 machines) the cheepo ones are often overkill and can really make a huge difference to performance. I only have spinning disks in my raid and will probably swap those out for SSDs at some point next year.

4 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

When you arrive at the dreaded pensionable age you will learn that some things such as replacing glasses, hardware, cars.. have to be balanced against food and fuel. I looked into the possibilities of subsidising my income by selling either my body or my partner's but the idea didn't go down very well.

Find a PC recycler and pick up a 4 year old lenovo business desktop, slap a little more ram and GPU in it and bam .. job done.

Thrift stores have worked out well for me, but its very hit and miss and you have to go as often as you can, that's a whole hobby in itself.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

I run SL on a ten year old PC. I've pimped it out with an SSD and 16GB of RAM though. 4GB DDR3 modules don't command much of a premium nowadays, so anything with more than one RAM slot should really have at least 8GB. 

In addition to the 512x512 texture limit, enable texture compression. That really cuts down on VRAM use. Like by half.

For video cards, since prices on almost everything have gone insane, get what you can get I guess. There may still be some good values in OEM cards with no retail versions or Quadros. 

[Jenna Huntsman]

2 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

In addition to the 512x512 texture limit, enable texture compression. That really cuts down on VRAM use. Like by half.

It does; but at the cost of hammering your CPU - so if your CPU is weak, enabling texture compression may actually cause worse performance than leaving it disabled (especially with newer viewers that make use of the multithreaded asset fetching).

Also not recommended if you're particularly low on VRAM (i.e. less than around 700mb) as you'll end up with a framerate in the single digits (this is caused by 'texture thrashing' - framerate drop is caused your CPU now has extra overhead when swapping textures out from the RAM as well as running the rendering thread)

With that being said, if you've got a strong CPU and a weak GPU, it's a good option.

Edited December 3, 2021 by Jenna Huntsman

[Nick0678]

It all depends on your SL activities. If you are a loner who likes to spend time on a skybox / platform making cubes and dressing your Ken//Barbie doll then even an old Core2Duo can handle SL but because it can log in don't expect it to handle a Saturday night in places like The Chamber (or others) where 60-70 mesh avatars will be around partying.. (if you are still on a 32bit client and expect to see what they are doing, how they are dressed etc..better close SL and watch your local TV news)

Edited December 3, 2021 by Nick0678

[ValuedAndSelective]

6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I've yet to have an SSD fail on me, even the bargain bucket sub $20 ones from micro center just keep trucking along, I certainly don't baby them either.

I like a good samsung one for my main boot drive as they have a little cache ram on them and smarter controllers, but for everything else, including scratch drives for SL cache, swap files etc etc, the cheepo ones are fine.

For older or vintage hardware (right down to 486 machines) the cheepo ones are often overkill and can really make a huge difference to performance. I only have spinning disks in my raid and will probably swap those out for SSDs at some point next year.

Find a PC recycler and pick up a 4 year old lenovo business desktop, slap a little more ram and GPU in it and bam .. job done.

Thrift stores have worked out well for me, but its very hit and miss and you have to go as often as you can, that's a whole hobby in itself.

I wish I lived in a state that would allow me to buy from a scrap yard/recycler. I would have an almost-new computer fifty times over even if I just bought individual parts.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

24 minutes ago, ValuedAndSelective said:

I wish I lived in a state that would allow me to buy from a scrap yard/recycler.

 

Ebay is a suitable workaround.

Just steer clear of Small form factor machines

[Alazarin Mondrian]

Years ago I managed to log in on a Pentium III. By golly was it ever slow!