Second Life Viewer Texture Memory

[iceing Braveheart]

Hi

can you increase the texture memory slider limit to 12288 from 512. 512 is fine as a default setting in the viewer with the option to turn up to 12288

if you run around this store and tour all the boats it can use over 3 GB GL Mem and over 2GB Bound Mem at the same time

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dutch Harbor/142/145/25

https://secondlife.com/support/downloads/

top of viewer click world click show click advanced menu then click advanced menu click performance tools click show statistics bar

the graphics look muddy and washed out like a painting that was painted and water thrown on it when the viewer is flushing the memory to keep it at 512 instead of using what is needed to run the game with the second life viewer

[Solar Legion]

Ah yes, it was only a matter of time before this cropped up again ... And would you look at that, it's one of the usual suspects!

There is no reason whatsoever to have any Second Life client able to eat the entirety of any GPUs VRAM - not even if you're one of those able to afford something that has that much memory.

If such is your desire (potentially causing machine issues) then go and code it yourself.

[iceing Braveheart]

[Beq Janus]

Most TPVs allow you additional control (arguably to the point where you can break yourself if you try hard enough.) If you want that on the Lab's viewer then the first place to start is by raising a JIRA for a new feature request, they can then consider it and perhaps ask one of us TPVs to contribute their code. I expect there are any number of people who have requested this in the past so take a look for existing tickets and add your own comments to one of them.

Ultimately though, the configuration is a hint and making it higher won't force thing to change, it is the OpenGL drivers that will dictate how much VRAM you get to use. Applications do not allocate resources on the card directly, but instead grab buffers which the drivers decide where to place (VRAM or system RAM), as such you will frequently find that at least as much system RAM is used to mirror the VRAM pools.

 

[Jenna Huntsman]

* There is an issue right now with iGPU VRAM detection which locks out the detected VRAM to the lowest 'reserved' amount (this can be as low as 64MB!) and most laptop manufacturers do not allow you to change this. Considering that modern iGPUs (Intel iris xe; upcoming AMD RDNA2 based iGPUs) are capable of running SL with ALM at 30+ FPS, it'd be good to get better VRAM limits for these more modern chips

[iceing Braveheart]

8 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

Most TPVs allow you additional control (arguably to the point where you can break yourself if you try hard enough.) If you want that on the Lab's viewer then the first place to start is by raising a JIRA for a new feature request, they can then consider it and perhaps ask one of us TPVs to contribute their code. I expect there are any number of people who have requested this in the past so take a look for existing tickets and add your own comments to one of them.

Ultimately though, the configuration is a hint and making it higher won't force thing to change, it is the OpenGL drivers that will dictate how much VRAM you get to use. Applications do not allocate resources on the card directly, but instead grab buffers which the drivers decide where to place (VRAM or system RAM), as such you will frequently find that at least as much system RAM is used to mirror the VRAM pools.

 

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-231895

[Odaks]

A 1024m draw distance has been thrown into the mix, I see from the Jira submitted. Is there a presumption that, provided there is lashings of video memory in use, high graphics settings will be ok?

[NiranV Dean]

On 3/7/2022 at 9:46 PM, Solar Legion said:

Ah yes, it was only a matter of time before this cropped up again ... And would you look at that, it's one of the usual suspects!

There is no reason whatsoever to have any Second Life client able to eat the entirety of any GPUs VRAM - not even if you're one of those able to afford something that has that much memory.

If such is your desire (potentially causing machine issues) then go and code it yourself.

That's simply not true. Any and all 3D games should be able to use all your GPU's VRAM (given a little buffer for windows of course). How they do it is a totally different story though, SL in particular is incredibly inefficient when it comes to GPU VRAM, effectively allocating every texture twice into memory which massively bloats the VRAM usage and effectively lowers how much VRAM we really have. 6GB easily become effectively 3GB. With how many textures we frequently see in SL it's quite normal to assume at least 2-3GB usage. More if we are talking about big textures (although 1K really isn't big).

Not to mention that the texture memory setting is misleading and doesn't even represent how much the Viewer actually uses, 512 is roughly 1GB in reality (split roughly 700 / 300 for both memory pools).