performance I think we should, collectively, be somewhat embarassed.

[Beq Janus]

Just for context here is graph of FS Sessions in Feb 2022.

What we can never discern from these is what the relative contribution to the economy is.

1.2% Linux and 5.6% Mac is still a decent number of users.

 

Edited April 7, 2022 by Beq Janus
edit cos I hit post too soon

[Gavin Hird]

5 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

Just for context here is graph of FS Sessions in Feb 2022.

Just out of curiosity, what is the identifier you use for the Mac users, because the system stopped reporting Mac OS X years ago. It will now report macOS if you query the system services. 

[Gavin Hird]

25 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

I used to think that a world run by Microsoft would be narrow intolerant oligarchy but now I see that a walled orchard world mediated by the Apple corporation would be so safe secure and utterly intolerant that its denizens would probably die from boredom.

Probably.

But then, what do I know.  I am one of the uninitiated who never could afford the ticket into that orchard.

Apple has not become particularly more proprietary now than it used to be with the exception they have now gone for a processor implementation that is not sold to anyone else.  Apart from the special instructions added for Intel memory mode and scheduling of high performance and energy cores, the processor instruction set is out of the box ARM.

The first Linux versions that can be installed and run on those processors are emerging and making good progress. Apple has even made changes to the boot loader recently to make it easier to load and run other operating systems on the machines.

Large portions of macOS is still open source, while virtually nothing in Windows is, and even Android has a smaller share open source in it. 

[Beq Janus]

1 minute ago, Gavin Hird said:

Just out of curiosity, what is the identifier you use for the Mac users, because the system stopped reporting Mac OS X years ago. It will now report macOS if you query the system services. 

The viewer uses a hardcoded string "DARWIN_PRODUCT_NAME", the rest of the data of fulfilled form the OS

        const char * DARWIN_PRODUCT_NAME = "Mac OS X";

       

        SInt32 major_version, minor_version, bugfix_version;

        OSErr r1 = Gestalt(gestaltSystemVersionMajor, &major_version);

        OSErr r2 = Gestalt(gestaltSystemVersionMinor, &minor_version);

        OSErr r3 = Gestalt(gestaltSystemVersionBugFix, &bugfix_version);

 

 

 

 

[Gavin Hird]

11 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

The viewer uses a hardcoded string "DARWIN_PRODUCT_NAME", the rest of the data of fulfilled form the OS

        const char * DARWIN_PRODUCT_NAME = "Mac OS X";

       

        SInt32 major_version, minor_version, bugfix_version;

        OSErr r1 = Gestalt(gestaltSystemVersionMajor, &major_version);

        OSErr r2 = Gestalt(gestaltSystemVersionMinor, &minor_version);

        OSErr r3 = Gestalt(gestaltSystemVersionBugFix, &bugfix_version);

 

 

 

 

OK, thanks. 

Better change that to macOS 😉

Oh, wow - jeez. - Gestalt cannot report system versions over 10.9. 

Cinder wrote a change to that years ago. Here is the commit I have i my viewer.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Gavin Hird

[Flea Yatsenko]

The viewer and hardware has been getting better, but content keeps increasing in complexity. Look how complex a lot of mesh avatars have gotten, those are easily the largest contributors to poor performance. And if LL makes the viewer faster, people are just going to make their builds and AVs more and more complex, negating performance increases. Build tools should show render impact on every object in world, and avatar complexity should add a clearer, more obvious message that X% of people won't be able to display you properly.

Lots of people use SL to make attractive and interesting avatars, but for a lot of people there's no optimal way to do it, you can just keep adding complex stuff to your body until you get what you want. Just imagine what improvements we could see if, say you attach something to your avatar and the heaviest and worst offenders are temporarily colored red and the best ones are colored green.

Some of the tech stuff that's happening is really awesome, both with LL and Animats. But if you give people more performance for free they aren't going to be excited they have higher frame rates. They are going to keep adding stuff to their builds and AV until their computer slows down and then we are back to where we started. And it's not their fault, it's an ignorance thing because there's not enough tools to make it clear what affects performance negatively.

SL has never been very performant, but if you took a modern viewer back to a sim built around ancient hardware and didn't use mesh and new features you'd probably find it runs extremely well. This is just an endless battle between trying to make SL run faster and content creators using the higher performance to make more complex things. The race is not going to end until there's something equivalent to land impact for rendering performance.

[Aishagain]

2 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

Apple has not become particularly more proprietary now than it used to be

So I say again, which is the worst, a totalitarian that is habitually secretive, or a totalitarian that is both habitually secretive AND paranoid enough to insist on having total control over what you see and what you do?

Neither are good, but that is just life, I guess, and no I am not drawing any parallels, in case you think I am.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Aishagain
spelling

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, arabellajones said:

A useful internet rule about any technology is to check whether the furries are using it. 

Absolutely this.

2 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

1.2% Linux and 5.6% Mac is still a decent number of users.

Yet you would think Linux was a dominant platform for all the noise it's users make about it.

We never got pestered or to make a Mac client, but people have sprung up to thank us for doing so.

We get harassed incessantly by weirdly entitled Linux users demanding all sorts of things, even had one try and run a one man smear campaign against us on Twitter .. until Twitter torched his accounts.

 

OK, there was this one Linux user who was polite, but after a decade of doing this I'm marking them as an edge case.

[Gavin Hird]

31 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

So I say again, which is the worst, a totalitarian that is habitually secretive, or a totalitarian that is both habitually secretive AND paranoid enough to insist on having total control over what you see and what you do?

Neither are good, but that is just life, I guess, and no I am not drawing any parallels, in case you think I am.

Well, on the Mac there is no limitations to what you can install or do with the machine. The consumer machines are pretty locked down in terms of HW these days. Tim Cook has been a disaster in that respect. I just call him Timmy.

On iOS it pisses me off to no end the limitations Apple tries to impose on you, but they are not unique at all. It is pretty much how all US companies operate these days. Even LL does.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Gavin Hird

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

The viewer and hardware has been getting better, but content keeps increasing in complexity. Look how complex a lot of mesh avatars have gotten

The content hasn't really gotten that much more complex, rigged mesh on avatars looks better now than at launch, but that's 90% artistry as people making the content get better at it.

The real kicker is content that is forced for operational reasons to work around limitations imposed on the platform.

Mesh bodies with HUD based alpha sections being a good example. They present the viewer with a huge number of meshes that need to be processed every frame specifically because meshes are limited to 8 texturable faces.

Heavy scripted content tends to happen when the scripter gets too close to the 64k memory limit for comfort and needs to break their project down into many scripts that talk via linked messages.

High texture processing ... when a single 1024 texture isn't sufficient so they are forced to use several.

 

[Gavin Hird]

6 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Absolutely this.

Yet you would think Linux was a dominant platform for all the noise it's users make about it.

We never got pestered or to make a Mac client, but people have sprung up to thank us for doing so.

We get harassed incessantly by weirdly entitled Linux users demanding all sorts of things, even had one try and run a one man smear campaign against us on Twitter .. until Twitter torched his accounts.

 

OK, there was this one Linux user who was polite, but after a decade of doing this I'm marking them as an edge case.

You nailed that one!

[Ardy Lay]

Linux has different sorts of fans.  Some genuinely appreciate what it is.  Others just want everything for zero cost.  Guess which is louder.

[Ardy Lay]

Hmm, by the concepts presented here, I am two people.  Or more.  I have two iPhones, several computers running Windows and several computers running Linux distributions.  I would hope that pie chart with percentages is representing percent of logins from an OS family and not trying to somehow represent percentages of SL residents that use a reported OS, because I would get TWO SLICES of that pie..  I use two different OSs to log in to Second Life; Windows and Linux.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Ardy Lay

[Gavin Hird]

40 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

Hmm, by the concepts presented here, I am two people.  Or more.  I have two iPhones, several computers running Windows and several computers running Linux distributions.  I would hope that pie chart with percentages is representing percent of logins from an OS family and not trying to somehow represent percentages of SL residents that use a reported OS, because I would get TWO SLICES of that pie..  I use two different OSs to log in to Second Life; Windows and Linux.

I'd rather trust LL stats to the extent they exist, because they should have a better chance to unique the logins. A possibility I assume FS does not have.

[animats]

20 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The vast majority of content is entirely static.

Yes. And although you don't know in advance what's going to change, you can observe what does change.

I do that in my experimental viewer. Everything starts out static. If it moves or changes, it's moved to "dynamic". All the static objects are divided into tiles (currently 16 tiles per region) and handled, to some extent, as a group. Dynamic objects get individual attention. This is in the early stages; it's not working yet.

I previously posted some images from GTA V to show where they transition from 3D models to flat background impostors. That's the effect I'm looking for. That's how GTA gets those impressive vistas. SL has impressive vistas, especially in Heterocera and the Snowlands, but unless you turn up draw distance to 1024m and wait several minutes, you'll never see them. Like this:

Heterocera, from the ridgeline in Lota. That's Heterocera's central island in the distance. The Unknown Park amusement park is to the left of center. Taken with Firestorm, draw distance and LOD at max, which slows Firestorm down to 3.5 FPS. My goal is to have views like that all the time. Most of the distant scenery would be coming from static images collected once a week or so by a picture-taking bot.

[Suzanna Soyinka]

34 minutes ago, animats said:

Yes. And although you don't know in advance what's going to change, you can observe what does change.

Daily snapshot updates, regional atlassing.

We could do a lot with that and imposters and a lod system that actually works.

[Monty Linden]

5 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

1.2% Linux and 5.6% Mac is still a decent number of users.

I want to meet the Windows Server person.

[Ansariel Hiller]

6 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

Just like your speculation on number of Mac users in SL.

Shame we get stats from LL - try something else! 😛

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

Shame we get stats from LL - try something else! 😛

Reminds me .. we need to ask for them at the next TPV, its been a while

[Gavin Hird]

10 hours ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

Shame we get stats from LL - try something else! 😛

Go fix your viewer. It runs like *****! That should keep you busy for a couple weeks. 😎

To be fair to you, I am referring to the Mac version of FS. I have never used the Windows version simply because I don't own kit that runs Windows.

Here is what it is all about:

• Macs have always shipped with weak GPUs (fact) and has not exactly been stellar in the CPU department either. Meaning you can't pile on functionality that loads on additional work on the GPU; you have to concentrate on rendering the basic scene as fast and good as you can.
• macOS does not allow any application to address the screen directly like Windows does, but your app has to render to a buffer that is composited to the desktop at 60 Hz/fps. Trying to drive the frame rate faster is pointless as 60 fps is what you get.
• All Macs since 2014 with built in displays (most of them) comes with what Apple calls a Retina display. This means that your app will have to render at 4X the resolution of the resolution perceived by the user. Combine this with the weak GPUs, and it is not really possible to drive an app like the viewer much faster than 20-40 fps with reasonable settings. 
• Even if you render at normal settings (like you would on Windows), the compositor will upsample it to screen resolution, meaning it will look somewhat blurred.
• To a Mac user FS feels like a badly ported Windows app that hardly has been tested on a Mac by the developer. Unless you are a Mac user you probably don't understand what I am talking about, but Mac users get it immediately. It is not unique to FS, but quite common for "cross platform" development, where the cross means a bad, unoptimized port and UI that reeks foreign.
• The fact that you have built the viewer with a deployment target of macOS 10.11 (El Capitan released Sept 2015) means it is linked with libraries that probably were the worst ever for the viewer. 10.11 was the first system version with the Metal desktop compositor and all viewers crashed badly on it. It was not till 10.12.6 (Sierra) that Apple had made changes to the kernel that made the viewers run stable. (I worked with them for 1 1/2 years testing and reporting).
• Building with such an old target also hides a lot of deprecations and removals from system support that must be fixed for the viewer to run as best as it can on currently supported Apple kit. It won't compile at all in the latest Xcode 13.3. It also makes it impossible to sign and notarize it. 
• Finally: What with the LSL bridge? – It is creepy.

Edited April 8, 2022 by Gavin Hird
Clarification

[Mollymews]

On 4/7/2022 at 8:07 AM, animats said:

 I'm working on an experimental viewer that uses Rust, Vulkan, and many threads.

i appreciate that you actually work on these kinds of things, and not just talk about it as most of the rest of us do (which includes me)

 

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

2 hours ago, Monty Linden said:

I want to meet the Windows Server person.

It's probably a furry, tried and trusted tech is their metier?

[animats]

10 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

i appreciate that you actually work on these kinds of things, and not just talk about it as most of the rest of us do (which includes me)

I was really bored during coronavirus lockdown. I had to do something. Now I've come far enough I don't want to quit until I get something others can play with.

[Ansariel Hiller]

9 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

Go fix your viewer. It runs like *****! That should keep you busy for a couple weeks. 😎

Suddenly trying to derail? Well then... How about this: Works fine here - go fix your crappy hardware! 😛

[Andred Darwin]

On 4/3/2022 at 4:08 PM, Henri Beauchamp said:

For example, you did enable multi-threading in the NVIDIA driver, right ?

Thank you for that one! I got an extra 20fps in average by enabling it for the viewer! (On my machine its called Threaded Optimization under Manage 3D Settings... 

For what its worth, I agree with the OP... viewer performance sucks! It's tolerable ( 2022 ) if you use 64sqm of viewing area... with less than 5 avatars in a scene! I hope they continue the work with the Performance viewer, and add more effort into improving the viewer (same as it was done with the simulator when it comes to script performance...) and less effort adding new stuff.... (the snowball keeps growing, at one point, will need to deal with it!)