Extremely Low FPS On Gaming PC

[Hemms Osterham]

Hi. Since first obtaining this computer I have suffered from extremely low FPS across the board on SL across all viewers.

As you can see I have a really decent computer. Certainly decent enough to expect 30FPS. However the only time I am able to breach this level of FPS is in the sky, no other avatars, no background, basically no game. In any sim my FPS is about 5-7. the weird thing is that this is under ANY GRAPHICS SETTING. REPEAT. CHANGING GRAPHICS SETTINGS DO NOT CHANGE FPS. THE SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM IS NOT TO LOWER DRAW DISTANCE AND TURN OFF SHADOWS. I HAVE DONE THAT PLENTY. I HAVE ALSO TRIED CHANGING SCREEN RESOLUTION. I HAVE ALSO UNINSTALLED REINSTALLED SEVERAL TIMES. NO EFFECT! STILL 7 FPS!

Besides. I am a Second Life Photographer and Cinematographer. (Photography & Video) Filming on anything other than Ultra is unacceptable.

Trying to solve this problem off and on for a year I have basically heard something something SL uses your processor something something single core only something something 32bit architecture something something. Is this the solution?

In addition depth rendering in Second Life does not work on ANY VIEWER.

My gut feeling is something isnt utilizing my GPU correctly but I am not enough of a computer genius to go about figuring out how or what that is. I am willing to expend money to solve this problem, whether that involves buying new parts, or paying some kind of advanced tech support.

 

I see other users copypaste this huge stack of information including sim info but I dont know how to do that. If you tell me how users are getting this information I will update this post.

Current PC Setup:

CPU

    AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor

    Base speed:    3.60 GHz
    Sockets:    1
    Cores:    6
    Logical processors:    12
    Virtualization:    Enabled
    L1 cache:    384 KB
    L2 cache:    3.0 MB
    L3 cache:    32.0 MB

    Utilization    21%
    Speed    3.94 GHz
    Up time    0:09:42:59
    Processes    240
    Threads    3550
    Handles    147577

Memory

    16.0 GB

    Speed:    2667 MHz
    Slots used:    2 of 2
    Form factor:    DIMM
    Hardware reserved:    49.1 MB

    Available    2.4 GB
    Cached    2.0 GB
    Committed    26.4/38.0 GB
    Paged pool    530 MB
    Non-paged pool    402 MB
    In use (Compressed)    13.5 GB (198 MB)

Disk 0 (C:)

    SATA SSD

    Capacity:    447 GB
    Formatted:    447 GB
    System disk:    No
    Page file:    No
    Type:    SSD

    Read speed    4.1 KB/s
    Write speed    108 KB/s
    Active time    0%
    Average response time    0.7 ms

Ethernet

    Realtek PCIe GbE Family Controller

    Adapter name:    Ethernet
    DNS name:    Home
    Connection type:    Ethernet
    IPv4 address:    192.168.0.35
    IPv6 address:    fe80::d521:9179:7a33:a3e5%5
    Receive    4.8 Mbps
    Send    16.0 Kbps

GPU 0

    AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT

    Driver version:    30.0.15002.1004
    Driver date:    3/9/2022
    DirectX version:    12 (FL 12.1)
    Physical location:    PCI bus 43, device 0, function 0

    Utilization    58%
    Dedicated GPU memory    5.7/6.0 GB
    Shared GPU memory    0.2/8.0 GB
    GPU Memory    5.9/14.0 GB

 

 

[NiranV Dean]

On 5/6/2022 at 1:58 PM, Qie Niangao said:

We need to lure a viewer developer into this thread somehow, but meanwhile I'll just talk out of my butt as usual: The ability of the viewer to save depth map images to disk long antedates the ability to emulate real time depth of field optics in graphics preferences. It's certainly possible these features use the same scene data, and it's interesting that you can enable and get that depth of field effect (at least on Black Dragon, as you reported), but either way it seems informative that you can't generate that depth map image for saving to disk. (It should just save a greyscale image with brightness corresponding to distance.)

FWIW, you absolutely should be getting way better performance in SL than you are. Something is definitely wrong and that something is being exceptionally elusive. Not that this observation helps in any way.

I've had reported cases of this before where someone couldn't save depth snapshots but was able to turn on Depth of Field (which absolutely needs depth information, like pretty much most of deferred rendering). It's important to note that the depth snapshot and the actual depth map the viewer uses are two entirely different things. We did not find a solution but that case was also an AMD GPU user and also had exceptionally low framerates for no reason. I'm led to believe this is just another one of AMD's poor openGL driver support issues.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

This may sound silly, but make sure your monitor is plugged into the GPU instead of the motherboard. There's at least two separate places at the back of your computer for that.

Do you play other games? Do they have similar issues?

[Hemms Osterham]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

This may sound silly, but make sure your monitor is plugged into the GPU instead of the motherboard. There's at least two separate places at the back of your computer for that.

Do you play other games? Do they have similar issues?

Yes, it is plugged into the GPU. I do not have this problem with other games. This is specifically a Second Life, and I suspect, Open GL issue.

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Hemms Osterham said:

I see other users copypaste this huge stack of information including sim info but I dont know how to do that. If you tell me how users are getting this information I will update this post.

You provided a lot of info already, but some of the software and configuration data can be had using this:

I gave up on AMD, but many folks here actually prefer those GPUs and should have suggestions. Just idly sloping around the web for info about this particular card I saw some rumblings that it can't handle 4K monitors very well (although the specs show it should at least drive them) which is probably irrelevant anyway. And anyway, that wouldn't be SL-specific, so… hmmm, does AMD come with a control panel (analogous to the old "Catalyst" I guess)?

Fingers crossed somebody who knows this card will come along soon.

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Hemms Osterham said:

In addition depth rendering in Second Life does not work on ANY VIEWER.

I meant to mention: Assuming this refers to "Depth of Field" it's only supposed to function with Advanced Lighting Model enabled.

(I think there's another kind of "depth rendering" for snapshots that codes the image by distance from the cam, but I'm guessing that's not what you mean.)

[Wulfie Reanimator]

23 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

hmmm, does AMD come with a control panel (analogous to the old "Catalyst" I guess)?

I have an AMD card (grr shortages), it does have its own panel but I don't have any suggestions. OP's card is by no means weak, so 5-10 FPS isn't expected even if they were in 4K.

Edited May 3, 2022 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Lindal Kidd]

The read and write speeds of your SSDs look very low to me. Also, something is using an awful lot of your RAM. But I don't know how those (possible) clues might help you.

Could you maybe try putting the SSDs in another computer and comparing their performance there with your current performance?

[Emma Krokus]

Reposting this from my reply in another thread (November 2021) - regarding RAM issues:

"This may not be your issue but worth a look if you haven't checked running processes already (in case you need it: on a Windows device, CTRL + ALT + DELETE will bring up a menu with Task Manager on it).

My story: I had a similar issue - eventually checked out Task Manager and found a huge number of dullahan.exe processes hogging resources - even after logging out from SL. People have tried to explain this beast to me but it's gone over my head. There is a discussion in the forums here somewhere!)

I eventually ended up disabling that file in my viewer (Singularity) completely (by renaming dullahanx.exe). I think it means I can't access SL media but frankly I wasn't a great user of that anyway.

I do hope you find the source of your issue!"

[Fritigern Gothly]

16 hours ago, Hemms Osterham said:

GPU 0
    AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
    Driver version:    30.0.15002.1004

I checked against the current diver versions on the AMD site and your number appears to be quite a bit off. 
I also find it suspicious that you can't get Depth of Field going, which makes me feel that you are using the drivers that came with Windows, which are designed to just work, but won;t give you anything in the way of performance or gaming features.
Do download and install the drivers for your operating system from this page and see if that helps.
If you don't trust the link I pasted here then go to the AMD website which is https://www.amd.com, click "Drivers and Support" at the top of the page, choose your graphics card and download the official, latest drivers for your graphics card.

Edited May 4, 2022 by Fritigern Gothly

[Hemms Osterham]

I dont understand this answer. While the info I copied from my Task Manager that I provided in my post says [GPU 0 AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Driver version: 30.0.15002.1004] My AMD software says I am using Driver Version 22.3.1. But both have a driver date of 3/9/22

 

I've downloaded the drivers through the AMD app several times and installed them. I dont know what other drivers it could be using. How do I select that and tell my computer to change to use different drivers?

Edited May 4, 2022 by Hemms Osterham

[Hemms Osterham]

15 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I meant to mention: Assuming this refers to "Depth of Field" it's only supposed to function with Advanced Lighting Model enabled.

(I think there's another kind of "depth rendering" for snapshots that codes the image by distance from the cam, but I'm guessing that's not what you mean.)

Refering to "Depth" as in the Depth Map generated by SL by which it calculates Depth Of Field. Black Dragon is somehow able to render its own Depth Of Field without this, but GShade is not able to ustilize Deapth Of field shaders as it pulls info from the SL Depth Map.

[Hemms Osterham]

3 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

I checked against the current diver versions on the AMD site and your number appears to be quite a bit off. 
I also find it suspicious that you can't get Depth of Field going, which makes me feel that you are using the drivers that came with Windows, which are designed to just work, but won;t give you anything in the way of performance or gaming features.
Do download and install the drivers for your operating system from this page and see if that helps.
If you don't trust the link I pasted here then go to the AMD website which is https://www.amd.com, click "Drivers and Support" at the top of the page, choose your graphics card and download the official, latest drivers for your graphics card.

My depth of field issue refers to the fact that Second Life is unable to produce a depth map.

[Hemms Osterham]

17 hours ago, Hemms Osterham said:

Yes, it is plugged into the GPU. I do not have this problem with other games. This is specifically a Second Life, and I suspect, Open GL issue.

Second Life isnt even utilizing all available resources.

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Hemms Osterham said:

I dont understand this answer. While the info I copied from my Task Manager that I provided in my post says [GPU 0 AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Driver version: 30.0.15002.1004] My AMD software says I am using Driver Version 22.3.1. But both have a driver date of 3/9/22

Yeah, the driver numbering is confusing; this from the latest release notes:

Quote

Package Contents

The AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.3.1 installation package contains the following:

• AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.3.1 Driver Version 21.50.02.01 for Windows® 10 and Windows® 11 (Windows Driver Store Version 30.0.15002.1004).

So I think the drivers are fine. Unfortunately I have no idea how depth of field works in any viewer (least of all Black Dragon) but I can see why that feature (and viewer) would be of interest to an SL photographer, and it does seem like a big clue as to what’s going wrong—or would be, to somebody who knew how to interpret it. I wonder if the Black Dragon developer(s?) offer any way to contact them for support, not that it’s a viewer problem per se, but this might be right up their alley.

[Rowan Amore]

9 hours ago, Hemms Osterham said:

My depth of field issue refers to the fact that Second Life is unable to produce a depth map.

The depth button on the snapshot floater has nothing to do with depth of field per se.  That's in the photo tools floater.  The 2 are not the same.  The Depth on the snapshot floater means...

• Colors or Depth: Colors speaks for itself. Depth creates a grey-scale image where objects close by are dark, while those further away are light. Such an image can be combined with the Color image in image postwork. Note: This option can only be changed when saving to disk.

Edited May 4, 2022 by Rowan Amore

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

1. Try another viewer.

2. Do a virus check.

3. Update your GPU with the latest drivers, preferably a clean install.

4. Make sure your viewer bandwidth settings (Preferences> Network>) are set to the correct levels. 0-500 for Wi-Fi, 500-1000 for copper cable, 1000-1500 for Fibre Optic.

5. Turn off "Anistropic Filtering" in Preferences> Graphics> Hardware Settings - its notoriously laggy.

Edited May 4, 2022 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Hemms Osterham]

I thought that was the depth map that the SL engine creates to calculate Depth Of Field information from.

[Hemms Osterham]

On 5/4/2022 at 12:28 AM, Qie Niangao said:

Yeah, the driver numbering is confusing; this from the latest release notes:

So I think the drivers are fine. Unfortunately I have no idea how depth of field works in any viewer (least of all Black Dragon) but I can see why that feature (and viewer) would be of interest to an SL photographer, and it does seem like a big clue as to what’s going wrong—or would be, to somebody who knew how to interpret it. I wonder if the Black Dragon developer(s?) offer any way to contact them for support, not that it’s a viewer problem per se, but this might be right up their alley.

On 5/4/2022 at 7:33 AM, Rowan Amore said:

The depth button on the snapshot floater has nothing to do with depth of field per se.  That's in the photo tools floater.  The 2 are not the same.  The Depth on the snapshot floater means...

• Colors or Depth: Colors speaks for itself. Depth creates a grey-scale image where objects close by are dark, while those further away are light. Such an image can be combined with the Color image in image postwork. Note: This option can only be changed when saving to disk.

I thought that was the depth map that the SL engine creates to calculate Depth Of Field information from.

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, Hemms Osterham said:

I thought that was the depth map that the SL engine creates to calculate Depth Of Field information from.

We need to lure a viewer developer into this thread somehow, but meanwhile I'll just talk out of my butt as usual: The ability of the viewer to save depth map images to disk long antedates the ability to emulate real time depth of field optics in graphics preferences. It's certainly possible these features use the same scene data, and it's interesting that you can enable and get that depth of field effect (at least on Black Dragon, as you reported), but either way it seems informative that you can't generate that depth map image for saving to disk. (It should just save a greyscale image with brightness corresponding to distance.)

FWIW, you absolutely should be getting way better performance in SL than you are. Something is definitely wrong and that something is being exceptionally elusive. Not that this observation helps in any way.

[Rowan Amore]

On 5/3/2022 at 4:49 AM, Hemms Osterham said:

    Adapter name:    Ethernet
    DNS name:    Home
    Connection type:    Ethernet
    IPv4 address:    192.168.0.35
    IPv6 address:    fe80::d521:9179:7a33:a3e5%5
    Receive    4.8 Mbps
    Send    16.0 Kbps

If you could also post the stats from the viewer that might help as @Qie Niangaosuggested above.

On 5/3/2022 at 8:33 AM, Qie Niangao said:

You provided a lot of info already, but some of the software and configuration data can be had using this:

 

 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

if you are trying to get super gaming rendering like a game with normal generated assets, then you are not going to ever get that,  SL is dynamic and user created,  every asset you come across is user generated and many many people have their own ideas what that means and there is no standards.   

 

30 fps.  depending on what you are running the settings at is able to be had, but shadows will drop the fps, anything more than 64m will drop the performance (more so on mainland)

just some ideas,  I can get pretty much constant 30 fps everywhere and most of the times 90+ fps in other areas, because I make sure I'm set for the area I'm going. 

[Hemms Osterham]

5 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

I've had reported cases of this before where someone couldn't save depth snapshots but was able to turn on Depth of Field (which absolutely needs depth information, like pretty much most of deferred rendering). It's important to note that the depth snapshot and the actual depth map the viewer uses are two entirely different things. We did not find a solution but that case was also an AMD GPU user and also had exceptionally low framerates for no reason. I'm led to believe this is just another one of AMD's poor openGL driver support issues.

So does that mean the solution Nvidia? I don't normally listen to people who's immediate solution is "Oh you have X brand, you need Y brand ya noob!" cause it usually is just them falling for marketing but they may be right. I will run some GPU diagnostics programs this week and post them along with viewer information. I'm glad this post is still getting attention!

 

[Rowan Amore]

7 hours ago, Hemms Osterham said:

So does that mean the solution Nvidia?

I have an AMD which isn't even as good as yours so I'm guessing that isn't the issue in and of itself.   Even running wifi, I get better fps than you've indicated.

[Hemms Osterham]

On 5/9/2022 at 6:04 PM, NiranV Dean said:

I've had reported cases of this before where someone couldn't save depth snapshots but was able to turn on Depth of Field (which absolutely needs depth information, like pretty much most of deferred rendering). It's important to note that the depth snapshot and the actual depth map the viewer uses are two entirely different things. We did not find a solution but that case was also an AMD GPU user and also had exceptionally low framerates for no reason. I'm led to believe this is just another one of AMD's poor openGL driver support issues.

LOL. Its me. Its the SAME GUY with the SAME PROBLEM.

 

Ok so I ran a GPU diagnostic tool and got this information. Is there an OpenGL diagnostic tool or a GUI for it I can attempt to troubleshoot for?

I refuse to beleive I need to chuck this 600$ GPU because of this issue. This has to be a checkbox problem somewhere. Evereything I hear tells me I should not be having this problem. I'll accept even wiping my PC and reinstalling the operating system but if that doesnt fix it I dont know what to do.

Also here is the SL info everyone has been asking for.

 

Black Dragon 6.4.13.47856 (64bit)
4.0.2 - Refreshing Dragon
Release Notes

You are at 132.2, 210.5, 2,802.5 in Cherrydale located at simhost-05f8a3bdec7e08509.agni
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cherrydale/132/210/2802
(global coordinates 167,812.0, 288,466.0, 2,802.5)
Second Life Server 2022-05-05.571557
Release Notes

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor               (3600 MHz)
Memory: 16335 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19043.1706)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 30.0.15002.1004
OpenGL Version: 4.3.14800 Compatibility Profile Context 22.3.1 30.0.15002.1004

Window size: 3840x2066
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 96m
Bandwidth: 3000kbit/s
LOD factor: 1.5
Render quality: 5
Advanced Lighting Model: Enabled
Automatic Memory Managment: Enabled
Texture memory: 529MB
Scene memory: 417MB
VFS (cache) creation time: March 30 2022 22:32:00

RestrainedLove API: RLV v3.3.3 / RLVa v2.3.0.47856
J2C Decoder Version: OpenJPEG: 1.5.1, Runtime: 1.5.1
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.00.07
Dullahan: 1.7.0.202008031800
  CEF: 81.3.10+gb223419+chromium-81.0.4044.138
  Chromium: 81.0.4044.138
LibVLC Version: 2.2.8
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Packets Lost: 60/14,772 (0.4%)
May 10 2022 22:07:34

Edited May 11, 2022 by Hemms Osterham

[Hemms Osterham]

On 5/3/2022 at 5:33 AM, Qie Niangao said:

You provided a lot of info already, but some of the software and configuration data can be had using this:

I gave up on AMD, but many folks here actually prefer those GPUs and should have suggestions. Just idly sloping around the web for info about this particular card I saw some rumblings that it can't handle 4K monitors very well (although the specs show it should at least drive them) which is probably irrelevant anyway. And anyway, that wouldn't be SL-specific, so… hmmm, does AMD come with a control panel (analogous to the old "Catalyst" I guess)?

Fingers crossed somebody who knows this card will come along soon.

Black Dragon 6.4.13.47856 (64bit)
4.0.2 - Refreshing Dragon
Release Notes

You are at 132.2, 210.5, 2,802.5 in Cherrydale located at simhost-05f8a3bdec7e08509.agni
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cherrydale/132/210/2802
(global coordinates 167,812.0, 288,466.0, 2,802.5)
Second Life Server 2022-05-05.571557
Release Notes

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor               (3600 MHz)
Memory: 16335 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19043.1706)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 30.0.15002.1004
OpenGL Version: 4.3.14800 Compatibility Profile Context 22.3.1 30.0.15002.1004

Window size: 3840x2066
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 96m
Bandwidth: 3000kbit/s
LOD factor: 1.5
Render quality: 5
Advanced Lighting Model: Enabled
Automatic Memory Managment: Enabled
Texture memory: 529MB
Scene memory: 417MB
VFS (cache) creation time: March 30 2022 22:32:00

RestrainedLove API: RLV v3.3.3 / RLVa v2.3.0.47856
J2C Decoder Version: OpenJPEG: 1.5.1, Runtime: 1.5.1
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.00.07
Dullahan: 1.7.0.202008031800
  CEF: 81.3.10+gb223419+chromium-81.0.4044.138
  Chromium: 81.0.4044.138
LibVLC Version: 2.2.8
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Packets Lost: 60/14,772 (0.4%)
May 10 2022 22:07:34