Simple Question about the use of the Advanced Lighting Model

[Qie Niangao]

Always on, except when I remember to check something I'm building for how it looks without materials and proper lighting. (To be honest, though, I usually don't change anything: If they choose to blind themselves to the projected light sources and normalmaps I tweaked for hours, screw 'em.)

[Ceka Cianci]

I have it always on, unless I'm shopping.. I drop down to High settings then..

I like having it on and using shared environment when I first get into a place like a beach.. It's great for tweaking shadows and things for pictures..

 

[Paul Hexem]

Always. Usually shadows, too.

[Myntz Mysterious]

10 hours ago, Jules Catlyn said:

How many of you use the Advanced Lighting Model in your viewer? https://gyazo.com/e4b335dc7a3737f32d50480479804c63

Always on here. 💡

[Gabriele Graves]

On all the time.  In fact everything is on and on high all the time.

I hope the OP realizes though that canvasing the forum is a very small sample size and possibly not representative of what is typical.

Edited May 5, 2022 by Gabriele Graves

[Jules Catlyn]

6 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

I hope the OP realizes though that canvasing the forum is a very small sample size and possibly not representative of what is typical.

I do. I asked in more places than here and the responses differ. It did make me realize that the number of people who have it on permanently is a lot smaller than i thought.

[Robberinthemuseum]

I lag when it's on. So only for photos

[Lewis Luminos]

Always on.  

[Henri Beauchamp]

ALM (deferred rendering) is almost always turned off for me.

It is not a question of performances (deferred rendering runs almost as fast on my computer(s) and with my viewer, as direct rendering), but it is all about the very bad look it got, regarding anti-aliasing and textures blurriness. Direct rendering (with 4x genuine AA) provides a crisp display, with clearly defined (non-aliased) edges and very crisp textures (no blur whatsoever). On the other hand, ALM provides very poor edges for distant objects and (slightly but very visibly nonetheless) blurry textures everywhere... I hate it !

Edited May 5, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[June Starlight]

Always on.

Some additional shinies that look pretty, but eat up my PC resources - situational. 50% of time I go around with shadows turned off, and tell my viewer to stop rendering Linden water unless I am near it. For pictures though all belts are off and setting could go sky high.

[Silent Mistwalker]

Always on with a GTX 1660

[Lindal Kidd]

5 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

the very bad look it got, regarding anti-aliasing and textures blurriness

I don't see this at all. Maybe I need new glasses.

[Jackson Redstar]

this question in a nutshell also encapsulates on of the reasons why it is SL cant retain new users - with a modern computer and especially a 'gaming' computer there should be no reason not to have it on all the time. But lag. So you switch of off and all the pretty is gone just to be able to move in a place where 20 or so other people are. Or you don't know enough about SL yet and it is switched on by default, and everyplace you go is lagged out.

long winded answer, but I only turn it on for doing photos or video, and maybe sometimes exploring mostly empty sims

[Mollymews]

about raw rendering ALM vs No ALM.  It depends on our computer. This is mine (with me by myself)

Quote

Second Life Release 6.6.0.570163 (64bit)
Release Notes

You are at 94.5, 7.0, 26.9 in Seto located at simhost-01ab4a9b30dbc9f19.agni
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Seto/95/7/27
(global coordinates 261,726.0, 255,239.0, 26.9)
Second Life Server 2022-04-21.571166
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3400.03 MHz)
Memory: 16318 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19043.1645)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 27.21.14.5671
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 456.71

Window size: 1206x1387
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 128m
Bandwidth: 3000kbit/s
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: 5
Advanced Lighting Model: Enabled
Texture memory: 512MB
Disk cache: Max size 204.0 MB (100.0% used)

J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.4
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.02.03
Dullahan: 1.12.3.202111032221
  CEF: 91.1.21+g9dd45fe+chromium-91.0.4472.114
  Chromium: 91.0.4472.114
LibVLC Version: 3.0.16
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Packets Lost: 5/23,097 (0.0%)
May 05 2022 10:46:03

with ALM On

with ALM Off

 

so I go with the ALM as 60+ is pretty ok for me

edit add: for completeness. ALM with Shadows. 40 something which is still pretty ok for me personally

 

 

Edited May 5, 2022 by Mollymews

[Jackson Redstar]

48 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

about raw rendering ALM vs No ALM.  It depends on our computer. This is mine (with me by myself)

so I go with the ALM as 60+ is pretty ok for me

edit add: for completeness. ALM with Shadows. 40 something which is still pretty ok for me personally

 

 

 

once you throw 20+ people into the mix, all bets are off lol. Unless you imposter everyone or derender people - but then what is the fun of that!

[Mollymews]

4 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

once you throw 20+ people into the mix, all bets are off lol. Unless you imposter everyone or derender people - but then what is the fun of that!

is all relative yes.  The Linden Improvement viewer 6.6.x which is what I am using gives me about a 15% boost overall in raw rendering (FPS) over the previous viewers on my 1050Ti graphics card at 2K screen resolution

this is me at Fameshed landing point with ALM Shadows. 18 about

 

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't, because the pictures look blurry. The end.

[animats]

Always on. I might turn shadows off, but never advanced lighting.

[Qie Niangao]

22 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

ALM (deferred rendering) is almost always turned off for me.

It is not a question of performances (deferred rendering runs almost as fast on my computer(s) and with my viewer, as direct rendering), but it is all about the very bad look it got, regarding anti-aliasing and textures blurriness. Direct rendering (with 4x genuine AA) provides a crisp display, with clearly defined (non-aliased) edges and very crisp textures (no blur whatsoever). On the other hand, ALM provides very poor edges for distant objects and (slightly but very visibly nonetheless) blurry textures everywhere... I hate it !

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't, because the pictures look blurry. The end.

You both have said this before, too, so there must be something you’re seeing, but like Lindal, I just can’t see it. (On the other hand, I used to disable all anti-aliasing because I thought it made edges look smeared at any non-zero setting, but I have it enabled in most viewers now.) I wonder why some see ALM as blurry and others don’t. I still have a 1080P monitor, so maybe I’d need 4K to have enough pixels showing to see it?

[Gabriele Graves]

I have a 4K monitor and ALM is very crisp for me.

[Jenna Huntsman]

I also have a 4K (3840x2160p - "4K" isn't a great term as there's multiple '4K' standards, for example DCI 4K, SMPTE UHDTV1 and CinemaWide 4K) and ALM is perfectly crisp for me. In actual fact, I prefer having DoF on (albeit with tweaked settings, to simulate a real camera lens, not the garbage default settings!) to provide a softening effect to distant objects.

I always have ALM on - but not shadows (usually).

As an aside, I do wonder if people mistake ALM being 'blurry' because of the increased frequency of unloaded textures, as the extra CPU load incurred by ALM means there's less time to spend decoding textures. Although more modern viewers now use threaded texture decoders, which alleviate this issue.

Edited May 6, 2022 by Jenna Huntsman

[Gabriele Graves]

Just to clarify, I also meant 3840x2160p when I said I have 4K.

[Henri Beauchamp]

6 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

You both have said this before, too, so there must be something you’re seeing, but like Lindal, I just can’t see it. (On the other hand, I used to disable all anti-aliasing because I thought it made edges look smeared at any non-zero setting, but I have it enabled in most viewers now.) I wonder why some see ALM as blurry and others don’t. I still have a 1080P monitor, so maybe I’d need 4K to have enough pixels showing to see it?

You need glasses... Or the pitch of your screen (measured in dots per inch) is so high that your eyes cannot discriminate pixels (but at 1920x1080 you would need a 17” or smaller screen... which is possible on a notebook that usually have small 13 to 15” screens)

At 120 DPI or over (and a distance to the screen of around 40-50cm), you will not distinguish two neighbouring pixels, which is annoying when using small fonts (programmers like me love to have a lot of lines visible in the editor, so they use small fonts), drawing stuff or designing 3D models, for example...

Ideally, a screen should offer 96 DPI; my main system monitor got a 24” 1920x1200 screen (94 DPI).

Nowadays, people use HDPI screens with 200+ DPI, so the image can be blurry, they will not notice it... On the other hand, they will complain about ”lag” (actually, low frame rates, since lag is not related at all and measures delays between events), but hey, if your GPU must render 4 times as many pixels, you should really not complain !

But still, you should be able to make the difference. Here are two screen shots I took on my computer (1920x1200: do watch them with the image fitting the width of your screen since your monitor only got 1080 pixels of vertical resolution):

Here with ALM off (and 4xAA).

Edited May 6, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Henri Beauchamp]

And now ALM on:

 

Notice the blur on the letters, on the tree leafs, on the edges of the objects, and pretty much everywhere... Even the smoke above the chimney of the tree house, in the background, almost disappears, so much it is blurred with the sky !

Also, the colours are much less contrasted with ALM on, making them less vibrant and more gloomy... Definitely YUCK !

Edited May 6, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Qie Niangao]

To be honest, I have to try very hard to see any difference at all in these images, but I guess a photographer could (and I freely admit to utter incompetence with a camera, RL or SL).

Incidentally, there's another thread where an SL photographer is in dire need of some advice that I think only a viewer dev would be qualified to give.

But back to this topic, I had to click on the images to see them at full scale, so I pulled them into gimp and grabbed a section from each that hopefully will show full size in a single image here:

What I see in the upper selection is less sharp vegetation, and in the lower selection totally smeared-out front surfaces of the stones. Maybe the stones have a normalmap that's invisible to the non-ALM lower selection.

Thing is, I want to see those normalmap effects and all the Materials details, especially as they emerge differently under different cam angles and lighting conditions. The lighting in these images seems pretty flat with the sun angle almost directly overhead, which mutes Materials effects pretty drastically.

I mean, people can see SL however they want, and if they don't want to see my projected lighting and Materials effects, that's fine, but that way they'll miss a whole bunch of dynamics in favor of some static diffusemap texture detail.