What would be the best viewer for 3080 GPU

[Alexacroft]

So i am looking to start making videos and i would need like black dragon style quality but also some performance.  as you read in the title i have a 3080 and the rest of my pc is pretty beefy too with m.2 etc but not sure about viewers 

[Chic Aeon]

Most people as you likely know use Firestorm -- not because it takes the best pictures but because it has more useful features (for many of us anyway).  I have a 3070 card and honestly I think any viewer you chose will work fine. 

[Ardy Lay]

Honestly, I would choose the viewer that gives you the least grief in normal usage.  No point busting your knuckles and nerves on unfamiliar Second Life viewer user interface while learning video production.  Once video production is smooth and comfortable, then compare viewer rendering to see which offers the look you prefer.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Alexacroft said:

So i am looking to start making videos and i would need like black dragon style quality but also some performance.  as you read in the title i have a 3080 and the rest of my pc is pretty beefy too with m.2 etc but not sure about viewers 

Don't render in real time what you can render in post.

Don't render everything you need all in one pass. Compositing is your friend.

For video, frame rate is king, everything else can be worked around or patched up later, but if you don't have the frames. You don't have a video.

 

[Alexacroft]

4 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Most people as you likely know use Firestorm -- not because it takes the best pictures but because it has more useful features (for many of us anyway).  I have a 3070 card and honestly I think any viewer you chose will work fine. 

i am currently using firestorm yeah 

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Don't render in real time what you can render in post.

Don't render everything you need all in one pass. Compositing is your friend.

For video, frame rate is king, everything else can be worked around or patched up later, but if you don't have the frames. You don't have a video.

 

i guess i can after effects enhance the video afterwards but thats like extra work XD

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, Alexacroft said:

i am currently using firestorm yeah 

i guess i can after effects enhance the video afterwards but thats like extra work XD

With the card you have there should be no problem at all doing what you want to do without special effects -- unless of course you want them.   IF there is a sim that is problematic (I went to one last week via Inara's post that was so heavy with mesh and textures nothing would load) then MOVE ON.   The point of having a good graphics card (and the cost involved in having one) is pretty much about the creative freedom that comes with that.  Camera smoothing settings will solve a lot of issues with fps, but still 15fps was always my low number. If I couldn't get that (middle of the road card at the time) then I "fudged" and even used stills. Most of the time though -- even then I could do what I wanted to do.  

 

Practice helps :D. 

[Jackson Redstar]

Post is your friend. Color grading is your friend.  So in world, it is having the right tools and UI to be able to do in world videos properly and easily. For me, that is Firestorm. Black Dragon, unfortunately has drifted far far away from being a useful viewer to be able to do videos on. and the Linden viewer - fuget bout it! Granted the FPS on FS can suck really bad at times and I also have a 3070, but again - post. You can always do slow zooms or pans in post if you can't move the camera in world

[NiranV Dean]

2 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

Post is your friend. Color grading is your friend.  So in world, it is having the right tools and UI to be able to do in world videos properly and easily. For me, that is Firestorm. Black Dragon, unfortunately has drifted far far away from being a useful viewer to be able to do videos on. and the Linden viewer - fuget bout it! Granted the FPS on FS can suck really bad at times and I also have a 3070, but again - post. You can always do slow zooms or pans in post if you can't move the camera in world

How has it drifted away if it hasn't changed anything in years.

[Jackson Redstar]

21 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

How has it drifted away if it hasn't changed anything in years.

you may be right Niran it hasn't drifted per say, it has never been a good choice for machinima. Photography it is excellent, video not at all. Not putting down BD at all, just saying for video work - it just does not work

[Coffee Pancake]

On 5/25/2022 at 10:08 AM, Jackson Redstar said:

Post is your friend. Color grading is your friend.

This a million times.

If you're into making film, of any kind, learning the editors craft is essential study and informs everything else you do. There is a deeply transformative rabbit hole here that will affect every aspect of your work at all skill levels and intended purposes.

Even if you just dip your toe in and pick up the basics, it time well invested (and comes with the free side effect of increased appreciation and enjoyment of film in general).

[MarissaOrloff]

I have a 3080 and 5900x I use Firestorm in Linux which is a great compromise between features and performance. If you just want the best fps possible use Henri's Cool VL Viewer in Linux. It's a V1 style interface though but fully functional modern viewer. If you don't want to use Linux both viewers are available for Windows.

[NiranV Dean]

On 5/26/2022 at 3:53 PM, Jackson Redstar said:

you may be right Niran it hasn't drifted per say, it has never been a good choice for machinima. Photography it is excellent, video not at all. Not putting down BD at all, just saying for video work - it just does not work

I do not seem to follow, being good for photography automatically makes it better for machinima too, how is the viewer not good for videos at all, it offers all the same machinima options as other viewers (and a lot more and unique ones specifically for that matter), after all the Viewer is specifically designed for photography AND machinima.

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

I do not seem to follow, being good for photography automatically makes it better for machinima too

You don't have a video if you don't have the frames.

SL photography is often captured at a much higher than on screen resolution.

[iceing Braveheart]

On 5/24/2022 at 4:31 PM, Alexacroft said:

So i am looking to start making videos and i would need like black dragon style quality but also some performance.  as you read in the title i have a 3080 and the rest of my pc is pretty beefy too with m.2 etc but not sure about viewers 

https://alchemyviewer.org/

[Jackson Redstar]

On 5/28/2022 at 3:26 PM, NiranV Dean said:

I do not seem to follow, being good for photography automatically makes it better for machinima too, how is the viewer not good for videos at all, it offers all the same machinima options as other viewers (and a lot more and unique ones specifically for that matter), after all the Viewer is specifically designed for photography AND machinima.

Since you asked, let me point out a few things that for me at least, make BD unsuitable for the video work I do. These might be 'minor' things but make a huge problem doing video work for me

1) Cannot resynch animations (Like couples dancing)

2) No Texture refresh 

3) In my experience at least, BD still experiences more texture thrashing

4) Often times in 'heavy' areas (alot of avis,, alphas and the like) BD either takes forever to load, fails to load completely and sometimes and is often stuck at 1 or 2 fps for a long time until things can render. And it has been my experience in the past that these conditions makes BD unstable and prone to crashing

5) While this is of course a design decision of BD, much needed controls like joy stick configuration, (I often adjust the feathering for the flycam) enable/disable dynamic draw and other little tings like that are buried in Preferences. In other words, the lack of a Phototools panel like in FS makes for me, doing video in BD harder. Not though a deal breaker

6) BD shadow engine, while really good on a still image, has issues with the camera moves through a scene. But to be fair, all the viewers suffer this problem

I used to use BD when I started out filming weddings, but the 3 big things, no animation re-synch, texture thrashing/inability to refresh textures and general unstable performance I switched back to FS and any perceived image quality difference I can  color correct in post anyways. Doing still photography work, none those issues is a big deal. Shooting a live event or wedding, it is a huge deal

and if you need my computer specs
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz (3792 MHz)
Memory: 32671 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 22000.675)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070/PCIe/SSE2
and all my drives are SSD

 

[JeromFranzic]

On 5/29/2022 at 9:36 AM, iceing Braveheart said:

https://alchemyviewer.org/

As someone who runs BD at least a few times a week via Linux/Wine Staging for photos, +1 for this option. Nice, natively running alternative.  It just lacks the crazy angles BD gives me, but it's fine for high res pics so some things can be done post process.

[NiranV Dean]

On 5/29/2022 at 1:20 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

You don't have a video if you don't have the frames.

SL photography is often captured at a much higher than on screen resolution.

Well framerate has always been an issue in SL, nothing new. You can do good machinima with down to 15 frames (already seen some), sure it could look smoother but you can't have everything, especially not fanciness and performance, one will necessarily exclude the other, rendering needs time, more rendering needs more time regardless of optimization, you can only reduce the additional impact.

BD specific: BD has never been optimized at all (unless you count not rendering invisible faces and squaring shadow texture resolutions as optimization) beyond what LL offers. It also does not include the performance improvements yet which i hope is going to help with the slowest part of the viewer -> avatar rendering.

23 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

Since you asked, let me point out a few things that for me at least, make BD unsuitable for the video work I do. These might be 'minor' things but make a huge problem doing video work for me

1) Cannot resynch animations (Like couples dancing)

2) No Texture refresh 

3) In my experience at least, BD still experiences more texture thrashing

4) Often times in 'heavy' areas (alot of avis,, alphas and the like) BD either takes forever to load, fails to load completely and sometimes and is often stuck at 1 or 2 fps for a long time until things can render. And it has been my experience in the past that these conditions makes BD unstable and prone to crashing

5) While this is of course a design decision of BD, much needed controls like joy stick configuration, (I often adjust the feathering for the flycam) enable/disable dynamic draw and other little tings like that are buried in Preferences. In other words, the lack of a Phototools panel like in FS makes for me, doing video in BD harder. Not though a deal breaker

6) BD shadow engine, while really good on a still image, has issues with the camera moves through a scene. But to be fair, all the viewers suffer this problem

I used to use BD when I started out filming weddings, but the 3 big things, no animation re-synch, texture thrashing/inability to refresh textures and general unstable performance I switched back to FS and any perceived image quality difference I can  color correct in post anyways. Doing still photography work, none those issues is a big deal. Shooting a live event or wedding, it is a huge deal

and if you need my computer specs
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz (3792 MHz)
Memory: 32671 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 22000.675)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070/PCIe/SSE2
and all my drives are SSD

 

1) It can resync animations, since a long time actually. Dragon - My Useful Features - Animation Controls. Select everyone you want to sync, hit "Reset".

2) Texture refresh was a thing but broke at some point, i never felt the need to readd it, corrupted textures only ever happened to me after cache code changes and forgetting to clear the cache after said changes. I was planning to bring it back very soon (after merging all the way up to the latest code)

3) Impossible. Texture thrashing comes down solely to your settings and BD out of all Viewers gives you the most available texture memory (with 4GB for each memory pool, totaling up to 8GB). Either you have auto-memory off (which means you have to manually set it, in which case setting the maximum for your GPU and be done with it would be the best approach) or you are not seeing texture thrashing but rather textures simply not loading (or corrupting). Also there is no way you are filling all 4GB's worth of memory on both pools, by that point you won't be having anymore FPS anyway, it would require an obscene amount of faces and thus objects. We're talking 1000 1024x1024 textures visible onscreen and fully loaded to fill the scene pool (remember textures load in lower res on distance). The only way you feasibly fill that amount is by using Full Res Texture debug and then you WILL get texture thrashing after turning it off.

4) I cannot tell you what it is but slow loading has only ever happened very randomly for me, usually accompanied by connection issues (failing friendlists, broken outfit and the like). Outside of these rare cases BD loads perfectly fine and very fast for me and a lot others. This has been a rare issue for me in all Viewers ever since i joined SL and i'd say that is to be expected with a complex system like SL that breaks apart the moment the login chain in the Viewer gets slightly out of order. This could be anything, texture decoding getting stuck, downloading being slow, connections failing, servers having issues, router/provider/application throttling, your harddrive being too slow (or busy), too many things happening at the same time, the list goes on and on, whatever it is it is usually fixed by a relog or after some waiting.

Crashes i do not experience outside of new code merges that broke something in the viewer or some new code that i messed up (which usually get fixed before they go live), any other random crash i cannot fix unless it is reproducible (on my side) or at the very least spits out a useful warning/error in the log files (which it will most likely not).

5) What you and me define as "much needed" are obviously subject to our own needs. I see going into preferences for joystick or control configuration as perfectly fine. Anyone can edit the UI and add more options to the sidebar if they so desire, just no one is willing to do so (its technically not even hard, does not require coding knowledge and can be done by any text editor that isn't trash like notepad). I also attempted to make a dynamic sidebar years ago but thanks to a bug in layout panels that prevented me from clearing/deleting said panels (it crashed the viewer) i was not able to make it happen beyond a couple smaller updates that progressively lagged more the more widgets you added (due to the removed ones still being there slowly bogging down the viewer). I have plans to bring it back because i too want a dynamic sidebar and remove all the options i don't need.

Edited May 31, 2022 by NiranV Dean

[Jackson Redstar]

48 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

Well framerate has always been an issue in SL, nothing new. You can do good machinima with down to 15 frames (already seen some), sure it could look smoother but you can't have everything, especially not fanciness and performance, one will necessarily exclude the other, rendering needs time, more rendering needs more time regardless of optimization, you can only reduce the additional impact.

BD specific: BD has never been optimized at all (unless you count not rendering invisible faces and squaring shadow texture resolutions as optimization) beyond what LL offers. It also does not include the performance improvements yet which i hope is going to help with the slowest part of the viewer -> avatar rendering.

1) It can resync animations, since a long time actually. Dragon - My Useful Features - Animation Controls. Select everyone you want to sync, hit "Reset".

2) Texture refresh was a thing but broke at some point, i never felt the need to readd it, corrupted textures only ever happened to me after cache code changes and forgetting to clear the cache after said changes. I was planning to bring it back very soon (after merging all the way up to the latest code)

3) Impossible. Texture thrashing comes down solely to your settings and BD out of all Viewers gives you the most available texture memory (with 4GB for each memory pool, totaling up to 8GB). Either you have auto-memory off (which means you have to manually set it, in which case setting the maximum for your GPU and be done with it would be the best approach) or you are not seeing texture thrashing but rather textures simply not loading (or corrupting). Also there is no way you are filling all 4GB's worth of memory on both pools, by that point you won't be having anymore FPS anyway, it would require an obscene amount of faces and thus objects. We're talking 1000 1024x1024 textures visible onscreen and fully loaded to fill the scene pool (remember textures load in lower res on distance). The only way you feasibly fill that amount is by using Full Res Texture debug and then you WILL get texture thrashing after turning it off.

4) I cannot tell you what it is but slow loading has only ever happened very randomly for me, usually accompanied by connection issues (failing friendlists, broken outfit and the like). Outside of these rare cases BD loads perfectly fine and very fast for me and a lot others. This has been a rare issue for me in all Viewers ever since i joined SL and i'd say that is to be expected with a complex system like SL that breaks apart the moment the login chain in the Viewer gets slightly out of order. This could be anything, texture decoding getting stuck, downloading being slow, connections failing, servers having issues, router/provider/application throttling, your harddrive being too slow (or busy), too many things happening at the same time, the list goes on and on, whatever it is it is usually fixed by a relog or after some waiting.

Crashes i do not experience outside of new code merges that broke something in the viewer or some new code that i messed up (which usually get fixed before they go live), any other random crash i cannot fix unless it is reproducible (on my side) or at the very least spits out a useful warning/error in the log files (which it will most likely not).

5) What you and me define as "much needed" are obviously subject to our own needs. I see going into preferences for joystick or control configuration as perfectly fine. Anyone can edit the UI and add more options to the sidebar if they so desire, just no one is willing to do so (its technically not even hard, does not require coding knowledge and can be done by any text editor that isn't trash like notepad). I also attempted to make a dynamic sidebar years ago but thanks to a bug in layout panels that prevented me from clearing/deleting said panels (it crashed the viewer) i was not able to make it happen beyond a couple smaller updates that progressively lagged more the more widgets you added (due to the removed ones still being there slowly bogging down the viewer). I have plans to bring it back because i too want a dynamic sidebar and remove all the options i don't need.

thanks for the follow up Niran, but
1) ctrl -s to resynch when shooting a live video would be much better

2) Im not sure if it is 'broke' or not, but I use it all the time to get partially loaded textures to load fully
3) Maybe was an issue on my end or maybe was a few versions back in BD but it did happen alot for me at least

I would like to use BD again for video, I think for me at least the "two" must haves for the types of video  I do is to re synch via a simple keyboard shortcut and to refresh mis behaving textures. In any case I still use BD for photography all the time , as it is a great viewer when it comes to that

[NiranV Dean]

On 5/31/2022 at 2:07 PM, Jackson Redstar said:

thanks for the follow up Niran, but
1) ctrl -s to resynch when shooting a live video would be much better

2) Im not sure if it is 'broke' or not, but I use it all the time to get partially loaded textures to load fully
3) Maybe was an issue on my end or maybe was a few versions back in BD but it did happen alot for me at least

I would like to use BD again for video, I think for me at least the "two" must haves for the types of video  I do is to re synch via a simple keyboard shortcut and to refresh mis behaving textures. In any case I still use BD for photography all the time , as it is a great viewer when it comes to that

1) Faster but impossible with the current system. It's not a feature, it's a side effect of said window's abilities. The window itself is meant to set up animations for videos/photos. There is no need to do it while a live video is running, animations will never desync once synced unless they are time dilated (which only happens with impostors) unless the weird fast animation on distance bug makes a reappearance (which is something i could easily disable).

2) I don't know why single textures fail to load at higher resolutions, this is Second Life and it could be anything. Probably the Viewer getting stuck on decode or something.

3) Like i said, it is literally technically impossible to cause texture thrashing unless you set the available texture memory too low or manage to use all 8GB worth of memory (and even then there would still be the option to use full-res textures as last resort or simply set the value higher in debug, which is unsupported and possibly crashy though). As noted previously using full-res textures WILL cause texture thrasing when turned off and possibly bug the Viewer to the point it is stuck in perma-texture thrashing, do NOT use it unless you intend to relog afterwards.

[blossombomb1]

On 5/31/2022 at 7:07 AM, Jackson Redstar said:

thanks for the follow up Niran, but
1) ctrl -s to resynch when shooting a live video would be much better

2) Im not sure if it is 'broke' or not, but I use it all the time to get partially loaded textures to load fully
3) Maybe was an issue on my end or maybe was a few versions back in BD but it did happen alot for me at least

I would like to use BD again for video, I think for me at least the "two" must haves for the types of video  I do is to re synch via a simple keyboard shortcut and to refresh mis behaving textures. In any case I still use BD for photography all the time , as it is a great viewer when it comes to that

My viewer crashes everytime I try to login, says fail to login 

[Odaks]

4 hours ago, blossombomb1 said:

My viewer crashes everytime I try to login, says fail to login 

Hi @blossombomb1, welcome to the forums.

Firstly, a quick bit of advice - this request for help has nothing to do with this thread ("Best Viewer for a 3080"), so create a new topic rather than add to an un-related one.

Be specific and state exactly which viewer you are using, what does load up ok and at what point do things go wrong. Note that a "failure to log on" is not a crash! Copy any error messages to your post.

We'll help if we can!