Which is the most optimised MacOS viewer, that uses the least energy?

[AmberJoyBliss]

The energy prices here have gone through the roof and after optimising everything I can in Firestorm, I wonder if there are other viewers to consider?

If the calculations are correct, I am paying around L$4k every hour on Firestorm on my electricity bill, and would love to see that number go down.

Not sure I am willing to continue using SL if this doesn't improve.

Good day to you!

[Jenna Huntsman]

In terms of lowering resource usage, the only thing you can do is to limit your viewer's framerate.

The viewer by default will use as many resources as it can, as it's trying to achieve the highest possible framerate on your hardware. Limiting the framerate (The lowest limit I would set is 24 fps) will result in lower resource usage, as the viewer is no longer trying to achieve the highest possible framerate, instead just meet the framerate limit.

"Optimized" viewers are the viewers that can use more of your hardware, but in your situation you want the opposite.

[Henri Beauchamp]

18 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Optimized” viewers are the viewers that can use more of your hardware, but in your situation you want the opposite.

This is not exactly true. The more optimized the viewer, the less energy it consumes per rendered frame (because less CPU and/or GPU instructions are executed per frame), but if you let it run freely, then it will render more frames per second, and thus consume more power in the end...

The solution is a well optimized viewer with a well conceived frame limiter (a frame limiter that won't kill your rezzing experience by lengthening the rez time). The Cool VL Viewer fills the bill, of course, but you'd have guessed it, I'm sure !

Edited August 22, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Henri Beauchamp]

20 hours ago, AmberJoyBliss said:

I am paying around L$4k every hour on Firestorm on my electricity bill

I'm a bit skeptical about your calculation... Let's say your computer consumes 1kW.h (which is already an enormous amount of energy: my overclocked 9700K + overclocked 1070Ti consume less than 300W.h in average (*) when running SL with the Cool VL Viewer without any frame rate limitation). Given L$4000 is equivalent to around US$16 (= 16 Euros too, right now), it would mean you pay that much for each kW.h of electricity ?... My guess is that there's an error of at least an order of magnitude (x10) in your calculation.

(*) I just made a measurement with a (true RMS) Watt-meter connected so that it accounts for all the power consumptions (PC + LCD screen, etc) in my system. The total power consumption averages at 280W.h without frame rate limitation and with ALM on; it can reach 300W.h while rezzing after a login or TP, and when the FPS rate reaches 210+ fps; it is of only 185W.h with the frame limiter set at 60 FPS. And this is for a PC in which the CPU and GPU have all cores permanently locked at their overclocked frequency, which is 5.0GHz for the 9700K cores and 1980MHz for the CUDA cores (and 9200 MHz for the VRAM), meaning it is indeed not a PC set up for energy savings !

Edited August 22, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Coffee Pancake]

With Henri on this .. OP needs to double check their numbers.

[Henri Beauchamp]

More fun numbers: while ”idle”, my overclocked system consumes 143W.h in total, so the over-cost of running SL is less than 45W.h with the frame limiter on and set at 60fps, and less than 150W.h with it off...

Being a lucky French guy, I got cheap electricity, and even anticipating coming price increases, it's about 20 cents per kW.h... So running SL without the frame limiter costs me 3 cents of so per hour and less than 1 cent per hour with the frame limiter on, when compared to letting my PC idling (or just surfing the Web)...

[arabellajones]

Power consumption can still add up with the crazy pricing in Britain, which is far higher than in France. The reasons are political, and I shall say no more than that.

Henri's measured power figures are some comfort, but I used the "Suspend" option far more than I used to. Again, politics, but Jack Monroe's cookery website is focused on quick-to-cook meals. I'm in an environment that may be paying too much attention to power costs, but they are yet another reason to raise the scarlet banner high....

(And the colour choice will confuse Americans.)

[bigmoe Whitfield]

not sure where they live, but I'm only pulling around 2 usd dollars a day on this system,  it's oc'd and never gets turned off.   my microwave costs me more than that just being on for 5 mintues.  

[AmberJoyBliss]

The numbers were indeed far far off. I am not a tech person, saw in the activity monitor -  Firestorm on Mac using 38 power units - and googled and it said it was for kilowatt hours. The price here for kWh is around 0.5 USD atm, was almost triple the other day, then double. 

When I posted this, 38 kWh would have costed around 12 USD, or somewhere near L$4k, that day.

The actual cost, turned out to be around... 0,4 kWh at the peak, or 11 cents US, as the most expensive hour this week, Firestorm on low graphics, non-stop. - 9 SL hours on the dollar, 12 dollars = L$ 4.000, giving a total of 108 hours, give or take, or two weeks of 8 hours a day.

I might be wrong again, just not THAT wrong