Second Life - Performance Thread

[Extrude Ragu]

Quote

Why is SL a slideshow on Powerful PC's?

Because SecondLife residents are not game developers, and have no financial incentive to optimize the items they create in-world.

The truth is, SecondLife is actually a lot faster than a lot of game engines, because SecondLife's engine has to cope with all of the user generated content. But users don't tend to care about performance or even know how to spot an unoptimised object so they will just rez and rez and rez unoptimised junk until it's barely tolerable.

In my own region, I create all my own content and use optimization techniques. SecondLife in a well developed region runs at 120+fps on mid-tier hardware.

Users are keen to blame the viewers, but the truth is the viewers are doing a herculean effort rendering the junk users tend to upload, it's actually the users habits that need to change, and the only way that's going to happen is when creators who sell to the wider SecondLife audience have a strong financial incentive to optimize their content. Good luck making that happen, because guess what making people put more effort into making money is never going to be popular.

[AmeliaJ08]

3 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Because SecondLife residents are not game developers, and have no financial incentive to optimize the items they create in-world.

The truth is, SecondLife is actually a lot faster than a lot of game engines, because SecondLife's engine has to cope with all of the user generated content. But users don't tend to care about performance or even know how to spot an unoptimised object so they will just rez and rez and rez unoptimised junk until it's barely tolerable.

In my own region, I create all my own content and use optimization techniques. SecondLife in a well developed region runs at 120+fps on mid-tier hardware.

Users are keen to blame the viewers, but the truth is the viewers are doing a herculean effort rendering the junk users tend to upload, it's actually the users habits that need to change, and the only way that's going to happen is when creators who sell to the wider SecondLife audience have a strong financial incentive to optimize their content. Good luck making that happen, because guess what making people put more effort into making money is never going to be popular.

I know LL probably hate the idea for obvious reasons but SL really needs some sort of content review process where truly badly optimized stuff can be flagged as needing improvement. That said they're also not blameless, LOD still doesn't work properly for rigged mesh does it?

 

[animats]

11 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I know LL probably hate the idea for obvious reasons but SL really needs some sort of content review process where truly badly optimized stuff can be flagged as needing improvement. That said they're also not blameless, LOD still doesn't work properly for rigged mesh does it?

 

Hm. I could have Sharpview outline objects with bad lower LODs in red, or something.

The two big SL content optimization problems are

• Objects which artificially reduce their LI by having overly-reduced lower LODs. Those are the ones that turn into loose triangles at distance.
• Clothing. Way too many triangles. Shoes often have 20,000 triangles. Lower LODs are usually terrible. The entire avatar gets the same LOD, so little stuff gets loaded with all its triangles.

Solutions to this will probably involve automatic LOD generation, which gets better every year. It's an AI problem, and that field is coming along nicely.

[Extrude Ragu]

Just now, AmeliaJ08 said:

I know LL probably hate the idea for obvious reasons but SL really needs some sort of content review process where truly badly optimized stuff can be flagged as needing improvement. That said they're also not blameless, LOD still doesn't work properly for rigged mesh does it?

 

If SecondLife had a content review system I would not have ever created in SecondLife or own my region today. As a creator this is a big no-no, and is actually the reason I rejected a more technically advanced virtual world in the past (Sinespace)

The things that generally cause lag are known and measurable. Triangle counts, Texture Memory (VRAM) and Draw calls. Might all sound like jibberish to average joe, but all creators worth their salt know what these are.

Most creators simply do not optimize not out of ignorance of optimisation, but because it takes them more time. It adds extra steps to their workflows, and sad to say it but a lot of creators are just here to get as much money as they can out of the platform, and cutting corners gives them a competitive advantage over other store owners because they can provide more content which grows their brand and attracts more customers who don't know better.

The simple solution to this, and the one that will also be deeply unpopular is to start imposing lag limits on avatars. Avatars are the worst offenders because unlike rezzed items which have the land impact limits, attached items have no lag limits at all. We need   VRAM limits, triangle limits, draw call limits. There is no financial incentive for LL to do this directly and will be deeply unpopular the moment they realize they can't put on their laggy mess of an avatar. LL will probably never be brave enough to impose these limits on SecondLife.

HOWEVER there *is* financial incentive for region owners to impose lag limits. A few laggy guests can spook off other visitors because they will perceive the region to lag. So give region owners the tools to impose these limits and many will. Let the region owners take the blame.

Once such limits are imposed on avatars, customers will inevitably start demanding less laggy things from creators so that they can wear all the stuff they want to wear - This will be how we finally start reigning in some of the stuff that really takes the cake.

[Candide LeMay]

On 12/13/2023 at 10:27 PM, Extrude Ragu said:

HOWEVER there *is* financial incentive for region owners to impose lag limits. A few laggy guests can spook off other visitors because they will perceive the region to lag. So give region owners the tools to impose these limits and many will. Let the region owners take the blame.

I like this idea. A script call that would answer the question "If avatar ABC with all its attachments was an animesh object, how much LI would it have?" I'm guessing we'd see many avatars with LI going to thousands.

[Kathrine Jansma]

3 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

I'm guessing we'd see many avatars with LI going to thousands.

The problem would still be, if LI was a proper metric for render cost/lag. Probably it isn't. Just like the ARC numbers are useless.

So instead of the ban systems kicking users for "too many scripts" you would have more or less random bans for "too much metric xyz", and still might skip the worst offenders.

Often the basic mesh body is probably already the worst offense to start with. How many land owners would ban people wearing some of the more popular bodies due to the atrocious load from all the submeshes used for hiding segments instead of using BOM alphas?  

 

[Candide LeMay]

My motivation for using the animesh formula is that

1) it's somewhat "fair" because it allows you to have LODs without additional LI penalty provided the LODs are kept simple enough

2) it's server side, unlike client side metrics like rendering/frame time

3) it's a formula that LL already has implemented and we all know the less work LL has to do, the higher the chance of them actually doing something

 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Candide LeMay

[filz Camino]

Speaking of performance, AMD have added a neat feature: "in driver AI upscaling" where you can have Firestorm running at a low resolution to get a high frame rate and the GPU will upscale it to the full resolution of your display.

You just add Firestorm to your list of games in AMD Adrenalin software and then select "Borderless fullscreen" for "AMD Super Resolution".

Not sure which graphics cards it supports but it certainly works well  with the 780m iGPU in my laptop.

 

Edited December 16, 2023 by filz Camino

[Kathrine Jansma]

For AMD dedicated GPUs you should also try to have "Smart Access Memory" enabled. It can make a significant difference.

It is the AMD name for the PCI Resizable-BAR feature.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Kathrine Jansma

[gwynchisholm]

I finally found a crowded enough place to use all 16gb of video memory

to think i might genuinely need more vram for SL is hilarious to me

[filz Camino]

10 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

I finally found a crowded enough place to use all 16gb of video memory

to think i might genuinely need more vram for SL is hilarious to me

Have you ticked "Enable lossy texture compression" in graphics settings?

SL is not just GPU memory intensive btw, on a busy sim I often see my computer using over 20Gb of RAM with nothing else running except Firestorm.

Edited December 17, 2023 by filz Camino

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, filz Camino said:

I often see my computer using over 20Gb of RAM with nothing else running except Firestorm.

AMD or Nvidia GPU? there has been talk about a memory leak in certain AMD drivers.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, filz Camino said:

Have you ticked ”Enable lossy texture compression” in graphics settings?

I won't recommend doing this: it causes bad fps hiccups (compressing textures *does* take time, and it happens in the rendering thread in SL viewers), and degradation in textures quality (of course, on a HiDPI screen, you would likely not notice it, but I do, on a 96dpi screen).

[Kathrine Jansma]

11 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

genuinely need more vram for SL is hilarious to me

Well, technically it is a good thing to use all available memory if there is good use for it.

It is just trouble if things like disk cache and other ram hungry places battle for it and there isn't enough in total. 

[gwynchisholm]

4 hours ago, filz Camino said:

Have you ticked "Enable lossy texture compression" in graphics settings?

SL is not just GPU memory intensive btw, on a busy sim I often see my computer using over 20Gb of RAM with nothing else running except Firestorm.

It is on in that screenshot, that only helps so much from previous testing in this thread, I was bound to go over 16gb regardless.

i have 64gb of ram so I don’t really worry about what sl uses as far as system ram goes

2 hours ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

Well, technically it is a good thing to use all available memory if there is good use for it.

It is just trouble if things like disk cache and other ram hungry places battle for it and there isn't enough in total. 

This caused whole system stutter, as it hit the vram limit, few milliseconds of nothing, cleared something, and then returned to normal, repeat every few seconds 

I thought it was a whole different issue at first but it was just a running out of vram, and then the stutter was it allocating things to system ram . if it didn’t do that, who cares, but SL in the background using every megabyte of vram I have was causing the entire pc to suffer

[filz Camino]

6 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

AMD or Nvidia GPU? there has been talk about a memory leak in certain AMD drivers.

both - i see it on my desktop (nvidia gpu) and my laptop (amd i gpu).

it is not a memory leak - it is actual memory use on a busy sim.

 

[filz Camino]

7 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I won't recommend doing this: it causes bad fps hiccups (compressing textures *does* take time, and it happens in the rendering thread in SL viewers), and degradation in textures quality (of course, on a HiDPI screen, you would likely not notice it, but I do, on a 96dpi screen).

i don't think it is a good idea to make blanket statements like this. you need to find out how more about someone's hardware, and how they are using SL.

i've got no shortage of processing power (7800x3d / 4070ti) to throw at the compression but I spend a lot of time on extremely busy sims (dance clubs) where i do have a shortage of VRAM and i find i get a much smoother experience with compressed textures enabled. otherwise, i get constant texture thrashing.

plus i can't tell the difference in quality between having compression on and off (i have done tests).

is it possible that the compression algorithm is card dependent and for some cards it looks bad and for other cards it looks ok?

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 hours ago, filz Camino said:

i don't think it is a good idea to make blanket statements like this.

Sure... After all, with only 16+ years of viewer development and feedback from the users of my viewer, myself having been running SL with only 10 different GPUs, I probably should not give such an advice: I'm not experienced neither competent enough... 🙄

Edited December 17, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[gwynchisholm]

22 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Sure... After all, with only 16+ years of viewer development and feedback from the users of my viewer, myself having been running SL with only 10 different GPUs, I probably should not give such an advice: I'm not experienced neither competent enough... 🙄

Blanket statements are always questionable. Because SL will perform wildly different on all sorts of different hardware, itll run on basically anything, and no two systems will be the same performance wise.

My personal experience is very different than that sentiment about texture compression. From my uses so far, its barely noticeable outside of some terrain items where youre already seeing a pretty blown up texture. And it doesnt really cause me any issues with performance. Its impact is also negligible as far as system utilization goes. 

But thats testing across a few modern gpus on a handful of platforms, in firestorm and the LL viewer. How much that matters for other system i cant really say unless i sit down and benchmark them. Some other people may be running hardware where it does literally nothing for them, some may be running hardware where enabling that setting crashes their GPU drivers. It varies.

And if we're going by personal accreditation based on experience, i mean hell, i have more than 10 gpu's i know the SL performance of just within eyesight of my desk, ignoring the 30 more on the shelves, and tote of another 50. Most of which have played SL at one point or another. Everything from the legit bare minimum to even play this game, to modern mid range and high end cards. Ive personally never really noticed texture compression causing any issues, i would enable it by default on low end hardware and it never did much in terms of framerate or frame times. But i also dont really use it on higher end cards with more than 4gb of vram so my experience there is limited.

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

15 minutes ago, gwynchisholm said:

Blanket statements are always questionable. Because SL will perform wildly different on all sorts of different hardware, itll run on basically anything, and no two systems will be the same performance wise.

If we can't say "texture compression isn't recommended," should we also stop saying "max LOD factor isn't recommended?"

If not, why not?

Edited December 17, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[gwynchisholm]

1 minute ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

If we can't say "texture compression isn't recommended," should we also stop saying "max LOD factor isn't recommended?"

If not, why not?

Probably yeah, i mean, why wouldnt it be recommended? Its the statement to not recommend some configuration universally founded? Ive personally not seen 4.0 LOD scaling do a whole lot to my game, at least nothing worth noting, ill take the nicer models at distance for the small framerate hit.

Blanket statements dont take outliers into effect and are commonly related to things that change often.

Example, It was not long ago that people on this forum and in the greater SL community would make the blanket statement that AMD/ATI cards arent recommended for SL because they have XYZ problems. Which was founded on whats now tech more than a decade old, for a viewer more than a decade old. In that scenario it was mostly the Radeon HD3000/4000 series that were having issues with OpenGL games in general and were performing worse than their nvidia counterparts. This was resolved with driver updates, and wasnt a concern at all for later Radeon HD cards, or the R9 series, or Polaris or Vega, etc. But still every so often i see the same blanket statement thats founded in an issue from 2008.

Can the same be said today? God no, im running SL fine on an Intel Arc A770, it runs about the same as it does on its AMD RX 6600 XT equivalent or the RTX 3060ti. None of those options have any specific notable issues related to them from a hardware perspective.

Maybe at one point texture compression did cause issues, i can see how it would, maybe it did it to specific hardware, maybe it was a specific OpenGL version or a specific range of viewer versions, maybe it was caused by the implementation of new tech into SL. But does it apply now? I dont think it does, and the blanket statement is moot.

Heres one from my experience though. Having your shadow scaling set to 4.0 isnt recommended. It tanks my framerate immediately and attempts to turn my gpu into the demon core. But will that be the case in a few years, maybe shadows will be optimized, or maybe the scaling will result in much better looks rather than the minor changes it offers now, to where itll be worth going to single digit framerates for a screenshot with 4.0 scaling shadows on?

[Love Zhaoying]

10 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

If we can't say "texture compression isn't recommended," should we also stop saying "max LOD factor isn't recommended?"

If not, why not?

Only "we" get to say what can and cannot be said, not "thee".

And while I'm at it, what's mine is mine, and what's thine is also mine.

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, gwynchisholm said:

Probably yeah, i mean, why wouldnt it be recommended? Its the statement to not recommend some configuration universally founded? Ive personally not seen 4.0 LOD scaling do a whole lot to my game, at least nothing worth noting, ill take the nicer models at distance for the small framerate hit.

Blanket statements dont take outliers into effect and are commonly related to things that change often.

Example, It was not long ago that people on this forum and in the greater SL community would make the blanket statement that AMD/ATI cards arent recommended for SL because they have XYZ problems. Which was founded on whats now tech more than a decade old, for a viewer more than a decade old. In that scenario it was mostly the Radeon HD3000/4000 series that were having issues with OpenGL games in general and were performing worse than their nvidia counterparts. This was resolved with driver updates, and wasnt a concern at all for later Radeon HD cards, or the R9 series, or Polaris or Vega, etc. But still every so often i see the same blanket statement thats founded in an issue from 2008.

Can the same be said today? God no, im running SL fine on an Intel Arc A770, it runs about the same as it does on its AMD RX 6600 XT equivalent or the RTX 3060ti. None of those options have any specific notable issues related to them from a hardware perspective.

Maybe at one point texture compression did cause issues, i can see how it would, maybe it did it to specific hardware, maybe it was a specific OpenGL version or a specific range of viewer versions, maybe it was caused by the implementation of new tech into SL. But does it apply now? I dont think it does, and the blanket statement is moot.

Heres one from my experience though. Having your shadow scaling set to 4.0 isnt recommended. It tanks my framerate immediately and attempts to turn my gpu into the demon core. But will that be the case in a few years, maybe shadows will be optimized, or maybe the scaling will result in much better looks rather than the minor changes it offers now, to where itll be worth going to single digit framerates for a screenshot with 4.0 scaling shadows on?

I'm confused. Are you saying we can't make blanket statements, or that we would merely be factually incorrect in making those statements? If we can't make the blanket statements, who will stop us from doing so?

It's so confusing.

 

[gwynchisholm]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I'm confused. Are you saying we can't make blanket statements, or that we would merely be factually incorrect in making those statements? If we can't make the blanket statements, who will stop us from doing so?

It's so confusing.

 

realistically nobody can stop you from making blanket statements

its just not ethical to do so, in almost any context both irl and in niche places like the barely populated tech section of a forum for a social game from 2003

blanket statements dont really apply to everyone, and even if they do they may not apply for all time, they should just be avoided and instead more specific and situational takes should be used

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, gwynchisholm said:

realistically nobody can stop you from making blanket statements

its just not ethical to do so, in almost any context both irl and in niche places like the barely populated tech section of a forum for a social game from 2003

blanket statements dont really apply to everyone, and even if they do they may not apply for all time, they should just be avoided and instead more specific and situational takes should be used

Being "wrong" or "politically incorrect" (the only serious options I see) are unethical? Today I learned something new!