The era of 150+ avatars in a region is here. We have a performance problem viewer side.

[Coffee Pancake]

30 minutes ago, animats said:

I agree, and I've discussed that before. Roblox does that. It's quite difficult, especially on existing content. That's probably the way forward for some future avatar system, but not something we can apply to existing content.

My thought would be to only use the bake for the distance models, it's not the perfect ideal solution, but the ends result should be close enough. Plenty of room for error as the bulk of geometry is subpixel, might even be something easiest done with an AI model rather than an iterative brute force process all the things approach,

 

 

[Arluelle]

On 6/23/2023 at 5:31 AM, Jaylinbridges said:

Is it worth it to spend $1500 to upgrade my system so I can attend some mega lag event?

I'm on a high end system where the graphics card alone was $1500+. The Motown event was a great experience to me. On Firestorm I didn't perceive any server side lag, avatars were loading properly, when camming around everything was super smooth. I think up to 135 people were in the sim during that time. I didn't notice that performance wise at all.

The SL20B event was a noticeably worse (not super bad, just worse in comparison) experience to me, both server and client side. On the main sim it was hardly possible for me to move. In general some avatars and textures taking forever to load. I felt the heavy load on my system when camming around. It wasn't bad, but I always felt that this is not 100% smooth. I've uploaded a short clip and you can see occasional stutters. (I never crashed during both events)

 

Also I'm a heavy multi tasker. Often I have shadows disabled, 176m draw distance, LOD setting at 2, max. # of non-impostor set to 16. Months ago I uploaded some clips on max. settings https://www.youtube.com/@arluelle/videos

 

 

Edited June 25, 2023 by Arluelle

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Arluelle said:

IOn Firestorm I didn't perceive any server side lag, 

Because no one was moving.

[rasterscan]

ctrl alt shift 4 is your friend

[Jaylinbridges]

6 hours ago, Arluelle said:

I'm on a high end system where the graphics card alone was $1500+

My limit is about $500 for the graphics card.  I will need to build a new system.  The only things I can still use are the case and fans, and the power supply.  32 GB memory is minimum, and 6 GB of VRAM min.  Not sure I can get by for $1000 minus the NVIDIA graphics card. Will also need a high end sound chip or card, as I need digital sound output.

There's not much else I would need a high end system for.  I didn't have too much lag at Motown the first day and never crashed - just had to wait for the body parts to get attached.

Edited June 25, 2023 by Jaylinbridges

[animats]

7 hours ago, Arluelle said:

I've uploaded a short clip...

Now that's exactly the situation I'm talking about. Lots of distant avatars, each of which occupies only a small amount of screen space. If that case is handled efficiently, crowds will usually work.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Jaylinbridges said:

My limit is about $500 for the graphics card.

There are currently big ”rebates” (when compared with the stratospheric prices we saw during the past two years) on the RTX 3060 12GB and 3060 Ti 8GB: you can find those between 350 and 400 euros/dollars. They will do just fine for SL (and with 12GB, the 3060 looks mighty appetizing, even more than the 3060 Ti, given the VRAM is now becoming the limiting factor, and will be more so with PBR).

Edited June 25, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Extrude Ragu]

I happen to have a high end consumer machine, not bought so much for SL but AI/Rendering.

RTX 4090 TI (24gb VRAM), 64gb of RAM, i9, nVME SSD's

I was at the opening ceremony and was managing about 15-20fps in ultra. For reference it's usually about 250fps in my own sim. There must have been about 200+ people there, but I found that moving the max avatars slider around didn't seem to affect performance, as though it were the mere fact the avatars were present, regardless of if they were being impostered or not, that was lagging me.

[Beq Janus]

10 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I happen to have a high end consumer machine, not bought so much for SL but AI/Rendering.

RTX 4090 TI (24gb VRAM), 64gb of RAM, i9, nVME SSD's

I was at the opening ceremony and was managing about 15-20fps in ultra. For reference it's usually about 250fps in my own sim. There must have been about 200+ people there, but I found that moving the max avatars slider around didn't seem to affect performance, as though it were the mere fact the avatars were present, regardless of if they were being impostered or not, that was lagging me.

There's definitely some truth in that. In the end an object is an object and the viewer has to iterate over them all, all those segmented bodies out there, while now far more heavily optimised in the viewer than was the case a year or so back, are still hundreds of separate parts all of which have to be properly marshalled. Imposters are "more efficient" mostly by virtue of rendering less frequently but still require everything to have been fetched in order to render them. 

I went to see my favourite SL musician (Tally Mercury)  singing at SL20B and after fiddling was getting around 20fps (3070Ti 8GB VRAM) with Max avatars at around 26, draw distance 288. I was getting about 9 FPS (IIRC) before I reduced the max avatars, so it made "a difference" but not perhaps what we'd expected. As you can see it was "good enough" to get a reasonably smooth flycam, though obviously the imposters switching in and out is not the best.

https://i.gyazo.com/ead815a44353ff8cae7b0a77d75bb0cc.mp4

 

 

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

With that many avatars around, the main issue seems to be the vertex buffers usage. Today, at Lab Gab, I reached over 5GB of VRAM used (for a 8GB VRAM card) by vertex buffers with 350 people around (in draw distance).

This said, the Cool VL Viewer bravely chugged on at respectable frame rates (well above 50fps with just a few dropouts) and high graphics settings. See by yourself:

LabGabPhilipOberwolf-start.mkv

LabGabPhilipObwerwolfPeakAudience.mkv

Of course this was on my main PC (specs in my post above), which is a rather high end one.

Edited June 28, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp