Firestorm PBR Alpha viewer

[Beq Janus]

13 minutes ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

OK sorry to nitpick as I tend to agree with the rest but use of the term 'polluting' I find - problematic.

why so? Taking the albedo, which is a fundamental property of the PBR model and baking it with other aspects that belong in separate maps detracts from the PBR rendering model, messes with the shading thus is muddying the whole concept. I am perfectly happy with my choice of words as I honestly think it is the correct term.

[arton Rotaru]

1 hour ago, Beq Janus said:

Last I heard the new SL mobile client had no support for PBR, is that still the case? If so the attitude of "everyone can see PBR" seems rather misplaced. I may well be out of date on the mobile viewer status though.

The mobile doesn't support glTF yet, but according to a comment from an official on the Second Life Youtube channel, they are planning to add glTF support in the next few month to the mobile client.

How that will work out may be a different question, though. Currently I wouldn't put any money at all on the mobile client.

 

Edited January 6 by arton Rotaru

[Qie Niangao]

10 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

why so? Taking the albedo, which is a fundamental property of the PBR model and baking it with other aspects that belong in separate maps detracts from the PBR rendering model, messes with the shading thus is muddying the whole concept. I am perfectly happy with my choice of words as I honestly think it is the correct term.

Anybody with a PBR viewer—hence, all those for whom a PBR rendering model even exists—will never see the "pollution", right? It's only folks gazing through the dimming glass of forward rendering who'll ever encounter it… and maybe a few too stubborn or delusional to update. Yes, it will look like crap sometimes, but surely no worse than a void textured surface.

Creators can be encouraged to keep spending the effort to populate those Blinn-Phong maps, but they simply won't, not after Firestorm and almost all other viewers quit supporting versions that lack PBR. It just won't make economic sense. (Try to find new clothes still fitted to Slink bodies.) At that point it won't even make sense to keep stuffing the asset store with those rarely viewed maps.

The purity of SL's "PBR model" is not determined by when the Cool VL Viewer quits synthesizing diffusemaps, but rather when Firestorm supports only versions that display PBR whenever present, sometime more than eighteen months from now. 

(It absolutely would be a dreadful mistake for Firestorm to synthesize those diffusemaps, or provide a non-PBR viewing mode beyond the build tool. Such is the burden of hegemony, I guess.)

[Beq Janus]

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Anybody with a PBR viewer—hence, all those for whom a PBR rendering model even exists—will never see the "pollution", right? It's only folks gazing through the dimming glass of forward rendering who'll ever encounter it… and maybe a few too stubborn or delusional to update. Yes, it will look like crap sometimes, but surely no worse than a void textured surface.

We may be talking at cross purposes. I asserted that if viewers were coerced into automatically using the albedo as a fallback diffuse, then the creators would be coerced by those not seeing PBR into providing baked light in their albedo map at the point of material upload, as such, the albedo is corrupted at source and the pollution propagates to all. It is a hypothetical use case based on the exact behaviour we have observed from creators since ALM.

Synthesising a fallback diffuse automatically would be different as the base PBR is not being corrupted in the process.

[Extrude Ragu]

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Anybody with a PBR viewer—hence, all those for whom a PBR rendering model even exists—will never see the "pollution", right? It's only folks gazing through the dimming glass of forward rendering who'll ever encounter it… and maybe a few too stubborn or delusional to update. Yes, it will look like crap sometimes, but surely no worse than a void textured surface.

She's saying that some creators would be tempted to put a diffuse map in their PBR material instead of albedo, because their customers can turn PBR off in certain viewers and will just see whatever populates the albedo slot.

So in other words it's actually only  the people using a PBR viewer, who would see the pollution.

[Beq Janus]

23 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I would have loudly opposed to this totally silly statement about providing two different items for PBR and legacy viewers, when all viewers can render (even if differently) a combined PBR plus ALM (or diffuse only) bearing face !

Making two separate items achieves nothing, PBR is in the eye of the beholder. If I rez a new leather sofa with lovely PBR materials, that's fine because I can see it, if my guest is on a non-PBR viewer, then I do not have the option to rez them a different item. They will see what I have, and it will be ugly without fallback support. The extension of this argument becomes "If you are building for a mixed audience, then you should only rez non-PBR", this is completely counter-productive and would kill transitional adoption dead in its tracks. We need multimode rendering during the transition, making it harder for creators to provide a fallback is in nobody's interests. 

"Why don't you just force everyone to update?"

Firstly, that's never ben the FS model, our users have always enjoyed the long-term support model that allows them to choose, within a three-release window, when to update. More than this, though, I would argue that we need the transition to allow people who have weaker hardware the time and space to decide on whether they need to upgrade, find an alternative way to interact with SL, or  (the very worst case) leave SL. While they are not the majority, by any measure, we do play host to a significant number of minority groups who use SL as a social space to interact where they are unable to do the same in RL. These groups include those living on some form of disability income, for example, and often do not have the same disposable income to make a major purchase at a moments notice. Allowing them the time and options to manage their own transition, while not burdening the majority with legacy demands and/or additional work is something I feel strongly about.

There will come a point by which people will need to have made their choices, for Firestorm users, that will be after our 3-release long-term support policy removes the final non-PBR release. For other TPVs, it will vary, as @Henri Beauchamp has stated. 

 

[Flea Yatsenko]

I can guarantee you there will be people actively seeking out fully baked homes and stuff over PBR two years from now. That's just how some of the SL residents are.

Surely if you make something like a fully baked, non-PBR skybox and you run PBR on the absolutely lowest settings it's not that resource intensive? I've got a truly anemic netbook, 128 GCN 2.0 cores, an A4-5000 AMD APU. It barely ran with forward rendering on low. R7 260 was the same generation and had 768 cores, with 290x at 2816 cores. Surely if that laptop can get over 10fps on low the problems with PBR are over-hyped.

[Beq Janus]

11 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I can guarantee you there will be people actively seeking out fully baked homes and stuff over PBR two years from now. That's just how some of the SL residents are.

Correct, they can desire that. Same as many cling to default avatars and sculpties. The expectation is that those will be the tiny minority. It's a free world where they can wish for what they like and seek out such content; there may/will be niche creators who wish to support them, too.

I think the excellent work that LL has done in raising the frame rate through successive iterations of optimisation has brought much more breathing space to the low end and reduced that entry bar. Too much time is spent bashing LL for this or that statement here, and not enough to recognise the amazing work done. The uplift in performance over the last couple of years is nothing short of miraculous in the face of the unrelenting flood of poorly optimised content.

What I have no conclusive data for yet (and I doubt it will be available until we have PBR in the wild and a fair amount of content) is the typical long-term memory demands. I suspect that 16GB will become the minimum viable memory footprint for normal use in the near future. This will be driven partly by the overuse of 1024 maps where they are not needed, as we have seen for the last decade, but also by the increase in maps. The rationalization/de-duplication of blank maps that LL are doing on the server side is one attempt to mitigate some of this effect. 

I see a lot of out-of-memory crashes in our bug splat reports. We can sometimes put a plaster over them and carry on, but at some point, things fail. AMD graphics is particularly good at this kind of crash. Their "shared memory model" allows users to allocate/reserve portions of main RAM for GPU use. We have recently seen users with 8GB main RAM and 4GB reserved for GPU. This leaves ~4GB for the OS and the programs, and all the data. Needless to say, they crash almost immediately in the AMD drivers.

 

[Flea Yatsenko]

3 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

Correct, they can desire that. Same as many cling to default avatars and sculpties. The expectation is that those will be the tiny minority. It's a free world where they can wish for what they like and seek out such content; there may/will be niche creators who wish to support them, too.

I think the excellent work that LL has done in raising the frame rate through successive iterations of optimisation has brought much more breathing space to the low end and reduced that entry bar. Too much time is spent bashing LL for this or that statement here, and not enough to recognise the amazing work done. The uplift in performance over the last couple of years is nothing short of miraculous in the face of the unrelenting flood of poorly optimised content.

What I have no conclusive data for yet (and I doubt it will be available until we have PBR in the wild and a fair amount of content) is the typical long-term memory demands. I suspect that 16GB will become the minimum viable memory footprint for normal use in the near future. This will be driven partly by the overuse of 1024 maps where they are not needed, as we have seen for the last decade, but also by the increase in maps. The rationalization/de-duplication of blank maps that LL are doing on the server side is one attempt to mitigate some of this effect. 

I see a lot of out-of-memory crashes in our bug splat reports. We can sometimes put a plaster over them and carry on, but at some point, things fail. AMD graphics is particularly good at this kind of crash. Their "shared memory model" allows users to allocate/reserve portions of main RAM for GPU use. We have recently seen users with 8GB main RAM and 4GB reserved for GPU. This leaves ~4GB for the OS and the programs, and all the data. Needless to say, they crash almost immediately in the AMD drivers.

 

I just did a quick and dirty test on my A4-5000 netbook with latest FS Alpha with PBR. The default settings were way, way too high for this thing, like 0 fps high. I had to turn everything off and set view distance to 32 and I was actually getting 15-25fps on my build platform. I went to a club and was still getting FPS in the 10s but I didn't have time to wait for the new texture fetch algo to load a whole club. The CPU is massively struggling with FS on that APU, more so than the GPU I think. It took like a minute for FS to actually load and show the log in screen.

Maybe I will look a bit closer later on, but the HD 8330 on this APU is about equal to Intel Integrated on Haswell according to notebookcheck. https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-8330.92874.0.html

Haswell came out in 2012. Surely the people who are complaining so much aren't on 11 to 12 year old laptops?

I was running Linux with KDE. AMD's support for that GPU isn't very good in Windows anymore.

Perhaps the default graphics settings are too high for the PBR viewer and it's making people think PBR runs far worse than it actually is? I figure LL is responsible for the recommended specs though.

[Beq Janus]

7 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Haswell came out in 2012. Surely the people who are complaining so much aren't on 11 to 12 year old laptops?

In Feb 22 we had about 3% of users on pre-2012 hardware. In Oct 23, it had dropped to about 2.5%.

The rate of change at the low end is high, with just less than half of those on pre-2012 machines trading up to newer machines between 2022 and 2023. (The number crunching for this is far from good statistical science as the stats we have are not very clean, but they give a fair indication I would say)

The point is that I don't think  CPU is the bottleneck now. The optimisation work has shifted the workload and made things far better in that regard. certainly for older machines the lack of threads will be a constraint but people are still buying brand new machines with 8GB of RAM and expecting them to run SL healthily. Spoiler alert: they are disappointed.

There is some pressure on us, our support team more than most, to identify the best strategies for users on limited resource machines, and help them adjust. Low defaults is only one tool in the toolbox. Once we have a good picture of the impact we can try to make things manageable but there also has to be an acceptance that there is only so much you can do, you simply cannot fit a litre of textures in a pint glass of RAM.

 

[Jenna Huntsman]

26 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

A4-5000

It's worth noting that SL pretty much hates pre-Ryzen AMD CPUs - even if you have the absolute fastest pre-Ryzen CPU (FX 9590 if memory serves), you'd be lucky to see over 30fps.

[Extrude Ragu]

6 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

...people are still buying brand new machines with 8GB of RAM and expecting them to run SL healthily. Spoiler alert: they are disappointed....

It's interesting that you say this.

Currently, according to the official SecondLife system requirements (https://secondlife.com/system-requirements) - 4gb is the minimum and 8gb is the 'recommended' - Perhaps this is misleading residents and giving them false expectations?

I don't know when this was last updated, but I wonder if it's even possible to play SecondLife on 4gb of RAM.

[Flea Yatsenko]

1 hour ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

It's worth noting that SL pretty much hates pre-Ryzen AMD CPUs - even if you have the absolute fastest pre-Ryzen CPU (FX 9590 if memory serves), you'd be lucky to see over 30fps.

A4-5000 is not Bulldozer like the FX, it's a Jaguar CPU and it's actually quite good, completely demolished Intel in the price bracket at the time, though it was competing with celerons. I did have both FX and this APU.

Perspective for what I tested on, it was a $500 netbook released in 2011. The entire package (CPU and GPU) is only 15w.

The most important thing I got from my little test was that the default settings are way too high and make me think it runs horribly, but when I turned them down I was impressed. I was fully expecting a completely un-usable experience based on what people have been saying about PBR.

Not only does my experience represent 2.5% of users based on computer age, at the time this laptop was a slow netbook that got 8+ hours of battery life when the average was only like 2 hours. I think LL needs to update their min requirements and turn down default recommended settings on older hardware. Maybe this should be in another thread because there's no reason why TPVs should be doing this.

But lowering draw distance should be the biggest factor for reducing VRAM usage, right?

[Beq Janus]

8 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I don't know when this was last updated, but I wonder if it's even possible to play SecondLife on 4gb of RAM.

No, its ridiculous and has been raised 100 times in various meetings.

To be honest ours is not much better but it is clear that you can maybe "logon and make basic interactions"

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_system_requirements

We do specific 8GB min for 64bit, and if we are strictly honest that's correct. It will get you logged in. Chances are you will crash as soon as more than one person is in the region. We should probably add a footnote to say "8GB dedicated RAM not shared with your GPU."

Of course, anyone buying a new machine and targeting the minimum spec for something that is important to their purchasing decision is probably asking for trouble.

 

[BartPitcher]

Even 16GB is not enough if you want to visit busy places. For busy clubs ( > 20 to 30 AV's) you need 32. Looks like data that define AV's is intrinsically (or just stored?) very inefficient? And even then, loading of this data takes ages so that the first 10 minutes you see a bunch of naked people with grim faces on the back of their heads. Here the network bandwidth is not the limitation. So even with a reasonable high-end system, the experience is .... suboptimal. Looks like this level of experience cannot be compensated with client hardware upgrades, not even in a technical, but especially not in an economical viable way.

LL made huge improvement steps, true, especially for sailing and other inter-sim activities, but still could be better. I hope the focus on (texture) loading capacity will persist and not degrade with time after more users adopt PBR.

Edited January 9 by BartPitcher

[Henri Beauchamp]

11 minutes ago, BartPitcher said:

LL made huge improvement steps, true, especially for sailing and other inter-sim activities

Sadly, in its current state, the PBR viewer is a BIG step backwards for sailing, with ugly sky-blue water and broken water reflections (WL waters looked way nicer, including with just ”minimal” reflections, i.e. all but sky turned off)... Another of the things among the many rendering glitches that should have incited LL to keep the PBR viewer in a RC state a little longer. 🫤

Let's hope they will fix waters quickly so that we can again enjoy sailing on SL seas !

Edited January 9 by Henri Beauchamp

[BartPitcher]

11 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Sadly, in its current state, the PBR viewer is a BIG step backwards for sailing, with ugly sky-blue water and broken water reflections... Another of things among the many rendering glitches that should have incited LL to keep the PBR viewer in a RC state a little longer. 🫤

Let's hope they will fix waters quickly so that we can again enjoy sailing on SL seas !

Yes, very true, for competitive sailing I reduce graphic quality to about 10 years back in time anyway .... indeed an example of tech not matching to be expected state-of-the-art experience. But still I stay for the experience that is offered. LL should not be lazy because of that.

Sim crossing and related behavior was improved, hence not all is doom and gloom.

Edited January 9 by BartPitcher

[Qie Niangao]

I kinda expect more improvement in sim crossings this year but I don't know what to think about Linden water appearance. In general it seems reasonable to trade-off some of the earlier appearance for the earlier dreadful impact on performance, but this stuff we have now is pretty awful. On the other hand, the new Linden viewer (7.1.2.7215179142) fixes underwater alpha textures viewed from above the water surface (still broken on the Dec 29th Firestorm 7.1.2 (72848)) so they're clearly working on it.

[Aishagain]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

On the other hand, the new Linden viewer (7.1.2.7215179142) fixes underwater alpha textures viewed from above the water surface (still broken on the Dec 29th Firestorm 7.1.2 (72848)) so they're clearly working on it.

The fact that they (Linden Lab) are still "working on it" several weeks after they foisted this clearly unfinished and badly broken server/viewer combination upon us is a testament to their attitude that a broken "shiny" is better than the existing system.

Some of us just want the thing to work, not be ultra realistic and the current setup is a huge step backwards.

I had not realised just how bad SL sailing looked until I tried it using the latest FS alpha.  In that regard I agree wholeheartedly with Henri.

Edited January 9 by Aishagain
grammar

[Kathrine Jansma]

6 hours ago, BartPitcher said:

And even then, loading of this data takes ages so that the first 10 minutes you see a bunch of naked people with grim faces on the back of their heads.

Ten minutes sounds excessive. With enough threads thrown at the problem, even a busy club should rezz much faster.

But might be comparing apples & oranges. Which viewers did you try?

I would recommend you give Henri's Cool VL Viewer a spin, especially with the 'boost texture/fetch decode after TP' features. I tend to tp into fairly busy places and usually the crowd is looking proper after less than a minute. And thats with not really super modern hardware.

And make sure you have a AV exception for your viewer cache, makes a huge difference.

Edited January 9 by Kathrine Jansma
Add comment about AV

[BartPitcher]

3 hours ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

Ten minutes sounds excessive.

Which viewers did you try?

AV exception for your viewer cache.

I use Firestorm PBR Alpha, which in general loads textures faster.
But I wanted to check the AV exclusions, looked up the dir and found that some settings were still in the Alpha default. After setting caches to max and some other unrelated settings nothing changed, only after caches clearing and a couple of FS and PC restarts it is now faster. Coincidence? At sims with 90 users (Peak Lounge) a portion of 10 to 20 % avatars never get properly loaded. Edit: after typing this post now most avatars at Peak are loaded. With 50 users it looks faster now, but still 2+ minutes. Normal Firestorm release has similar end result but slower, however not checked recently.

AV exclusion for C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Firestorm_x64, no sub dirs.
No main memory, vRam nor GPU bottleneck, 2 processor cores run almost 100%.
Very fast fiber internet connection.

There is also another network issue that seems a factor. With VPN it is generally faster than without, maybe the provider throttles certain SL or cloud endpoints ...

Edited January 9 by BartPitcher

[BabsNorth]

It is good that technology moves forward, so I tried the Alpha viewer.  I have a fairly modern Desktop with 16GB Ram, video card and an i7 processor that I use mainly for work.  My internet speed is the maximun in my area of 33mbs. When running the usual FS, it is fast.  I tried the PBR Alpha and it is painfully slow to download textures and  makes movement of my avi jerky rather than the usual smooth flow.  I am just a user of software and have no clue how to adjust settings to improve the Preferences.  I hope the full FS PBR release will accommodate people like me as all my friends are saying the same thing.

[Beq Janus]

9 minutes ago, BabsNorth said:

It is good that technology moves forward, so I tried the Alpha viewer.  I have a fairly modern Desktop with 16GB Ram, video card and an i7 processor that I use mainly for work.  My internet speed is the maximun in my area of 33mbs. When running the usual FS, it is fast.  I tried the PBR Alpha and it is painfully slow to download textures and  makes movement of my avi jerky rather than the usual smooth flow.  I am just a user of software and have no clue how to adjust settings to improve the Preferences.  I hope the full FS PBR release will accommodate people like me as all my friends are saying the same thing.

If you have just downloaded and run the PBR viewer then there is a reasonably high probability that some of the issues you are seeing are due to anti virus software interfering. I would say it is probably the number 1 cause of such things (though not the only one of course)

Have a look at the following wiki page. You will probably have set all these in the past for the main viewer, but because the alpha is on a special "channel" and installs in a different place you will need to specifically exclude the alpha 

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I might populate the diffuse slot with a small "OUTDATED VIEWER" texture.

Same as I did back when mesh was rolled out.

[Henri Beauchamp]

4 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

I might populate the diffuse slot with a small ”OUTDATED VIEWER” texture.

I might blacklist the UUID of that texture (and any other such textures) in my viewer, so that people who cannot or do not want to use PBR just now (for whatever reason, but the main reason being that it is still very much in beta state, and this until LL fixes PBR properly) will not see it...

If you do not want to be bothered with ”outdated” viewers for your new builds, simply set the diffuse texture to be the same as your PBR material ”base color” one: it will not be perfect but, at least, your products will not look revoltingly ugly to people who do not use PBR.

Quote

Same as I did back when mesh was rolled out.

”Same”, really ?!? 😵

When it got rolled out, mesh did not ruin legacy contents and environment rendering (e.g. ugly PBR water vs gorgeous Windlight water). Also, it did not impact performances in existing scenes on old hardware (1).

What you did back then was therefore very different from what you intend to do now: back then you merely ”informed” people about the use of a deprecated viewer (2), while now you would slap in their face for refusing to use a beta-quality viewer !

Just please, don't do this...

----

(1) Even if, over years, the addition of many unoptimized meshes did impact new scenes with them, for everyone and whatever the hardware.

(2) And there was no possible fallback for mesh rendering in old viewers, unlike what PBR allows, since legacy diffuse texture and material can still be applied to a PBR face.

Edited January 19 by Henri Beauchamp