The Goal: 30 FPS

[Feorie Frimon]

Does my FPS have anything to do with the type of region I’m in? Will a full region have a more stable FPS? Will it be higher?
Is that the difference with those ‘mega fancy event’ regions? 
 

I ask because for 4K filming with machinima, I learned (and can confirm) that I need at least 30 fps for the footage to look good enough to edit.

For context, my computer is new (loads of ram, dedicated ram, great graphics card, and tons of hard drive space.) I work from home, so remote meetings are common. I also stream video/shows on multiple devices in my home without an issue. I’m hard lined on business level internet, so my net is usually pretty solid.
 

This hasn’t been a problem until recently (when I started filming all my raws in 4K),  but I find getting that FPS up is harder to achieve these days … even on my own empty homestead.

I’m pretty good at manipulating my graphics and I most often use Firestorm. I use a homestead for a lot of things I film, but the stuff I love to film is out in the mainland and getting my FPS that high with shadows and any draw distance has been a real challenge.

Any help anyone can provide would be awesome! ❤️

[Wulfie Reanimator]

33 minutes ago, Feorie Frimon said:

my computer is new (loads of ram, dedicated ram, great graphics card, and tons of hard drive space.)

Post the exact hardware you have so we can make sure!

34 minutes ago, Feorie Frimon said:

Does my FPS have anything to do with the type of region I’m in? Will a full region have a more stable FPS? Will it be higher?
Is that the difference with those ‘mega fancy event’ regions?

The type of sim (or sim performance) has no effect on your FPS. The stuff that's visible to your viewer does affect your FPS.

[JeromFranzic]

I think it still comes down to optimization. We all know that this has long plagued SL. Once the move to Vulkan is complete (whenever that happens), and the Unity mobile viewer is fully released... and we're away from the outdated Open GL engine... maybe FPS will stabilize once and for all, maybe.

I experience better FPS in Sansar most of the time, yet I don't have the latest PC; mine is a little over 5 years old, i7-8750H cpu + 1050 GPU. Yup lol...

ETA: my guess is you'll likely have to cap draw distance to something that allows a (mostly) stable 30 fps, even with the best hardware. 

Edited August 29, 2023 by JeromFranzic

[Feorie Frimon]

57 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Post the exact hardware you have so we can make sure!

The first is my 'old Bessy' that I use to log multiple avatars in on graphics really low....or to just play around and build during day to day stuff. It's a laptop, so it gets really hot...I try not to crank it to high for too long if I don't have to. 

• Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz   2.21 GHz
• RAM 32.0 GB 
• 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 with Max-Q Design

The second is the one I do most of my filming and editing on.

• 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700F   2.10 GHz
• RAM 32.0 GB
• 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER

 

57 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

The type of sim (or sim performance) has no effect on your FPS. The stuff that's visible to your viewer does affect your FPS.

That makes sense! I was filming a video a few weeks ago and I had the BIGGEST fight with this waterfall - I'd get near the thing, and my FPS would just tank. 

Edited August 29, 2023 by Feorie Frimon

[Aishagain]

3 minutes ago, JeromFranzic said:

I experience better FPS in Sansar most of the time

You do?  In Sansar??  Really???

[JeromFranzic]

Just now, Aishagain said:

You do?  In Sansar??  Really???

Yup. Their standards for creating objects is more streamlined compared to SL/Open Sim. Not as customizable with the avatars though.

[Aishagain]

I was under the impression that Sansar no longer existed.  You clearly know otherwise.  I am surprised.

[AmeliaJ08]

At 4K with high settings, shadows enabled etc. you're definitely going to struggle to achieve a reliable 30FPS in busy scenes on that hardware.

Shadows seem to be the most costly item, you can reduce their quality of course and this does make a big difference but it also looks terrible. They don't look great at their highest quality level either though, just less terrible

 

[Gabriele Graves]

16 hours ago, JeromFranzic said:

I think it still comes down to optimization. We all know that this has long plagued SL. Once the move to Vulkan is complete (whenever that happens), and the Unity mobile viewer is fully released... and we're away from the outdated Open GL engine... maybe FPS will stabilize once and for all, maybe.

I experience better FPS in Sansar most of the time, yet I don't have the latest PC; mine is a little over 5 years old, i7-8750H cpu + 1050 GPU. Yup lol...

ETA: my guess is you'll likely have to cap draw distance to something that allows a (mostly) stable 30 fps, even with the best hardware. 

The reason why Sansar performs better than SL is that the entire experience is downloaded to your PC before you begin, that includes all of it's objects, textures, animations and scripts and none of this can be changed from within the experience.  Experience updates can only be received and used once you logout or use another experience and then return back to the original experience again and that's assuming changes have been published.

Changes have to be made by the experience creator and then published to be available to others once those changes are complete.

Most of the reason why SL will never have that kind of performance is that anything/everything can change at any time and all those changes need to be downloaded on the fly instead of being able to downloaded as a one time thing.

SL is a fully dynamic environment and Sansar is pretty much a fully static environment.

Edited August 30, 2023 by Gabriele Graves

[Jenna Huntsman]

I'd recommend you try out the Linden PBR viewer (found here: https://releasenotes.secondlife.com/viewer/7.0.0.581368.html ) or the Alchemy PBR viewer, as they're both based on a newer (LL) codebase which contains many performance optimizations as compared to the current release viewer.

[Jackson Redstar]

You didn't remention what record software you are using, but, you are recording a screen - your record speed is set by the record speed you choose in your recording software, not the FPS in game. even 2 FPS you can still record at 60 FPS, but of course the recording will look bad with jerky movements. With software like OBS, you can monitor your recording to see if you are getting encoding lag and/or rendering lag. Even if I am at a really laggy event (like 8FPS in world) I still really don't get rendering lag or encoding lag. I currently record at 60FPS in OBS, and I edit the timeline at 24 FPS. But in most cases in world, the FPS is often between 10-32 FPS (I use a FPS limit of 32 FPS) with most recordings I do usualy falling in the mid teens in terms of FPS in world. Not ideal of course, but I do weddings so not alot of fast movement either. But I also only record 2k footage so there is that as well. I have a i7, a 3070, 32 gig of fast ram, and everything is running from and recording to SSDs.  I haven't yet named my computer, but I suppose if I had to I'd name it Dependable Dan lol

Edited August 30, 2023 by Jackson Redstar

[AmeliaJ08]

2 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

The reason why Sansar performs better than SL is that the entire experience is downloaded to your PC before you begin, that includes all of it's objects, textures, animations and scripts and none of this can be changed from within the experience.  Experience updates can only be received and used once you logout or use another experience and then return back to the original experience again and that's assuming changes have been published.

Changes have to be made by the experience creator and then published to be available to others once those changes are complete.

Most of the reason why SL will never have that kind of performance is that anything/everything can change at any time and all those changes need to be downloaded on the fly instead of being able to downloaded as a one time thing.

SL is a fully dynamic environment and Sansar is pretty much a fully static environment.

It does sort of make me wonder, maybe SL could implement this on a per-region basis.

[Gabriele Graves]

2 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

It does sort of make me wonder, maybe SL could implement this on a per-region basis.

It's possible some optimisations might be done here but it would have to be carefully managed to preserve how SL works I think.

[Jackson Redstar]

19 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

It does sort of make me wonder, maybe SL could implement this on a per-region basis.

one of the major grips with Sansar was hard disks filling up after everytime one went into Sansar

[Gabriele Graves]

5 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

one of the major grips with Sansar was hard disks filling up after everytime one went into Sansar

I believe that there were minutes worth of delay while downloading experiences as well.  The larger the experience, the worse it was.

[Candide LeMay]

It would help if the SL caching system would actually work. The CDN that's delivering assets is typically very fast, as is my internet connection. Sometimes I can get a sim to load faster if I nuke the cache and let everything re-download over the network, even with the cache located on a ram disk. That does not make sense.

[AmeliaJ08]

3 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

It would help if the SL caching system would actually work. The CDN that's delivering assets is typically very fast, as is my internet connection. Sometimes I can get a sim to load faster if I nuke the cache and let everything re-download over the network, even with the cache located on a ram disk. That does not make sense.

I'm left utterly confused as to what is in my cache given the number of times I see SL re-downloading things that I spend a lot of time around (my house for example). Makes no sense.

Ideally I'd like to be able to give it more cache if it wants it as well, I've got it maxed out but I think it's still only 10GB or so.

 

Edited August 30, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[AmeliaJ08]

3 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

one of the major grips with Sansar was hard disks filling up after everytime one went into Sansar

I can understand that. Possibly less of an issue in the current era? maybe not, storage capacity of the average PC hasn't moved much... just got a lot faster in most cases. Would definitely need smart management, maybe an ability for users to flag certain frequently visited regions to not delete etc.

 

[Feorie Frimon]

On 8/30/2023 at 4:39 AM, Jackson Redstar said:

You didn't remention what record software you are using, but, you are recording a screen - your record speed is set by the record speed you choose in your recording software, not the FPS in game. even 2 FPS you can still record at 60 FPS, but of course the recording will look bad with jerky movements. With software like OBS, you can monitor your recording to see if you are getting encoding lag and/or rendering lag. Even if I am at a really laggy event (like 8FPS in world) I still really don't get rendering lag or encoding lag. I currently record at 60FPS in OBS, and I edit the timeline at 24 FPS. But in most cases in world, the FPS is often between 10-32 FPS (I use a FPS limit of 32 FPS) with most recordings I do usualy falling in the mid teens in terms of FPS in world. Not ideal of course, but I do weddings so not alot of fast movement either. But I also only record 2k footage so there is that as well. I have a i7, a 3070, 32 gig of fast ram, and everything is running from and recording to SSDs.  I haven't yet named my computer, but I suppose if I had to I'd name it Dependable Dan lol

This makes a ton of sense! I started using a different program (I was using OBS Studio before but now I’m using from Streamlabs). 
It may be a settings thing that I’m not aware of, but the difference was amazing - I was able to film high graphics skating down Bay City roads with draw distance up to at least 400…shadows and projectors and it was crisp and beautiful. Even when Firestorm said I was at somewhere between 13 and 25 ‘fps’.
 

We gotta do another interview sometime Jackson, and let me pick your brain about machinima stuff now that I know more!  

[Jackson Redstar]

Streamlabs is a varient of OBS software. With OBS getting the right recording settings can make a huge difference in quality and performance I was planning on making a OBS video on my record settings, someday..