Fastest 2023 CPU for SL? (Ryzen 7 8700X3D)

[Nofunawo]

3 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

the graphic card are far more important.
Modern CPU's don't have their hands full mastering SL.

IMHO:

Correct, modern CPUs (middle class and higher) have enough power to run SL in any situation.

But see our findings here in this thread - CPU Single-Core speed the same - 4060TI vs 4070TI -> no difference in fps -> CPU limit

This tests were done in FullHD. My standard resolution is UWQHD and there the GPU is the limit.

I think we will see a change with the PBR Viewers. Also the Alphas are showing a difference in handling CPU & GPU.

But for now  it depends on the settings (ALM, Shadows...) and the resolution in use if it is the GPU or CPU which sets the limit.

 

[DwightLewis]

Well, I have a processor that is not the top of the range, it is an i5 12400, and the rest is only 16 GB ram, Nvidia RTX 2060 12GB and 2 NVMe of 1TB each, in 1080 resolution, SL is super smooth for me With all the graphic options active but without shadows and a viewing distance of 200, the processor only uses 8% to 12% and the GPU fluctuates its use and depending on what it has around it, from 15% to 32% % or 35% at 120 FPS that I intentionally limit, why do I want more FPS? when I activate shadows and Depth for a pic the processor usage stays the same and the GPU goes up to 52% to 55%. To be honest, I don't know why a Ryzen 7 or an Intel i9, at least for SL I don't see it as necessary, other games are excellent for me with maximum graphics.

[AmeliaJ08]

7 hours ago, Nofunawo said:

IMHO:

Correct, modern CPUs (middle class and higher) have enough power to run SL in any situation.

But see our findings here in this thread - CPU Single-Core speed the same - 4060TI vs 4070TI -> no difference in fps -> CPU limit

This tests were done in FullHD. My standard resolution is UWQHD and there the GPU is the limit.

I think we will see a change with the PBR Viewers. Also the Alphas are showing a difference in handling CPU & GPU.

But for now  it depends on the settings (ALM, Shadows...) and the resolution in use if it is the GPU or CPU which sets the limit.

It definitely seems like PBR rendering does begin to actually tap into GPU a little more, I see a boost in utilization numbers at least. It's probably not going to be much but every little helps, I think we're probably still butting up against engine limitations though regardless of how many extensions they tack onto it. I would hope in future if they're going to stick with it maybe some of available those GPU resources could be put to better work.

 

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

21 hours ago, Nofunawo said:

Correct, modern CPUs (middle class and higher) have enough power to run SL in any situation.

Even the laptop processor I got recently (i5-1335U) can run Firestorm on ultra (without shadows) in a populated place with everybody (10-15) fully rendered. No real GPU, still 30 FPS.

I think SL users tend to really underestimate modern hardware, myself included. And while the performance difference to my ridiculous desktop build isn't as big as it should be, anyone who says better hardware doesn't matter is just very wrong.

Edited November 10, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Flea Yatsenko]

SL has gotten a lot better with performance too. I have my old AMD FX 8350 I use sometimes and it is actually quite usable with an old HD 6900 and FX 8350 in Linux. Much better than I remember. Still not great on my AMD A4-5000 but that's a 2013 netbook APU so I can understand.

I think LL doesn't get enough props for what they've done with viewer performance, and PBR is going to shift massively from CPU limited performance to GPU limited. Between CPUs getting better and viewer getting better, the bar for running SL is lowering. Which is great because that can be a huge hurdle for new users, specially those who don't have proper gaming PCs.

[AmeliaJ08]

58 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Even the laptop processor I got recently (i5-1335U) can run Firestorm on ultra (without shadows) in a populated place with everybody (10-15) fully rendered. No real GPU, still 30 FPS.

I think SL users tend to really underestimate modern hardware, myself included. And while the performance difference to my ridiculous desktop build isn't as big as it should be, anyone who says better hardware doesn't matter is just very wrong.

Does that chip have the Iris integrated graphics? I have wondered how that performs, I know the old UHD 630 that seemed to stick around forever in Intel CPUs is basically useless but the Iris should be much (relatively) better.

Still, you want dedicated GPU for SL except for a few Ryzen chips that have a semi-competent Radeon built into them.

Turning off shadows is a very big performance booster though, it's surprising just how demanding they are... I'm sure it could be so much better, SL has this weird habit of making a giant fuss and hardware requirement over relatively simple features!

 

Edited November 10, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Wulfie Reanimator]

18 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Does that chip have the Iris integrated graphics? I have wondered how that performs, I know the old UHD 630 that seemed to stick around forever in Intel CPUs is basically useless but the Iris should be much (relatively) better.

Yeah, it's the Iris Xe. I haven't done any benchmarks and don't plan on gaming on the laptop, SL was just one-off for funsies. Is there anything specific you want me to do?

[AmeliaJ08]

3 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Yeah, it's the Iris Xe. I haven't done any benchmarks and don't plan on gaming on the laptop, SL was just one-off for funsies. Is there anything specific you want me to do?

Oh no I was just curious, nothing specific, I wish we had a standardized SL benchmark! Might be something to suggest in a JIRA though...

 

[gwynchisholm]

3 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

I think SL users tend to really underestimate modern hardware, myself included.

I think I used the example some months ago where I paired a core2quad q8200 with a cheap used Radeon Vega 56 and had sl running well in 4k. The real performance floor for the cpu is pretty low, and the benefits seen by higher end processors is surprisingly small. I think it’s important as a larger community to recommend hardware with this games real performance in mind. You don’t need the new i7 for this game, you don’t need the i5, on paper you don’t even need the i3, because really their single core performance is very similar and sl doesn’t see that much improvement at all relative to the cost of the hardware. 
 

A while ago I got an intel N100, its a 6 watt embedded CPU made of four gracemont cores (the “e cores” on current intel cpus), and its performance equivalent is similar to the 10 year old i5 4570. It plays SL great even with its igpu, add a dedicated video card to it and it performs fine as you would expect. But even just the igpu, an N100 mini pc can be had for under $200 and it’s the lowest end new desktop style hardware you can buy. 

I look at the “what do I need for sl” and see recommendations for $400 gpus and it’s like… why? The performance uplift just isn’t worth the cost in my eyes, and I throw all kinds of money at stupid stuff. Most people if they knew up front how little they get for that money they wouldn’t even bother, most people have a value oriented mindset by default.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

13 minutes ago, gwynchisholm said:

I look at the “what do I need for sl” and see recommendations for $400 gpus and it’s like… why?

Yeah, that's what I meant with the line you quoted. 🙂 The power of cheaper, mobile/laptop CPUs is pretty good on their own in current year. GPU optional as far as I can tell.

[gwynchisholm]

3 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Yeah, that's what I meant with the line you quoted. 🙂 The power of cheaper, mobile/laptop CPUs is pretty good on their own in current year. GPU optional as far as I can tell.

Optional for sure, but I would still recommend lower end gpus as great options for sl, or on a budget just old used gpus in general. The igpu on modern processors and mobile chips is absolutely adequate for sl, to the context I wouldn’t recommend gaming laptops over their less gaming oriented counterparts. But if someone has a desktop already or is doing a custom pc with sl in mind, the low end gpus are plenty for this game.

The RX 6400, Arc A380, nvidias nonexistent low end option (the gt 1630 doesn’t count), they’re really good value for things like secondlife, where they’ll give a noticeable improvement in capability more than framerate, being able to push settings higher but not always seeing better frames at lower settings. 
Right alongside the RX 560 and GTX 750ti on my gpu shelves sits the titan x pascal and r9 fury nano, and so on. And really from my testing there’s barely any purpose behind higher end gpus for sl. The 750ti, a decade old entry/mid tier gpu, gets like 10fps less on average than the much higher end, much newer Vega 56. Imagine in this time scale you’re 3 years down the line after buying your budget $120 750ti, and you see the $399 Vega 56 as a viable option, and then it gets you 10fps. 
3 years and a $280 price difference, slot power to dual 8 pins, and you get 10fps more. 
Outside of use cases where the higher end gpus have better specs, like playing in super high resolution where you can eat large amounts of vram, it’s just not worth it. The same applies today with modern hardware, the difference between a GTX 1060 and rtx 4060 is absolutely there, but is it worth the cost? Questionably.

[AmeliaJ08]

4 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

I think I used the example some months ago where I paired a core2quad q8200 with a cheap used Radeon Vega 56 and had sl running well in 4k. The real performance floor for the cpu is pretty low, and the benefits seen by higher end processors is surprisingly small. I think it’s important as a larger community to recommend hardware with this games real performance in mind. You don’t need the new i7 for this game, you don’t need the i5, on paper you don’t even need the i3, because really their single core performance is very similar and sl doesn’t see that much improvement at all relative to the cost of the hardware. 
 

A while ago I got an intel N100, its a 6 watt embedded CPU made of four gracemont cores (the “e cores” on current intel cpus), and its performance equivalent is similar to the 10 year old i5 4570. It plays SL great even with its igpu, add a dedicated video card to it and it performs fine as you would expect. But even just the igpu, an N100 mini pc can be had for under $200 and it’s the lowest end new desktop style hardware you can buy. 

I look at the “what do I need for sl” and see recommendations for $400 gpus and it’s like… why? The performance uplift just isn’t worth the cost in my eyes, and I throw all kinds of money at stupid stuff. Most people if they knew up front how little they get for that money they wouldn’t even bother, most people have a value oriented mindset by default.

No way that iGPU is going to handle things like shadows on etc though?

People do have a habit of recommending hardware that is a bit extreme for SL I agree but I don't think that little N100 is really going to cope with a busy scene particularly if there's other avatars involved, it's just a UHD 630.

SL's complete lack of optimization drives the recommendation for horsepower, while it is a terrible test of any GPU the faster and more VRAM it has the better and most iGPU's just don't have the chops particularly when things get busy.

 

Edited November 10, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Nofunawo]

21 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

I think I used the example some months ago where I paired a core2quad q8200 with a cheap used Radeon Vega 56 and had sl running well in 4k.

? What means running well in 4k ?

You can't tell me that this config is able to run SL smooth in a 4k resolution with ALM & Shadows. You might get 5 fps with low settings in the sky without any other AVAs.

 

 

[gwynchisholm]

On 11/11/2023 at 8:13 AM, Nofunawo said:

? What means running well in 4k ?

You can't tell me that this config is able to run SL smooth in a 4k resolution with ALM & Shadows. You might get 5 fps with low settings in the sky without any other AVAs.

 

 

Give me like a week to get this back together, my test bench is occupied with other hardware I’m working through.

MSI P458D with the Q8200 and Vega 56 pictured, I’ll have this assembled on a bench probably with Linux and get some metrics in 4k

I’ll try to get some other stuff added to aforementioned metrics as well to demonstrate the issue here, or potentially the inclusion of a whole different system for comparison. Probably that N100 on its own to satiate the other objection.

[gwynchisholm]

Well I think you’re gonna have to just take my word on this in the short term. I’ve been fighting trying to install windows 10 on a pre uefi system with usb 2.0 for too long and I’m not devoting more of my time to proving some point on the internet. I need my bench back and I have other things to do.

this is just being a pain and I don’t want to do it anymore, I’m moving on to other projects

ill try and do something with the N100 this week, that one currently has the arc a380 in it but I can try it with and without a more common gpu vs it’s igpu in the near future

i stand by that SL runs pretty ok on basically any hardware, because it also runs terrible on all hardware

and in the case of resolution, that doesn’t really matter much if your gpu is generally up to the task of displaying that image at all, the only time I’ve ever seen resolution impact frame rate in any substantial way in sl was on gpus that run out of video memory in 4k, stuff under 3gb or so, the 8gb Vega 56 doesn’t budge it’s frame rate more than 1-3fps when resolution changes, but something like a 2gb 750ti will tank immediately when it gets over 2gb if vram

 

ill try this again in the future when I have more time to basically wait for windows to load over usb 2.0, but that legit takes over an hour if it works? And the issue I’ve been presented is, it doesn’t really tell you if it’s working, you just have to stare at the blinking cursor until it does something else. But if it doesn’t work the blinking cursor still just sits there. So you’re effectively gambling an hour of your life waiting to see if it ever gets to the setup screen

 

[AmeliaJ08]

11 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

i stand by that SL runs pretty ok on basically any hardware, because it also runs terrible on all hardware

I get what you mean but I know fine well how SL runs on a UHD 630, I can quickly do that by telling Windows to use it instead of my dGPU. It runs particularly terribly, the only way to really get it to run at an adequate (+30fps) frame rate in anything but my house is to disable ALM. If going outside and into an averagely-busy region (Calas Galadhorn) it's possible to use ALM and get 20fps but I have to disable important features like shadows, water reflections etc. It's a huge compromise and frame rate also tanks whenever a remotely-modern avatar comes into view with their fancy mesh clothing.

I have heard Intel Iris Xe iGPU's are much better though, the UHD 630 that was included in so many Intel CPU designs (and apparently this N100) is a bit of a relic. Fine for 2D (although a little sluggish at 4k, apparently) but as a 3D chip it's pretty much only suited for software released before 2010.

I'm tempted to go run Crysis on it though! now I'm curious.

edit: no need, someone did it. 10-20fps which is pretty in line with what you get out of 2023 Second Life on this chip:

 

 

Edited November 19, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Henri Beauchamp]

11 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

Well I think you’re gonna have to just take my word on this in the short term. I’ve been fighting trying to install windows 10 on a pre uefi system with usb 2.0 for too long

Did you try Rufus ?

FYI, my oldest still running PC is based on a Core2 Quad Q6600 (OCed @3.4GHz) with 8GB RAM (and a purely BIOS, non-UEFI motherboard) and a GTX 460, and it does run Windoze 11 (in excess of Linux and Win7 which both run SL viewers much better and faster than Win11, with a blatant (+20% fps) advantage under Linux)...

Edited November 19, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Nofunawo]

11 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

Well I think you’re gonna have to just take my word on this in the short term. I’ve been fighting trying to install windows 10 on a pre uefi system with usb 2.0 for too long and I’m not devoting more of my time to proving some point on the internet. I need my bench back and I have other things to do.

sure...

11 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

and in the case of resolution, that doesn’t really matter much if your gpu is generally up to the task of displaying that image at all

Sorry, this statement is 100% bull*****!

https://www.gpucheck.com/gpu-benchmark-graphics-card-comparison-chart

On average, the step from 1080 to 4k halves the performance. It gets worse the less performance the card has and the less memory it has.

But the performance is always significantly lower. Saying that resolution doesn't matter much is ridiculous.

Edited November 19, 2023 by Nofunawo

[gwynchisholm]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I have heard Intel Iris Xe iGPU's are much better though, the UHD 630 that was included in so many Intel CPU designs (and apparently this N100) is a bit of a relic. Fine for 2D (although a little sluggish at 4k, apparently) but as a 3D chip it's pretty much only suited for software released before 2010.

Iris Xe is surprisingly good, I have a thinkpad x1 nano which uses that alongside an 11th gen mobile i7, and it does fantastic for sl. It is a little odd the N100 doesn’t come with a better igpu, but considering its intended purpose, I guess I kinda see what intel was going for. I don’t think most people with an N100 are playing any games to begin with since the vast majority of N100 machines are just mini pcs. Mine is on an Asrock N100m micro atx motherboard, so I’ve been playing around with it including various gpus. Its cpu performance is similar to an i5 4570, which is impressive for being 6 watts and getting the performance of an ok older Quad-Core.

But that means it pairs well with older midrange to higher tier gpus, intel could’ve done a lot more with it on the gpu side. I kinda wonder how it would be with one of the mobile Arc chips embedded on it, because I’ve paired it with everything from an 8800 GT (about equivalent to its igpu, or HD620 oddly enough) to an rtx 3070ti (complete overkill to remove any potential bottleneck).

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Did you try Rufus ?

FYI, my oldest still running PC is based on a Core2 Quad Q6600 (OCed @3.4GHz) with 8GB RAM (and a purely BIOS, non-UEFI motherboard) and a GTX 460, and it does run Windoze 11 (in excess of Linux and Win7 which both run SL viewers much better and faster than Win11, with a blatant (+20% fps) advantage under Linux)...

I have three sticks I use for windows 10, a regular windows 10 pro 32/64 made with the media creation tool, one that’s just a 64 bit iso from I think last year via Rufus, and one that’s an older version of enterprise ltsc. The issue is the usb speeds on the board I’m using, usually I’d be swapping ssds around but I wanted a clean install of 10 for this instead of Linux, and the p458d “memorylover” tends to be a consistent pain in my butt when it comes to booting from usb. I can try and do this again later and I’ll probably just default to Linux.

Ive had mixed experiences with Linux performance vs windows depending on hardware, and it’s not always all nvidia vs amd vs intel. Sometimes Linux is a huge performance boost, sometimes it’s a huge performance detriment, mostly due to gpu drivers. Old nvidia works amazingly well, slightly newer nvidia not always, but without a consistent pattern is my experience.

1 hour ago, Nofunawo said:

sure...

You don’t have to take my word for it, you can try and prove otherwise. But there’s a reason I have like 40 video cards and a bunch of different motherboards, and a bunch more less presentable ones in storage, and a shelf coated in laptops, and it’s not to measure frame rates in second life. It’s to measure overall performance metrics for Solidworks. I have things to do, bench time is finite and right now I can’t uphold the timeframe I gave to get SL metrics, I can try again in the future when I have time to do so, but that’s not now.

the memorylover is back on the shelf, because most of its purpose is to test ddr2 and ddr3 kits anyway

1 hour ago, Nofunawo said:

On average, the step from 1080 to 4k halves the performance. It gets worse the less performance the card has and the less memory it has.

Yeah in normal games, SL is not a normal game, most of what it’s doing graphically isn’t that hard. Just about anyone with an 8gb gpu or more and a 4k display can test this for themselves, scale your window to 1080, then to 4k, record the nonexistent difference.

The difference between SL and many other games is not optimization, it’s utilization. SL barely touches whatever hardware you have. At its core this is a game from 2003, all modern hardware would scoff at its paltry attempts to strain it if the game knew how to even try.

[Henri Beauchamp]

16 minutes ago, gwynchisholm said:

when it comes to booting from usb

Wait... USB is just for installation/upgrading. Booting and running an OS from it is too slow (and prone to USB memory failures/corruptions: these prmitive and cheap NAND USB memory chips do not have a high endurance neither a ”clever” controller to spread writes over the whole memory and swap faulty blocks with reserved ones, like what happens on SSDs) !

Just install a dual (or triple: Linux +Win7 +Win1x) boot on your hard disk or SSD. Linux can do this just fine for you.

Edited November 19, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[gwynchisholm]

3 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Wait... USB is just for installation/upgrading. Booting and running an OS from it is too slow (and prone to USB memory failures/corruptions: these prmitive and cheap NAND USB memory chips do not have a high endurance neither a ”clever” controller to spread writes over the whole memory and swap faulty blocks with reserved ones) !

Just install a dual (or triple: Linux +Win7 +Win1x) boot. Linux can do this just fine for you.

Nah I’m not running off of usb, what I’m saying is installing from usb on this system is a pain. Bad phrasing 

basically you gotta sit here:

and wait

and wait

and I just don’t have time for that, usually what I do for older systems to install an os, is I have a few older but not ancient laptops where I can install Linux or windows 10 on them, load them up with drivers, and then swap the ssds over. Specifically to avoid installing from usb on older boards because they’re just awful at it and are really picky. But I don’t have a spare ssd configured like that currently, the one that would work for that has I think MX AHS 23 on it currently and it’s being used for much newer hardware so it’s configured for optimizations with rebar, thunderbolt, etc and that would just be bloat for a core2 era build, so I’d have to reinstall something a bit more appropriate anyway 

[Nofunawo]

1 hour ago, gwynchisholm said:

Yeah in normal games, SL is not a normal game, most of what it’s doing graphically isn’t that hard. Just about anyone with an 8gb gpu or more and a 4k display can test this for themselves, scale your window to 1080, then to 4k, record the nonexistent difference.

No! Only difference between the runs: 1080p  vs 1440p (not even 4k)

 

 

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

I’m saying is installing from usb on this system is a pain.

Try installing from a DVD, then (it's usually what I do anyway).

[filz Camino]

On 11/7/2023 at 9:11 PM, Callieleaf said:

Very interesting discussion and something I am thinking about recently.  I am considering pairing a 7800X3D w/a standard 4070 12gb if i build something new.  I am wondering if the 7950X3D might offer any improvements with SL specifically.  For standard gaming it doesn't seem to in tests, but SL is hard to predict since it is generally unoptimized and also is, i believe, more processor dependent than a lot of games.  I get a lot of slow and janky rendering in SL.  I currently have a 3060 12gb but the rest of my current tower's hardware is pretty dated.

The 7950X3D has a single core Geekbench score of 2908 (running on the non 3D vcache cores), versus the 7800X3D single core score of 2716, so I'm guessing that assuming the extra L3 cache in the 7800X3D is of no benefit, and assuming that your operating system identifies the correct cores on which to run Sl, then you'll get a performance increase of about 7% using a 7950X3D rather than a 7800X3D. You won't get any performance boost from having 16 cores versus 8 because SL only really uses a couple of cores most of the time.

I am getting good performance from my 7800X3D, though. It is extremely rare that frame rates drop below 60fps, even on a really busy sim with max. avatars set to 20. It is generally smooth moving around once everything nearby has rezzed, although on some sims moving around can be a bit jerky at times (presumably due to Firestorm moving stuff in and out of the gpu vram as I move around). 

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has hardware that can deliver a 100% smooth experience when moving around a complex sim, my hunch is that this problem would still be present even with the most powerful hardware available right now, though.

[filz Camino]

On 11/9/2023 at 3:15 PM, gwynchisholm said:

And getting a cpu like that for sl, I would only recommend if the only thing you use your pc for is sl and money is no object. It’s really not going to help that much in a way that justifies the expense to most people, SL doesn’t really care what hardware you have, it performs awful on anything, and higher end hardware is just having it perform slightly less awful.

 

This claim isn't very accurate in my experience. With resolution set to FHD I get about 100 fps with my new 2023 computer on a crowded sim, in the same situation with the same settings my 2017 12" Macbook gives me a frame rate of about 4 fps.

That's the difference between movement and animations being buttery smooth versus the SL experience being a totally unplayable slow motion slideshow.

It may not be perfect, but on upper mid-range 2023 hardware, SL does for the most part perform quite well.