Loading, then reloading In-world

[Zalificent Corvinus]

On 11/19/2023 at 12:51 PM, Ceka Cianci said:

About the only thing that really ever blurs for me is profile pictures.. I don't really ever get the reloading blurr of textures in world, just the profiles that  sometimes will just be  blurry on some of them..

 

SL seems to auto-resize profile pictures, on a semi random basis, the "blur" comes from the crappy resizing system, and the fact that somebody's nice 1024x1024 uploaded profile pic gets resized to 128x128 or something equally daft.

[Nalates Urriah]

@graceblakeley Lots of information but not all of it is good. Amelia is pretty much on target.

There are blog articles on how to tune your graphics for the best SL performance. I have old articles on my blog. Little if anything has changed since I wrote them. PBR is new. I am not yet playing with it. But most everything else is the same.

The problem comes from your viewer consuming all available graphics memory. Then it starts swapping out textures to render new things entering the interest list (field of vision). We see it as what we call texture-thrashing - clear, fuzzy. clear, fuzzy, etc. So, when you see texture-thrashing, you need to tweak your settings. There are numerous settings that can help reduce the problem. Firestorm improved the use of Profile Icons in chat headers. But they still consume graphics memory and unfortunately, they seem to have a high priority over other stuff, and thus while they never thrash the world around us does. Turn them off. This is likely to make the biggest difference. The setting is in the chat window.

Your viewer's cache should be at max as someone suggested. But, this has almost no effect on the texture-thrashing we see in-world. It does have a large impact on how quickly the overall scene renders. In a worst-case scenario, your textures would remain fuzzy longer or even go grey if the cache were flushing out the textures and had to re-download. I suspect this re-download is seldom the case. But eliminate the possibility.

Computers with no dedicated graphics card use system RAM for Video RAM (vRAM). Running other apps consumes RAM and most require some vRAM. In such cases, there may be less memory available for an SL Viewer. Try running ONLY your SL viewer. Also, check to see how your RAM is allocated.

Turn down your draw distance (DD). Using a 1024 DD will use a ton of vRAM. The viewer is going to try and grab all the textures in a 9-region square. If you are in a club or shopping in a store you can often drop down to 64 or 128m DD. When I fly or sail I use a 512m DD. Only for large panoramas do I ever use a 1024m DD. I have presets that I use with my viewer for 128, 512, and 1024 graphics settings in Firestorm. Makes changing easy.

HUDs do use vRAM. So the fewer the better. When making an outfit I include the HUDs in the outfit. But once I wear an outfit and finish using a HUD I remove it. Textures and scripts are a problem when crossing a region boundary. So not only do they push you toward texture-thrashing they also make crossing regions more difficult. So, only those HUDs you are frequently using should stay on. I don't frequent like every day. I mean like several times per hour.

There are other more techie things to do to reduce vRAM use. But these should stop the thrashing.

 

Edited November 20, 2023 by Nalates Urriah

[graceblakeley]

It's worth noting that changes on the 'Graphics - Hardware Settings' sliders are not retained unless it is saved as a graphics preset.

This was not immediately obvious to me.

I previously had 5 graphic presets so deleted them all in order to re-create them again with the hardware settings changes.

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, graceblakeley said:

It's worth noting that changes on the 'Graphics - Hardware Settings' sliders are not retained unless it is saved as a graphics preset.

This was not immediately obvious to me.

I previously had 5 graphic presets so deleted them all in order to re-create them again with the hardware settings changes.

I did not know this, today I learned

I do have a preset I made so that's probably why, the only setting I ever change on it is draw distance but I do that often with the little firestorm quick menu thing in the lower right corner button so only ever needed the one profile.

 

Edited November 21, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[graceblakeley]

Also, the Default graphics setting is set to 512MB. I wish I could delete that auto-preset now I have created my own, but it seems it always has to be there and it is un-adjustable.

[JeromFranzic]

20 minutes ago, graceblakeley said:

Also, the Default graphics setting is set to 512MB. I wish I could delete that auto-preset now I have created my own, but it seems it always has to be there and it is un-adjustable.

It is useful to have the Default setting, just in case users need to start over with video settings.

You can back up your Firestorm settings, shown here:

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_backup_settings

[AmeliaJ08]

29 minutes ago, graceblakeley said:

Also, the Default graphics setting is set to 512MB. I wish I could delete that auto-preset now I have created my own, but it seems it always has to be there and it is un-adjustable.

The default really should be 'smart' in setting itself to at least half of available VRAM but as Zal mentioned above it can be somewhat tricky to detect total VRAM availability for various reasons. Messy!

I would say 1024MB would be a better default in 2023 though and probably lead to less texture thrashing problems for people, still not enough for most but you can be pretty sure most people accessing SL in 2023 have at least 2GB of dedicated VRAM available. Hard to say for sure though, a hardware survey would be a useful thing to find out what the average SL user is using!

 

 

Edited November 21, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Flea Yatsenko]

I think there is a bug or something with viewer detecting how much VRAM you have. I have a 6800 with 16GB of VRAM and with the Firestorm PBR viewer I get insane trashing. I saw them talking about it in the preview group as well. Seems like a new thing, just suddenly started happening, then I started using the PBR viewer and it got extremely bad.

Even if you had 32GB of VRAM, if the viewer is only detecting 512MB it's going to cause problems. Really hope there is a solution soon. This is so SL, the graphics get upgraded with PBR and everything looks way better but then there's a new texture loading problem and everything looks blurry and terrible.

I even deleted my firestorm_x64 folder to reset everything and it didn't help at all. I don't think this problem has to do with any settings unless there are new defaults and they are bad, or a new setting has a bad default that's breaking stuff.

Edited November 21, 2023 by Flea Yatsenko

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I think there is a bug or something with viewer detecting how much VRAM you have. I have a 6800 with 16GB of VRAM and with the Firestorm PBR viewer I get insane trashing. I saw them talking about it in the preview group as well. Seems like a new thing, just suddenly started happening, then I started using the PBR viewer and it got extremely bad.

Even if you had 32GB of VRAM, if the viewer is only detecting 512MB it's going to cause problems. Really hope there is a solution soon. This is so SL, the graphics get upgraded with PBR and everything looks way better but then there's a new texture loading problem and everything looks blurry and terrible.

I even deleted my firestorm_x64 folder to reset everything and it didn't help at all. I don't think this problem has to do with any settings unless there are new defaults and they are bad, or a new setting has a bad default that's breaking stuff.

From what I have read detecting VRAM on AMD cards is difficult due to driver reasons (bug?), I have also read that Resizable BAR is causing issues.

Does the viewer not let you manually specify how much to use?

 

edit: From this thread people noticed SL overflowing VRAM on certain driver versions, someone mentioned rolling back to driver 22.11.XX as a fix. Not sure if this is related to what you mention though.

Also found mention of slightly newer driver being okay here:

Quote

While the performance takes a slight hit, also early 23.x.x drivers work, without the performance drop from early 22.x.x drivers.

 

Edited November 21, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Flea Yatsenko]

Happens in Linux too, running the open source driver. Either it's a problem affecting both drivers or the viewer. I tried editing the debug setting to change VRAM and it didn't help. It seems to get worse if you TP around to other places. It's so bad in Firestorm Alpha that I can't even get stuff to stay loaded long enough to get product images.