PBR WOW!

[Luna Bliss]

Just getting around to seeing this. I'm impressed!  What do you like/not like about PBR so far?

https://screenrec.com/share/IVcrQq08fb

 

[Chic Aeon]

Went to the full PBR Winter Wonderland region.  Didn't like being a white cloud for about a minute or the minutes it took to load the textures (all gray buildings).  I have a year and a half old desktop that was top of the line when I bought it so not a wimpy computer).   Until they get things loading faster this will be a killer for some folks.  Those on FS have some time before the have to be on a PBR viewer so that's a plus.  I will be installing the latest FS viewer soon and skipping the PBR.   

The reflections are impressive.  That's the best part.  Also on the plus side it seems like very little old content is breaking --- a big plus.    

In SANSAR the devs managed some great things eventually with load times and PBR so it is likely that things will improve.    There have been some reports from builders with some major issues. I am not part of the beta testing LOL.   

 

2 minutes later --- well, good I waited as the FS new release has been taken off due to bugs.

https://www.firestormviewer.org/woops/

 

 

Edited December 9, 2023 by Chic Aeon
adding

[Luna Bliss]

Loading was fast for me, but my PC fan was running hard. I have a new PC and don't think I've ever heard the fan before!   Could be that my graphics settings were higher though, contributing to the strain.

Pretty good PC but not top of the line..

But oh so pretty...

Edited December 9, 2023 by Luna Bliss

[Rowan Amore]

15 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Went to the full PBR Winter Wonderland region.  Didn't like being a white cloud for about a minute or the minutes it took to load the textures (all gray buildings).  I have a year and a half old desktop that was top of the line when I bought it so not a wimpy computer).   Until they get things loading faster this will be a killer for some folks.  Those on FS have some time before the have to be on a PBR viewer so that's a plus.  I will be installing the latest FS viewer soon and skipping the PBR.   

The reflections are impressive.  That's the best part.  Also on the plus side it seems like very little old content is breaking --- a big plus.    

In SANSAR the devs managed some great things eventually with load times and PBR so it is likely that things will improve.    There have been some reports from builders with some major issues. I am not part of the beta testing LOL.   

 

2 minutes later --- well, good I waited as the FS new release has been taken off due to bugs.

https://www.firestormviewer.org/woops/

 

 

I've been using the FS Alpha viewer with PBR when visiting the Wonderland and other Christmas themed Linden regions.  I didn't have too many issues rezzing things in.  It seemed pretty fast, IMO.  I'm even on a laptop although a fairly good.one.  

[Istelathis]

I love how fast it runs on my computer, how smooth it makes everything look, the lighting, the reflections, how my skin looks, how my outfits look, I love it all and I especially like reflections.  It is as though I am playing SL 2.0, and overall I think LL did a fantastic job. 

 

One complaint is that not everything reflects in the built in screenshot for the viewer, I took multiple screenshots of the above and none of them would show the reflections.  I'm not sure if it is something I am doing wrong, if there is some setting I had forgotten - but using prtscr and pasting the image into a paint program works so I can still enjoy sharing the images.  

Edited December 9, 2023 by Istelathis

[Chic Aeon]

31 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I've been using the FS Alpha viewer with PBR when visiting the Wonderland and other Christmas themed Linden regions.  I didn't have too many issues rezzing things in.  It seemed pretty fast, IMO.  I'm even on a laptop although a fairly good.one.  

Good to know. I was on the new Linden PBR release.  I haven't seen it that gray in a very long time LOL.   

[Luna Bliss]

44 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

I love how fast it runs on my computer, how smooth it makes everything look, the lighting, the reflections, how my skin looks, how my outfits look, I love it all and I especially like reflections.  It is as though I am playing SL 2.0, and overall I think LL did a fantastic job. 

 

One complaint is that not everything reflects in the built in screenshot for the viewer, I took multiple screenshots of the above and none of them would show the reflections.  I'm not sure if it is something I am doing wrong, if there is some setting I had forgotten - but using prtscr and pasting the image into a paint program works so I can still enjoy sharing the images.  

Oh so that's what all those reflection photos you posted on some other thread were about...the new PBR....I just glanced and thought what is that wild and crazy Iste up to now!!!!!!!  ;0

[Luna Bliss]

Grrr...the LL viewer was a pain...because I've customized Firestorm movement to be more like Blender so was hard to move around.  Will try PBR in Firestorm next

[Janet Voxel]

I’ve been messing with it since LL made the gtlf viewer available. Loved it at first, not just for the reflections, everything just seemed to have more atmosphere. The last couple builds though……I don’t know what they did, but it suddenly turned into a resource hog. Yikes.

I really hope they reign that part in. If not there are going to be some unhappy campers. Looks great! I’m really not having loading issues, my problem has been when I cam around I get a stutter. Not really happy about that.

[Michael Blackwood]

Dunno if it's just me but so far, all I am getting out of PBR is terrible f*ed up lighting every other login in the current public release FS version without being able to enjoy the PBR aspects. So personally, can't say I'm thrilled just yet.Now to be fair, I haven't downloaded LL viewer yet and tested PBR where I can actually see it, to be able to judge PBR itself (topic of the thread here). But frankly, as crappy as light looks now in FS with PBR on sims enabled but FS not, I dont even want PBR anymore lol.

[MoiraKathleen]

I've been really pleased with the LL default PBR viewer.  I haven't noticed any longer loading times than previously, nor have I noticed any issues with camming around.  The winter wonderland regions are exceptionally beautiful.  I've been happy with how my mainland parcel looks now also, with the PBR viewer and the default mainland region environment settings.  There's also a new midday EEP, which is a big improvement over the prior one (which is still available, but marked as Midday (Legacy)).  

I've used either the LL viewer or the Kokua viewer since BOM went live.  The last piece of improvement for me in the LL viewer is that the 512 MB texture memory limit is no longer there, and I haven't had any of the texture thrashing that I used to have with the previous LL viewers.   When I look in the 'about' info in the viewer, it's showing 4095 MB for the texture memory.  Overall, I've been pleased with the performance and other improvements that have been made to the LL viewer, especially in the last year and a half or so.  

[shireena1]

I am exploring winter wonderland sims, (all 4 of them). I am on SL Viewer 7 with a 8th gen intel and a nvidia 2070  (ultra grafix). Apart from setting the fan to gaming setting, It seem to run fine for me, with very little lag, BUT, its usually the avatars that lag it for me. There is only a handful of avatars the time I am exploring, but if there was 40 or more, that might be another story altogether.

Edited December 9, 2023 by shireena1
typo

[shireena1]

EDIT... Winter Wonderland 1, I had to put my grafix back to hi setting (from ultra) to keep frame rate acceptable, but I didn't even notice when I went accross a sim border, so thats something. I am really wanting to try firestorm 7 when the stable release comes out.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

PBR materials do not differ a lot from Blinn-Phong ('classic') materials at all. The differences are very subtle. With all respect for the skillfully-made video and the expert decorations, they do not showcase disctinct PBR features. The footage could have easily been mistaken for one made with an old viewer, showing old materials The video mostly shows wet cobblestones 'reflecting' very diffuse, monochromatic red, white, and blue point lights. This can all be achieved with classic materials and an older viewer just as well.

The biggest change is the viewer (and the server making reflection probes). Making PBR materials as opposed to classic materials, on the other hand, is somewhat overrated. PBR materials offer separation of roughness metallic and emission mapping, but that's really all. I estimate you can make 90% of all objects in SL look the same with Blinn-Phong materials as you can with PBR materials. In most cases, all your old 'classic' Blinn-Phong items will reflect details just as nicely in de new PBR world.

My real fear #1. PBR can look great, PBR can look crappy. It depends more than ever on the surroundings. There's a real danger that people will think objects with PBR materials look crappy and put the blame on PBR tech in general, or because the creator textured it badly, whereas the real reason may very well be their own bad environment.

My real fear #2. Streaming cost. PBR materials double the amount of texture data that needs to be transfered from the asset servers to your computer (triple, if you include backwards-compatible classic texturing). Right now, if I cam around further away from and then back nearby my avatar again, I see the viewer 'forget' a lot of textures from nearby objects, as if they aren't properly chached on my local drive. Maybe that's just a bug that will be addressed in future updates. For now, for me, PBR means lot of waiting while staring at blurry objects.

That's not to say I don't welcome our new PBR overlord. I'm in the middle of a PBR workflow transition myself right now and I love all this shiny new stuff.

 

[Qie Niangao]

47 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

In most cases, all your old 'classic' Blinn-Phong items will reflect details just as nicely in de new PBR world.

Yeah, I somehow didn't expect this, just assuming that reflections only applied to PBR materials. For example, I have these bell jar-shaped glass walk-through teleporters that I thought I'd shine up with PBR reflections, only to find their previously merely shiny surfaces, now seen in a PBR viewer were already quite effectively reflecting their surroundings.

For a while I've been saying that the main benefit of PBR will be forcing ALM on everybody; I just didn't appreciate how true that would turn out to be.

[Conifer Dada]

The lighting effects with PBR are really good, with realistic reflections on existing shiny objects. It does mess up existing daylight settings though, so you have to make new ones. Also I found that adjusting daylight settings appears to affect the brightness of artificial lights.

The downside of PBR, at least with the current release, is that rezzing times are much slower, both for avatars and for the built surroundings. This is even the case when graphics set to minimum. I generally use the LL standard viewer and it had been fine up until this PBR release. 

Edited December 9, 2023 by Conifer Dada

[Carolyn Zapedzki]

It looks great and I found it rezzed as quickly as everywhere else, no lag.

It was quiet tough, only spotted 1 or 2 other avs, not sure what it would be like when busy.

[Janet Voxel]

1 hour ago, Conifer Dada said:

The downside of PBR, at least with the current release, is that rezzing times are much slower, both for avatars and for the built surroundings. This is even the case when graphics set to minimum. I generally use the LL standard viewer and it had been fine up until this PBR release. 

Ok, good! It's not just me. It's a little more 'skippy' right?

[Teagan Tobias]

Not sure how this is going to help but I brought up SL and popped open a PBR to see if it makes any difference. Maybe it will take two or three of them before it is noticeable. I’ll need to just wait and see how it goes.

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 hours ago, Conifer Dada said:

The downside of PBR, at least with the current release, is that rezzing times are much slower, both for avatars and for the built surroundings. This is even the case when graphics set to minimum. I generally use the LL standard viewer and it had been fine up until this PBR release.

This is not related to the PBR renderer itself, but to the fact that LL's PBR viewer (and all TPVs directly importing LL's code from git, meaning all TPVs but mine) changed the texture fetcher algorithm.

<technical stuff>

So far, the textures were fetched (and decoded, and cached) in the order of their priority (i.e. the higher priority textures first) and the priority (importance to camera, virtual size on faces using them, closeness to the avatar, texture usage - e.g. is it a preview texture, an attachment texture, etc -) was reevaluated every few frames for each texture in FOV.

This priority was also preserved whenever the fetcher thread encountered a delay (e.g. cache read delay, HTTP fetching delay, decoding delay, cache write delay), with just a (huge), constant penalty subtracted from the priority when such a delay was encountered, penalty immediately reverted as soon as the callback for the step that incurred the delay was invoked (meaning as soon as it got ready for the next step, the texture found itself back with its original priority in the queue).

Together with the PBR viewer (but independently from the PBR rendering code itself), LL changed that algorithm for a simpler ”first seen, first served” priority-less queue, in which, each time a delay is encountered, the corresponding texture is moved back at the end of the queue so that the fetcher can attend to the fetching of the next texture in the queue.

This simpler (and quite naive) algorithm avoids the periodic priority reevaluation and the sorting of the queue before each new fetcher loop, saving some (but not that much, in fact) time on the CPU side during a frame. But on the other hand, while it performs almost just as good on high end hardware or at least hardware with balanced performances (good CPU, good network bandwidth, good storage speed), it performs like utter sh*t on weaker or unbalanced hardware (e.g. good CPU, average storage, poor network, or average CPU, good network, average storage, or excellent CPU and storage but poor or unreliable network, etc...): the problem here is that important textures that got delayed must wait for all other textures to pass through a fetcher loop before they have a chance to escalate to the next step.

</technical stuff>

This is the reason why you are seeing this slooooooow rezzing on some hardware with all PBR viewers but the Cool VL Viewer, for which I kept (and further optimized, tuned, sped up) the old texture fetcher.

Edited December 9, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Conifer Dada]

As I mentioned in another thread, I downloaded the Cool VL viewer, and after lowering the maximum frame rate as suggested, it works well in busy places. 

[JeromFranzic]

^ Call me a fangirl, but I dig Henri's fixes. Cool VL makes PBR quite usable for me with decent frame rates on my 5yo laptop, with a 1050 GPU. 

ETA: I can also turn off ALM with Henri's viewer. I can't do that with the other TPVs, or LL's viewer.

Edited December 9, 2023 by JeromFranzic
Added ALM blurb

[sirhc DeSantis]

I like. Even this old potato PC makes it look - nice.  Playing with it I have had to adjust a wee bit of ye olde shine but not very much. On an old GT 620 no less (I had a better but my PSU blew up so I am on a clockwork one). But - to be honest even with that I can't remember the last time I switched off ALM. Well done, SL tech team. Nice one

[Ceka Cianci]

I'm tempted..

I have the new Black Dragon viewer and might see how that works there..

But I'm still kind of hesitant on committing my viewer that I use every day, the FS viewer over to it just yet.. Also I'm looking at other viewers as well.. So maybe I'll try in those first instead..

 

 

[Flea Yatsenko]

They did change the lighting system quite a bit. I am very happy with it, I almost always used a custom environment in my viewer and the PBR settings are great stock, maybe with just a little exposure setting changes. Just the lighting is a huge improvement, let alone using PBR materials or not. Just need to wait for people to get a grip on using reflection probes and it'll be really good.