BilliJo Aldrin Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 58 minutes ago, Conifer Dada said: I re-read that post. I'm not against PBR, I want to see it work well on my computer. The slow rezzing of textures might not be caused by PBR directly, but the change to texture fetching was bundled in with the viewer. My computer is 5 years old and it was quite high-end when I got it and there has been no deterioration in its overall performance, only the problems with the PBR viewer. I have a fast broadband connection (578 Mb/s). The only thing I can think of that might be suspect is the connection between computer and monitor, which I'll check again! dont forget they are going force advanced lighing on everyone. When its turned on in my computer, it destroys any reasonable playability. Add that to PBR, and it will basically render second life unplayable to a lot of people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quinn Elara Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 15 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said: dont forget they are going force advanced lighing on everyone. When its turned on in my computer, it destroys any reasonable playability. Add that to PBR, and it will basically render second life unplayable to a lot of people. This is something that's often said, but also very hyperbolic. If you look at the metrics from the Firestorm viewer - You'll see that the bulk of users are on hardware modern enough that they capable of running the PBR viewer. Besides, if you're in the camp of being unable to run it, then Henri's CoolVL viewer offers the ability to turn off ALM while not being out-of-date. Henri has mentioned that the option to turn of ALM likely won't be around forever, and will be maintained so long as it makes sense to do so. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luna Bliss Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 3 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said: Besides, if you're in the camp of being unable to run it, then Henri's CoolVL viewer offers the ability to turn off ALM while not being out-of-date. Is it true that Firestorm and the SL viewer's default will be with ALM enabled, and without the ability to turn it off? I'm concerned about my store inside a skybox and the park underneath with a dome sky -- these cast shadows that make environments too dark. Perhaps I should get to work redoing my store before all this goes into effect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quinn Elara Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said: Is it true that Firestorm and the SL viewer's default will be with ALM enabled, and without the ability to turn it off? Yes, and the documentation has stated as such for a while- https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PBR_Materials#Removal_of_Advanced_Lighting_Model_.28_ALM_.29_Graphics_Option 2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said: I'm concerned about my store inside a skybox and the park underneath with a dome sky -- these cast shadows that make environments too dark. So long as the dome is single-sided (i.e. when the camera is moved outside the dome, you can still see back inside), then it shouldn't cast a shadow, thus sunlight should still enter the dome. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frionil Fang Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 6 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said: Is it true that Firestorm and the SL viewer's default will be with ALM enabled, and without the ability to turn it off? I'm concerned about my store inside a skybox and the park underneath with a dome sky -- these cast shadows that make environments too dark. Daily reminder that just because shadows require ALM/PBR rendering to be enabled, doesn't mean you have to enable shadows. Just turn them off to save performance and keep scenes that are not designed with shadows and interior lighting brighter. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 If your PC is very old, you can't even run the official viewer install, because it uses Python which doesn't come with (or necessarily work on) older Windows versions. I've tried to say it before different ways..if your PC is really, really old (whether it is a "potato" or not) - you're lucky it works at all these days, let alone whether it works with Second Life or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luna Bliss Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 19 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said: 28 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said: Is it true that Firestorm and the SL viewer's default will be with ALM enabled, and without the ability to turn it off? I'm concerned about my store inside a skybox and the park underneath with a dome sky -- these cast shadows that make environments too dark. Daily reminder that just because shadows require ALM/PBR rendering to be enabled, doesn't mean you have to enable shadows. Just turn them off to save performance and keep scenes that are not designed with shadows and interior lighting brighter. Ahhh...so you can turn off shadows but not ALM in the newest viewers. The problem is that customers shopping for skyboxes in my store (going through my demos that rez both dome and box skies/sides) would not know that. If only they would read my instructions at the demo area! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 8 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said: Ahhh...so you can turn off shadows but not ALM in the newest viewers. The problem is that customers shopping for skyboxes in my store (going through my demos that rez both dome and box skies/sides) would not know that. If only they would read my instructions at the demo area! I'm missing something here. Isn't there a problem anyway, showing a product in a setting where it's best viewed without ALM or shadows? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quinn Elara Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 40 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said: So long as the dome is single-sided (i.e. when the camera is moved outside the dome, you can still see back inside), then it shouldn't cast a shadow, thus sunlight should still enter the dome. Figured I'd take some photos to illustrate this in action - this is using a hollow prim sphere as an example. Outer face visible (double sided): Outer face transparent (single sided): 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luna Bliss Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 5 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said: 15 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said: Ahhh...so you can turn off shadows but not ALM in the newest viewers. The problem is that customers shopping for skyboxes in my store (going through my demos that rez both dome and box skies/sides) would not know that. If only they would read my instructions at the demo area! I'm missing something here. Isn't there a problem anyway, showing a product in a setting where it's best viewed without ALM or shadows? The products I'm selling are skyboxes, and they have box or dome surrounds. So my store surround is not an influence on these particular items in my store. One flies off to the sky on a flower to view/rez thm. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 41 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said: The products I'm selling are skyboxes, and they have box or dome surrounds. So my store surround is not an influence on these particular items in my store. One flies off to the sky on a flower to view/rez thm. Okay, but I'm still confused. It seemed there was some concern (I guess with the store and the park, rather than the products for sale) about the fact ALM (and shadows) would be enabled for everybody: 1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said: I'm concerned about my store inside a skybox and the park underneath with a dome sky -- these cast shadows that make environments too dark. but again, if that's a problem, I'd think that would have been a problem all along for those running SL with ALM (and shadows) enabled, before PBR makes it mandatory in most new viewers. (I'm sorry; this won't be the first post I misunderstood today.) All of which raises a totally off-topic observation: Do shadows cast in one EEP "layer" appear in the layers below? I actually have a huge sky build at one location, spanning a couple distinct EEP altitudes, with another EEP defined for ground level, and I'm realizing that down at ground I've never seen a shadow cast from that build, even though I bounce between those levels often. This seems a beneficial feature of EEP but I never knew to expect it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Henri Beauchamp Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said: Ahhh...so you can turn off shadows but not ALM in the newest viewers. ALM (Advanced Lighting Model) is a renaming of the deferred rendering mode that happened when LL introduced (now legacy) materials. Prior to the materials introduction, the deferred rendering mode was only required to render shadows, so basically no one ever bothered enabling deferred rendering when they did not want shadows either, especially since the forward rendering mode was so much faster on the GPUs that were available at that time, and the forward rendering mode got (still today) the immense advantage of a gorgeous native (hardware) anti-aliasing mode (SSAA, sometimes also quoted as FSAA) which does not blur the textures details. Just like legacy materials, physically based rendering (PBR) requires the use of the deferred rendering mode. And since the fallback forward rendering mode got removed from LL's PBR viewer code base, you cannot ”switch off” deferred rendering (AKA ALM) any more. In the Cool VL Viewer, I kept the old (Extended Environment) renderer, with both its deferred (ALM) and forward modes, and added the PBR renderer, allowing to switch between the two on the fly. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said: All of which raises a totally off-topic observation: Do shadows cast in one EEP "layer" appear in the layers below? Maybe / maybe not related: I was surprised to see that my reflection probe shines light THROUGH my build, and it appears on the build above that. Like..huh?!? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frionil Fang Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 (edited) 1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said: All of which raises a totally off-topic observation: Do shadows cast in one EEP "layer" appear in the layers below? There is only one lighting environment being rendered, even if there's multiple defined at different altitudes. They're just swapped in on demand, they don't "exist at the same time". Edit: additionally, things obviously have to be in draw distance to cast shadows, so a build at 1000 m when your draw distance is 128 m from the ground is not going to ever cast a shadow. Edited January 9 by Frionil Fang 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Conifer Dada Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 (edited) 4 hours ago, Jenna Huntsman said: This isn't a PBR issue (i.e. viewers 6.x and below encounter the same issue). For me, the start of the problem coincided with downloading the PBR viewer. I wouldn't say rez times were wonderful beforehand, but they got a whole lot worse with the PBR viewer. I can understand that PBR isn't the cause, but some aspect of the viewer update must have been. Edited January 9 by Conifer Dada Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 36 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said: Edit: additionally, things obviously have to be in draw distance to cast shadows, so a build at 1000 m when your draw distance is 128 m from the ground is not going to ever cast a shadow. Oh good point. I wonder why folks used to worry about shadows from high-altitude skyboxes. Must have been superstition. I think the lore was that if you'd rendered them on a visit up there, they'd continue to cast shadows (for a while?), but probably that was always hokum. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said: Oh good point. I wonder why folks used to worry about shadows from high-altitude skyboxes. Must have been superstition. I think the lore was that if you'd rendered them on a visit up there, they'd continue to cast shadows (for a while?), but probably that was always hokum. Like a cloud that's always directly overhead! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zalificent Corvinus Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 8 hours ago, Conifer Dada said: There was an update to the PBR viewer yesterday. One of the fixes in the release notes was fixing "massive performance loss". Sadly, for me the update has made no difference. It's funny... The PBR fans have been claiming that there is "no performance loss" in the PBR fail-viewer, over and over, and then their beloved Lab announces a hotfix update to cure "massive performance loss". Classic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theresa Tennyson Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 4 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said: dont forget they are going force advanced lighing on everyone. When its turned on in my computer, it destroys any reasonable playability. Add that to PBR, and it will basically render second life unplayable to a lot of people. Context is important... On 10/30/2023 at 7:22 PM, BilliJo Aldrin said: You do what you gotta, my computer was new about 8 years ago, with a nvidea 705 graphics card, not great even then, but adequate. Eventually the fan in the card failed and the card would overheat and the computer shut down, so i dialed down my settings and blew two fans over the card. This worked for a long time, but then the card started overheating again, so i dialed everything right down to the settings I use today. It works ok, the computer only shuts down a couple of times a month due to the overheating card. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candide LeMay Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 24 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said: Oh good point. I wonder why folks used to worry about shadows from high-altitude skyboxes. Must have been superstition. I think the lore was that if you'd rendered them on a visit up there, they'd continue to cast shadows (for a while?), but probably that was always hokum. This is still happening and is very annoying. The sim I'm demonstrating it with has multiple height layers, 500m apart. If you visit a higher layer and then come back to the lower layer, the higher layer will cast shadows, despite being out of draw distance: Screenshot 1 fresh login, no big shadows http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The Sand Seas/199/200/67 Screenshot 2 one layer up http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The Sand Seas/199/200/508 Screenshot 3 back to the ground, now with shadow from the higher layer everywhere http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The Sand Seas/199/200/67 Screenshot 4 what you see looking up - the layer casting shadows is not visible Screenshot 5 the higher layer at 500m casting shadows on the neighboring sims Latest LL viewer, Midday (legacy) environment, 240m draw distance. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Conifer Dada Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 (edited) 5 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said: dont forget they are going force advanced lighing on everyone. When its turned on in my computer, it destroys any reasonable playability. Add that to PBR, and it will basically render second life unplayable to a lot of people. I use advanced lighting (shadows etc.) most of the time and it worked OK up until the PBR viewer came along. Now, turning off advanced lighting and setting other graphics to minimum doesn't improve the slow rezzing or non-rezzing, it's just as bad as with advanced. Edited January 9 by Conifer Dada 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beq Janus Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 1 hour ago, Candide LeMay said: This is still happening and is very annoying. The sim I'm demonstrating it with has multiple height layers, 500m apart. If you visit a higher layer and then come back to the lower layer, the higher layer will cast shadows, despite being out of draw distance: An interesting issue, if you have not already done so, this should be raised as a JIRA on jira.secondlife.com (from the LL viewer you can click help->report a bug and it will fill in some parts for you) 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beq Janus Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 1 hour ago, Conifer Dada said: I use advanced lighting (shadows etc.) most of the time and it worked OK up until the PBR viewer came along. Now, turning off advanced lighting and setting other graphics to minimum doesn't improve the slow rezzing or non-rezzing, it's just as bad as with advanced. There appears to be some confusion here. On the PBR viewer you cannot turn off advanced lighting. You can of course set the graphics settings lower. If you have a repeatable issue then please raise a JIRA https://jira.secondlife.com to document the issues so that it can be looked into. If the problem occurs only on Firestorm or another TPV but not on the LL viewer then report the issue on that viewer's system (for Firestorm that is https://jira.firestormviewer.org). Many people who are trying the alpha viewer for Firestorm are forgetting to ensure that the binaries and other aspects of the new viewer are whitelisted in their AV. Double check that you have the correct exclusions in place for any versions that you have installed. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Innula Zenovka Posted January 9 Share Posted January 9 3 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said: It's funny... The PBR fans have been claiming that there is "no performance loss" in the PBR fail-viewer, over and over, and then their beloved Lab announces a hotfix update to cure "massive performance loss". Classic. You may have missed Henri's post earlier in the thread 10 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said: This was due to NVIDIA driver viewer profile under Windows (see BUG-234706) that lacked the enabling of the OpenGL ”threaded optimizations” which can easily bring +50% in frame rates. If you are not running the viewer under Windows, or do not have an NIVIDIA card, or already had its driver configured for system-wide threaded optimizations, then you won't see any difference in performances. 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candide LeMay Posted January 10 Share Posted January 10 1 hour ago, Beq Janus said: An interesting issue, if you have not already done so, this should be raised as a JIRA on jira.secondlife.com (from the LL viewer you can click help->report a bug and it will fill in some parts for you) https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234966 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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