Blurry textures

[Moni Duettmann]

I have been experiencing poorly loading textures, some blurry, some almost not rendering at all, and all of them loading and unloading all the time back and forth in the current Linden viewer. I tried some fixes with texture debug settings et al, but nothing helped to improve the unsatisfactory performance. I changed then to the latest Firestorm viewer and found none of these issues there. Everything performed fine. Now, I don't believe the Linden viewer can't do it right. It must be some kind of settings problem, but I can't figure out what it could be. I'll stick to Firestorm, until I find a solution. May someone here in the forum has an idea where to look for.

Edited January 11 by Moni Duettmann

[Nalates Urriah]

This is a common problem known as Texture Thrashing. You can search the net for help with Second Life texture thrashing. Specifiy your viewer brand for more specific help.

The cause is your video card running out of video memory and discarding textures to render other textures. So a texture render starts blurry and progresses to sharp and clear and then reverts to blurry and re-renders repeating the process again and again.

There are workarounds. One can reduce Draw Distance, remove HUDs not in use, turn off thumbnails in chat, restart the viewer, and pay attention to what you are wearing and your ACI/ARC.

Depending on your computer's graphics system you may be able to make tweaks to get more video memory (VRAM). When using the CPU's built-in graphics one can assign system memory for use as VRAM. Which is not possible with a dedicated graphics card. One can add to system memory relatively easily.

If you turn around, like 180 - stop a minute - turn another 180, and find textures previously rendered have turned gray, try increasing your viewer cache size to the max. The setting is in Preferences.

[AmeliaJ08]

Doesn't the official viewer still have issue using an adequate amount of VRAM? I can't remember.

 

[Beq Janus]

It is worth noting that the Official viewer is now V7 (PBR/GLTF) whereas Firestorm Release is still 6.6.17 (pre-PBR).

Many things have been changed as part of the PBR update, lots of tuning and tweaking for performance, etc., and what you may be seeing is the side-effect of those, it would explain the fact that you see them in the official viewer but not in FS.

The texture blur/fail to load is a bug; there are numerous reports of texture-related issues with the PBR viewer. You might want to take a look at https://jira.secondlife.com and see if you can find a bug report that matches your experience and add your details to it, they may help LL to fix the problems.

This report for example cites MacOS but the user has not tested on Windows https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234595

On the Firestorm PBR Alpha, I have seen textures get stuck in a blurry state as well, it is one of the big ticket bugs that stops us from promoting PBR at the present time. If we manage to determine the cause before LL do, then we will make our changes available to LL, if LL find it in the meantime then we will inherit those changes.

Along with items refusing to render/vanishing from view, I would say that the texture loading issues are top of our most-wanted list for bug fixes, and I am sure high on the agenda for LL too.

That's not to say there are only two bugs on that list (sadly).