Beq Talks About The Future Of Firestorm And PBR

[Sammy Huntsman]

https://rog.asus.com/desktops/mid-tower/rog-strix-g16chr/spec/

I plan on getting this computer around christmas 

 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Would you accept one as a gift?

Absolutely not.

 

7 minutes ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

As for liquid cooling?  That's for weirdos. 

 

7 minutes ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

Liquid cooling is also a disaster waiting to happen, if it leaks.  Best to avoid it completely.

This (in addition to everything else). I'd also want to know about the motherboard, though I have a feeling Alienware uses at least some proprietary components.

[Extrude Ragu]

Since BilliJo shared a  machine costing $1250, I'm assuming that's about how much she wants to spend and I looked around on retailers in the States to see if I could find something better for the money

 

This machine has a 4060 TI instead of a 4060 which will significantly outperform the 4060

https://www.ibuypower.com/store/rdy-slate-8mp-003

 

There are probably even better options still out there, that was just with a quick search.

I'm led to understand the 4060 Ti also has a 16gb variant and usually goes 100 bux more, but probably the most future proof upgrade you could choose if there was any component to splash on.

 

[Extrude Ragu]

Also I hate all this rgb nonsense going into newbuilds these days, can't you pc manufacturers just sell us an ordinary looking computer? 😅

[Jaylinbridges]

58 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

https://rog.asus.com/desktops/mid-tower/rog-strix-g16chr/spec/

I plan on getting this computer around christmas 

If that's with the RTX 4080 and 32 GB RAM, 8GB VRAM, Amazon sells that combo for $2600 today.  Still beyond many SL budgets.  Even $1500 is beyond the budget if your fixed income/month is not much more.  Single bedroom rent is $1600/mo average in the states, before utilities, food, medical, transportation, and new underwear.  Inflation will raise living expenses after the elections, but not a paltry fixed income.  

Nice system though, for running one instance of FS and a browser w/ PBR full on.

Edited May 31 by Jaylinbridges

[Jaylinbridges]

1 hour ago, Extrude Ragu said:

The machine is more than good enough,

That system needs more RAM at least. And it won't work well at all with the PBR features turned on. And it won't handle large clubs or textures heavy regions for long.   I don't think clubs that need ordinary public to visit to survive will add anything PBR or 2K textures.  Club owners that think their patrons are going to be awed by mirrors and wierd EEP's and PBR furniture and higher resolution grass are going to wonder where everyone went.

 

Edited May 31 by Jaylinbridges

[Midnoot]

4 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

That system needs more RAM at least. And it won't work well at all with the PBR features turned on. And it won't handle large clubs or textures heavy regions for long.   I don't think clubs that need ordinary public to visit to survive will add anything PBR or 2K textures.  Club owners that think their patrons are going to be awed by mirrors and wierd EEP's and PBR furniture and higher resolution grass are going to wonder where everyone went.

 

I was thinking about how most club people are barely getting by on their 5 fps  potato machines . Now they're surely going to be eradicated by pbr. LL has lost their mind , :,D...

 

On the other hand.  Force change.  Force those who refuse to enjoy second lyfe beyond the 5 fps potato experiences out. 

[Cristiano Midnight]

I have been using the Firestorm PBR betas (and the alphas before them) and it has been stable enough for months to be my main viewer. It has definitely been an adjustment in some ways, and I have seen some glitches (I feel bad for creators who are going to get inundated with messages asking why their item suddenly looks different in Firestorm) but overall it has been incredibly stable. It actually performs better that non-pbr. Admittedly, I am on a high end machine, but the effect with pbr materials can be dramatic. I am obsessed with making materials now and redoing my places with them. I know it will be a painful transition, but SL does need to be modernized and sometimes that does mean it can't run on older machines well forever. I hope people are able to minimize the impact with settings adjustments to keep SL usable for them, but PBR is here to stay and will only improve in performance and features over time.

[Jaylinbridges]

48 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

On the other hand.  Force change.  Force those who refuse to enjoy second lyfe beyond the 5 fps potato experiences out.

We don't have anyone with 5 fps potato computers left.  They all left years ago, or upgraded.  I ask around a lot and the typical patron is getting about 30 fps with a small group of 15 avatars.  But they have the non-PBR FS with ALM turned off, no shadows, and DD to 32 or 64m,  because they have a mid range gaming computer from 5 years ago.  Once the crowd gets up to 40+, I see lots of crashes and relogs.  Some still don't know how to tune their preferences down for hi load regions.  PBR will work for them if they turn off all the PBR features, and use memory saving features.  Have you ever tried to help party people with technical issues? Great way to lose patrons.  I am on the front line with typical residents every day. Plenty of arm chair gamers here that think everyone is like them.

Like Beq said, those with weaker older systems will suffer performance when forced to use the PBR viewers.  That is why club owners are going to avoid all the PBR lighting, mirrors, and new materials.  Of course if you have a high end gaming computer you will love all the new shinies.  But they are not the ones here for social reasons.  SL has set up a new Class System.

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

This is

1 hour ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Since BilliJo shared a  machine costing $1250, I'm assuming that's about how much she wants to spend and I looked around on retailers in the States to see if I could find something better for the money

 

This machine has a 4060 TI instead of a 4060 which will significantly outperform the 4060

https://www.ibuypower.com/store/rdy-slate-8mp-003

 

There are probably even better options still out there, that was just with a quick search.

I'm led to understand the 4060 Ti also has a 16gb variant and usually goes 100 bux more, but probably the most future proof upgrade you could choose if there was any component to splash on.

 

I think my 4 year old system is still considered relatively high end, by most SL users.  I just checked my old PC Part Picker page, that I made when I built my current PC, back in 2020.

Here's my original build.

Here's what it looks like now, updated with upgrades I've gotten since then.

My main upgrades from 2020 to now, were going from a little 128Gb SSD main drive to a 1Tb SSD main drive, upgrading from an 8Gb RX 570 to a 12Gb 3060, and adding a second, fast monitor (I found a really good deal on it, on prime day).

I got extremely lucky, and built it for like $700, maybe two months before graphics card prices went parabolic.  The original system I spent $700 on is listed by the part picker site as being worth $901 now, and that's when they don't add in a lot of things, like the motherboard, and fans.  They say my current build is $1200, also without a lot of components priced in.  The PC Part Picker site won't let me add in my Presonus audio interface, or any of the equipment I plug into that.  That kind of stuff doesn't effect performance, anyway.

It's weird to think that my computer probably nearly doubled in value, if we just look at component replacement prices.  That can't just be regular inflation.  Not trying to get political, but I don't think the supply chain really recovered from the pandemic.

[Jaylinbridges]

18 minutes ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

Not trying to get political, but I don't think the supply chain really recovered from the pandemic.

Or cryptocurrency mining.  They need to adjust for inflation.  I was lucky to just pay the MSRP for my "new" EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB card, this year.  Only paid $230, which is on the low end of a gaming card.  I did not buy an RTX 4060 because my motherboard does not support it.  It is already inadequate because of the 6GB VRAM.  

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lowest-gpu-prices

 

Edited May 31 by Jaylinbridges

[animats]

Some comments from my work on Sharpview:

• I was already using a PBR renderer on classic SL content. The colors are a bit off, and translucent overlay isn't what you'd expect. But it pretty much works. So I use the same renderer for both new and old content. This is much easier than running two renderers, but not totally backwards compatible. It's really a shortcut I took, knowing that PBR was coming.
• Most of the complexity associated with PBR is how the server tells the viewer about materials. It's vaguely like the way glTF does it. But the material data in glTF format is so bulky that a rather ad-hoc system had to be developed to compress it. Decoding that is, er, messy. It's also been in flux for months. I wrote a decoder for the first announced version, and after that changed, making that code useless, I decided to wait until Firestorm had it working.
• This is just phase 1. PBR lights need to be implemented. glTF has cone lights but not projectors. Not clear what happens with projectors. The general idea in glTF is that it should be possible to have lots of point and cone lights that don't cast shadows, and little or no ambient illumination. Light your house and store or be in the dark. Cone lights are useful; you can have a ceiling light without illuminating your roof. Lots of cone lights with the distance set to stop them at the first fixed obstacle make for a nice illumination system. (Product hint: sell cone lights that do a cast ray when turned on or moved to find the first fixed obstacle. Set the light distance to that automatically.)
• LL's viewer has high dynamic range rendering, but it doesn't use it yet. To use that properly, lights need real illumination values, not 0..100. The sun is really bright, far brighter than interior lights. And there's automatic tone-mapping, which is like auto exposure control, to adjust the rendering camera as you go outside. (To see what that looks like, see some Cyberpunk 2077 videos, especially where people go from inside to outside, or under an underpass in bright daylight.) So we're only halfway to real PBR. I wish the rest of the roadmap and protocols were documented so us TPV people could implement to that spec.
• LL says glTF import is coming. To make that work right, SL needs a real hierarchy, not just root and children. Then glTF stuff will map properly to SL. I really hope that gets done properly. The viewers can actually display an object hierarchy; they just can't edit it yet. I covered this in detail in a JIRA that was lost during the Canny purge. It can be done in a backwards-compatible way. Finding that JIRA in the JIRA archive is left as an exercise for the student.
• 2K textures aren't really a problem for viewers that download only the resolution needed to get about one texture pixel per screen pixel. If you put a 2K texture on your bracelet, all that data should never be loaded unless someone gets really, really close to look at it. I put that in Sharpview years ago. Do the C++ viewers have that yet?
• No subsurface scattering layer for skin yet. That's what makes skin look alive. Humans are hard-wired to be sensitive to that little bit of red light coming out of skin near where light went in. Without that, skin is still on the range from "plastic" to "dead". This isn't LL's fault. The glTF standards people have had big disputes over how to do this. There's the really good way, which the cinema people want, and the fast way, which the game people want. So it's not yet in the main standard, although there are extensions.

Enough theory for one night.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

You have all given me a lot to consider. I have bought my last few computers from Dell, and this is what I found on the Dell website as their lowest priced gaming computer. Not planning on bying it tomorrow, but just threw it out there for some feedback.

Considering i have a 10 yr old dell with a 705 graphics card, this is light years ahead of that. I've never bought the latest and greatest, just the cheepist that would work.

I'm gonna keep looking, this was just the first thing I found.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

39 minutes ago, animats said:

PBR lights need to be implemented. glTF has cone lights but not projectors. Not clear what happens with projectors. The general idea in glTF is that it should be possible to have lots of point and cone lights that don't cast shadows, and little or no ambient illumination.

Wait, what?

No projectors or lights that cast shadows and ambient light????

[Zalificent Corvinus]

20 minutes ago, animats said:

Most of the complexity associated with PBR is how the server tells the viewer about materials. It's vaguely like the way glTF does it. But the material data in glTF format is so bulky that a rather ad-hoc system had to be developed to compress it. Decoding that is, er, messy. It's also been in flux for months

Translation for English speakers.

LL promised PBR "git-elf" format. LL tried git-elf format, LL found git-elf unsuitable for SL, LL kludged it badly, LL keeps changing it's mind about how to kludge it.

Outstanding as usual from LL.

 

23 minutes ago, animats said:

PBR lights need to be implemented. glTF has cone lights but not projectors. Not clear what happens with projectors. The general idea in glTF is that it should be possible to have lots of point and cone lights that don't cast shadows, and little or no ambient illumination. Light your house and store or be in the dark.

Translation.

LL forgot to add git-elf lights to make the git-elf PBR work right. We have the "inside of house in daytime is black as a coal mine", but we don't have the git-elf lights needed to make it all actually work.

Outstanding as usual from LL.

 

26 minutes ago, animats said:

LL's viewer has high dynamic range rendering, but it doesn't use it yet. To use that properly, lights need real illumination values, not 0..100.  [ snip ] So we're only halfway to real PBR.

Translation.

LL forgot to do git-elf PBR lighting, if they remember, it'll only be a year or 3 till they release it as half finished broken crap. Meanwhile PBR is broken and half finished.

Outstanding as usual from LL.

 

29 minutes ago, animats said:

LL says glTF import is coming. To make that work right, SL needs a real hierarchy, not just root and children. Then glTF stuff will map properly to SL. I really hope that gets done properly.

Translation.

LL forgot another essential part of the system they promised, without which it just won't work. If/when they add this, they will of course mess it up.

31 minutes ago, animats said:

2K textures aren't really a problem for viewers that download only the resolution needed to get about one texture pixel per screen pixel. [ snip ] Do the C++ viewers have that yet?

Translation.

2k textures ARE going to be a problem, a big vram guzzling texture thrashing inducing problem, misused by failed artiste wannabes with the technical knowledge of a goldfish. The "clever thing" that stops pc's downloading 2k resolution images for everything, basically doesn't exist for most people in SL.

 

34 minutes ago, animats said:

No subsurface scattering layer for skin yet. That's what makes skin look alive. [ snipped to remove the usual blather about avatars looking dead ] This isn't LL's fault. The glTF standards people have had big disputes over how to do this. There's the really good way, which the cinema people want, and the fast way, which the game people want. So it's not yet in the main standard, although there are extensions.

Subsurface scatter, isn't really part of PBR git-elf, and should be ignored, as the "PBR gurus" can't decide if they are coding for minutes per frame cinema work or frames per second games work. Meanwhile, the games that DO have SSS, often have MODS to disable it, as it's glitchy as hell, and often ugly.

 

So, we're getting smacked with bad FPS drops for a broken system, that isn't even half way finished, and will automatically be inferior to games that have REAL PBR already, and even then, we'll all need $1000 - $1500 "entry level" GPU cards.

LL should just un-roll PBR, delete all the code for it, and borrow some actual game devs to do a better attempt, from scratch.

 

[Qie Niangao]

13 hours ago, Rick Nightingale said:

The Firestorm beta handles this well. If you go into edit, you can switch between the PBR and Blinn Phong textures in the edit window and the mesh changes what is shows to match which is currently selected. I'm doing it right now, playing with textures on my new bikini bottoms.

No need to remove PBR. I think in the first Firestorm beta you had to remove PBR to see Blinn Phong, but no more (at least in edit mode of course).

That's a big improvement! Thanks.

Besides the tint behavior you noted, I seem to have trouble getting all the Blinn Phong stuff to work once I've applied and removed a PBR Material, but it could just be me. I basically can't test Firestorm any more because it, like the Linden viewer, throws constant "SLPlugin.exe has stopped working" errors on my machine. (So it's not Firestorm's bug, and the Lab has shown no sign of working on it in months.)

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

You have all given me a lot to consider. I have bought my last few computers from Dell, and this is what I found on the Dell website as their lowest priced gaming computer. Not planning on bying it tomorrow, but just threw it out there for some feedback.

Considering i have a 10 yr old dell with a 705 graphics card, this is light years ahead of that. I've never bought the latest and greatest, just the cheepist that would work.

I'm gonna keep looking, this was just the first thing I found.

If you are going to get a new pc...

Don't buy anything Alienware, you pay over the odds for the name, and the insides are often the same stock parts you could have bought for a lot less from a pc parts dealer.

Don't buy Dell or HP or IBM, for the same reasons.

Start with the graphics card, it's probably going to be the single most expensive part n the build. Unless you are planning to start playing "state of the art AAA games" hardcore, don't buy ANY 40?0 series GPU, they ae over priced, and the higher end ones need special power cables and special PSU's, and chunky PSU's at that. (And let's not talk about the reports of 40?0 gpu power cables melting and setting the pc on fire.)

You also probably won't need massive CPU power for SL, so gen 14 i7's are probably overkill too. a slightly older model of i5 would probably be ok, and noticably cheaper, as will be the motherboard to plug it into, 

Get 16GB of RAM, you won't need 64 GB unless you like running a dozen programs at the same time, like SL, and a AAA game, and blender, and photoshop, and running a few bots, and your own hyperfail grid, etc.

Most online pc parts dealers these days have a compatability check thing, so once you've selected the GPU, the CPU, the Mobo, the ram, the PSE, the storage and a case, you can check they will all work together before buying.

Some will build a pc for you from the parts you buy, if you don't want to try that your self.

 

Remember, NEVER buy a "name brand" ready to run pc, especially off Amazon.

 

Edited May 31 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Anna Salyx]

5 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Also I hate all this rgb nonsense going into newbuilds these days, can't you pc manufacturers just sell us an ordinary looking computer? 😅

I build my own rigs.  Have for a very long time. I can build as good a system that's on par with what's been shared here for about the same cost (maybe a little more, maybe a little less depending).  And I tell you it's getting near on impossible to buy basic components that don't have lighting effects. I turn off what I can, and just deal with the rest.

[Fionalein]

23 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Don't buy anything Alienware, you pay over the odds for the name, and the insides are often the same stock parts you could have bought for a lot less from a pc parts dealer.

Don't buy Dell or HP or IBM, for the same reasons.

Alienware is Dell...

I agree though. Only thing I bought from HP recently was a laptop bag (only to replace it with a Samsonite office backpack, but to be fair the bag performed fine, I just wanted a backpack).

Does IBM still do hardware? I thought they sold the private customer branch to Lenovo?

10 minutes ago, Anna Salyx said:

I build my own rigs.  Have for a very long time. I can build as good a system that's on par with what's been shared here for about the same cost (maybe a little more, maybe a little less depending).  And I tell you it's getting near on impossible to buy basic components that don't have lighting effects. I turn off what I can, and just deal with the rest.

After I had my CPU fan starting to make funny noises I slapped an RGB ring onto it's replacement. I personally find it highly comforting I can see the fan is running (I usually have only case and CPU fans running, PS and GPU fans are off in most cases).

Edited May 31 by Fionalein

[Anna Salyx]

14 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Get 16GB of RAM, you won't need 64 GB unless you like running a dozen programs at the same time, like SL, and a AAA game, and blender, and photoshop, and running a few bots, and your own hyperfail grid, etc.

I'd consider 16 entry these days.  I went with 32 when I built my current computer 6 years ago. But then I do run a lot of programs concurrently.  SL (natch), Firestorm browser with <coughs> 2500 tabs, spotify, Gimp, Steam, a couple of others along with services and hooks to cloud storage.  most times I'm at around 40 to 50% memory usage, even without SL logged in. At 16 I'd be bumping up against limit and swapping a lot.  32 gives a nice bit of wiggle.  This is on Win10. I agree at the present 64 is overkill for most everyday people.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

6 minutes ago, Anna Salyx said:

I turn off what I can, and just deal with the rest.

You know the neon pc thing has gone too far when people sell cases with neon lit fishtanks in them.

 

[Rick Nightingale]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Wait, what?

No projectors or lights that cast shadows and ambient light????

For clarity, the existing lights still work the same in the PBR viewer. I use projectors to simulate light though stained glass in my build and they still work the same. At least so far. I still light my house up as before, although I have put in extra lighting too; we do now need to illuminate areas as well as use reflection probes if we don't want the sky reflecting off the interior (through the roof!).

I've not read up on it but I think what is being said is that LL have not given us the different (and probably very useful) lighting available with gltf. Along with other things.

Something else we cannot do with PBR materials is that iridescence that a lot of texture makers use; where an object reflects different colours of light than it is itself. There's no way to do that with LL PBR. I miss it already.

Edited May 31 by Rick Nightingale

[Anna Salyx]

5 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

 although I have put in extra lighting too; we do now need to illuminate areas

if I recall correctly this was one of the reasons given for the recent LI recalc to "give us back" some LI capacity on our land.  Compensation for the fact that we were going to have to start putting more lamps out, or some such.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

I'm gonna keep looking, this was just the first thing I found.

Just as an example...

I checked a parts store here in the UK, for a "we build from your parts list" price tag.

Note these are UK prices, inclusive of VAT, US prices would be cheaper. Also I didn't do some in depth review of the parts, I just picked what seemed reasonable, and trusted the built in compatibility checker to warn if I messed up. Quick and dirty as an example.

And before anyone says anything. Yes an SSD and a platter drive,  You don't NEED every damn file you ever loaded all on SSD speeds, and smaller SSD's are cheaper, and that platter is a good brand, and fast, 7200 rpm, perfectly fine for most general storage.

Yes I included an optical drive, so you can watch blu-rays on the pc, could just as easily swap that for a dvd writer for secure backups.

 

 

That's £1088, or about $1384 American.

 

[Anna Salyx]

58 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

And before anyone says anything. Yes an SSD and a platter drive,  You don't NEED every damn file you ever loaded all on SSD speeds, and smaller SSD's are cheaper, and that platter is a good brand, and fast, 7200 rpm, perfectly fine for most general storage.

 

I am going to say. 

A 500gb m.2 nvme drive by the brand I like is 68.20 USD. (14 cents/gb). A 2000gb is just 102 dollars more at 170 USD. (9 cents/gb). The price difference between the small SSDs and the larger SSDs is not that significant in the scheme of things. And while it might just be a justification to go that route it can be a factor in consideration when deciding on how to future proof. I've had a couple of games now come up with recommended specs being SSD.  That is where we are heading.

True, I don't *need* everything on a blazing fast SSD, but I do like the lack of moving parts. I've got 5tb total right now.  Started with 1 tb SATA and platters, then added in a 2tb nvme on sale.  And not quite a year later added another nvme 2tb stick (and got rid of the platters) on another sale. That'll keep me happy for a few years. 

Edited May 31 by Anna Salyx
typo correction