Firestorm PBR Release Is Out

[Scylla Rhiadra]

16 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Isn't it more like the Lab didn't listen to residents saying this wasn't going to turn out well?

LL was going to do this regardless: rightly or wrongly they see this as a necessary preliminary step for other future improvements to (as well as stability of) the platform.

What they could have done is paid more attention to what many of us were saying, and softened the blow in a number of ways (as Henri's CoolViewer has, to some degree, but also by the provision of new EEPs).

On the other hand, as I know from hard experience both here and in discussions on the FS test group chat in-world, there was an awful lot of hostility to anyone voicing reservations about PBR, and specifically about how this was being rolled out.

Zali has a bit of a point about some of these people: it's a cult. And they can very nasty very quickly if you seem to be slowing down the express train to The Future. I suspect LL was listening to more of that than they were to the hesitant voices here.

Edited June 21 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

44 minutes ago, Evangeline Arcadia said:

Awww, I feel for Firestorm support, they're just implementing what they have to, sooner or later. I love Firestorm!!! 

I do too, I've been using it for years. 

[Evangeline Arcadia]

3 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

LL do hardware surveys and have said that they feel the average user can handle this. We're hearing from the people that are running iGPUs and probably didn't have ALM enabled.

 

The only time I every have ALM on is if I want to take a nice photo - then it's only on for a few mintues, take the shot, switch it off.

Edited June 21 by Evangeline Arcadia

[Arielle Popstar]

7 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Why couldn't Firestorm included lots of "It's coming!" Notifications? Blaming it all on the lab, when Official viewer users like me are already fully adjusted to the changes, seems illogical (possibly it seems like a specious argument to blame the lab if Firestorm users could have been warned).

Because FS devs were waiting for the Lab to finalize settings. The lab was the one everyone had to wait for.

[Quistess Alpha]

2 hours ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

Is it common for 3rd party viewers to keep older versions available for download for a while? To give people time to upgrade their pc's if they need to?

yes, I'm surprised how not-obvious it is to find the old firestorm versions, other tpv's are a lot more transparent.

[AmeliaJ08]

2 minutes ago, Evangeline Arcadia said:

The only time I every have ALM on is if I want to take a nice photo - then it's only on for a few mintues, take the shot, switch it off.

Is that because performance is intolerable with it enabled?

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Some of "us" - me - on the Forums have been aware of the changes for a long time because 1) the topics have been discussed for a long time, and 2) us/me using the Official viewer, having plenty of time to adjust (including, each Official viewer release informing us of the changes).

Why couldn't Firestorm included lots of "It's coming!" Notifications? Blaming it all on the lab, when Official viewer users like me are already fully adjusted to the changes, seems illogical (possibly it seems like a specious argument to blame the lab if Firestorm users could have been warned).

Well, the "us" on the forums is of course a very small percentage of the overall Resident population. And only a portion of "us" here actually followed these developments: I am sure a great many frequent forum posters feel as blindsided by this as do those who've not had access to those discussions.

Yeah, possibly Firestorm could have done more? But the "problem" isn't of Firestorm's making. We're just hearing the screams of anguish and outrage now because FS is such a popular viewer. Everyone, regardless of their viewer of choice, needed to be kept up to speed on what was coming. And, in theory anyway, LL should have access to better tools to do so than the FS team does.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

22 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Isn't it more like the Lab didn't listen to residents saying this wasn't going to turn out well?

Perhaps LL can tell us again why we even need this 😬

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Evangeline Arcadia said:

The only time I every have ALM on is if I want to take a nice photo - then it's only on for a few mintues, take the shot, switch it off.

And I think that's the case with a great many residents -- possibly even a majority.

People with great, up-to-date computers probably have ALM on by default as the viewer's recommend graphics setting; they're not going to notice nearly the same performance drop as those who, like yourself, had ALM mostly off.

[Arielle Popstar]

Just now, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Perhaps LL can tell us again why we even need this 😬

Work for Creators I think. People will need new things to make their SL palatable. 

[Cristiano Midnight]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

LL was going to do this regardless: rightly or wrongly they see this as a necessary preliminary step for other future improvements to (as well as stability of) the platform.

What they could have done is paid more attention to what many of us were saying, and softened the blow in a number of ways (as Henri's CoolViewer has, to some degree, but also by the provision of new EEPs).

On the other hand, as I know from hard experience both here and in discussions on the FS test group chat in-world, there was an awful lot of hostility to anyone voicing reservations about PBR, and specifically about how this was being rolled out.

Zali has a bit of a point about some of these people: it's a cult. And they can very nasty very quickly if you seem to be slowing down the express train to The Future. I suspect LL was listening to more of that than they were to the hesitant voices here.

Honestly there was one or two of the bold texted Firestorm people I found rather snide at times. I just kept my mouth shut. It is a difficult balance. Maintaining backward compatibility does hold things back a lot of times, and there was anecdotal evidence that being able to turn ALM off caused merchants to not embrace materials and other things as they otherwise might have. I get it, no one wants to suddenly have something perform worse on their hardware for what is seen as a dubious improvement.

I do think LL listened to both sets of voices, but I do think you are right that they were going to move forward and rip the bandaid off regardless. There can be cultish behavior on both sides - some people are never, ever happy with anything and only exist to complain and are resistant to change. There were genuine performance concerns from the beginning, and I hope they do continue optimization work to minimize the impact as much as possible on older hardware within reason. I don't want to see anyone shut out of SL because their system can't handle it - but I also do want to see the platform continue to grow and improve 21 years on.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And I think that's the case with a great many residents -- possibly even a majority.

People with great, up-to-date computers probably have ALM on by default as the viewer's recommend graphics setting; they're not going to notice nearly the same performance drop as those who, like yourself, had ALM mostly off.

I have an up-to-date, fairly high end computer and still have it off - I wonder if other people with high ends do the same. Maybe there's been an assumption that they don't have it off? Or maybe they have the data somehow that they do keep it on? Would love to know.

[Cristiano Midnight]

Speaking of backward compatibility, I still have stuff in my inventory from beta that still works 21 years later. Also, the mythical Starax wand is still as impressive today as it was pre-mesh, when it was one of the most expensive items in SL at the time. That is an achievement that most content still works - not all certainly, but I still stumble across old things in my inventory from beta that I check to see if they still work, and it makes me happy.

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

Just now, Cristiano Midnight said:

Speaking of backward compatibility, I still have stuff in my inventory from beta that still works 21 years later. Also, the mythical Starax wand is still as impressive today as it was pre-mesh, when it was one of the most expensive items in SL at the time. That is an achievement that most content still works - not all certainly, but I still stumble across old things in my inventory from beta that I check to see if they still work, and it makes me happy.

I rememeber thinking how overpriced it was...but in hindsight maybe not, especially considering it still works!

 

[Evangeline Arcadia]

6 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Is that because performance is intolerable with it enabled?

 

It's not so much that performance is intolerable (but then again I haven't kept it on for a long spell to really tell), but I don't like my PC running hot when it doesn't need to. I want it to last as long as possible, and I prefer it not to be kicking up in the 70-90° range I'm not happy with that. For me it's merely about prolonging the life of my computer. Yeah there's lots of articles on the web say the computer can handle it, but there's also a fair few saying it's not a good idea, plus the fact that of course it does comparatively speaking at to wear.

I might be an anomoly though lol - maybe most others aren't that bothered by it if it doesn't impare their experience within SL.

[SueWorthly]

I tried to test Firestorm 7.1.9 with two somewhat comparable (and not top notch) machines: a Steam Deck vs an old i7 laptop, both Linux machines having 16Gb RAM and about the same screen resolution (I resized the window on the laptop to mach the screen resolution of the Deck [P.S.: 1280x800]), on an islet amid the sea [P.S.: therefore with no other avatars etc around, to ensure testing at the same conditions]. Note: I don't normally use low, mid, high, ultra graphic settings, but a custom ones; however, in order to make the comparison easier, in this case I set them to mid and I manually add ALM and shadows.

Results:

The old laptop with an Nvidia card with Firestorm 6.x it gets 84-86 FPS (at mid graphic settings).  Enabling ALM: 55. Adding also shadows: 42. With Firestorm 7.1.9 at mid it is 43 (vs 55 of FS 6.x with ALM) and by adding shadows 37 (vs 42).

So 7.1.9 is slower, but not terribly so compared to 6.x with ALM. It's significantly slower than 6.x without ALM, though, so if you were used to have ALM disabled, that's quite a hit.

The (same) old laptop, but using the integrated Intel card, instead of the discrete Nvidia, drops to 14 FPS with 7.1.9, though, and textures become really slow at loading.

The Steam Deck, with 7.1.9 at mid, gets about 145 FPS. Adding shadows: about 120. At ultra: about 60. Also at mid+shadows it still works decently among trees with shadows enabled. To save battery, I limit the FPS and reduce the graphic settings, though.

[P.S.: this at the condition specified above, with no avatars around etc. to ensure the same testing conditions. During normal usage it would be less, of course, but the Deck still performs well enough. Testing instead some worst case scenario, like being inside a club full of people like Muddy's, for example, the Deck at mid got about 35-40+ FPS, depending on the avatars and crowd there. With shadows enabled (not so important inside a club, though) it drops to about 25 and it would be even less in larger crowds; still not bad for this little machine]

The Deck also works as a sort of mobile device, but better as it runs the actual desktop SL viewer. The only issues it has with Firestorm 7.1.9 is CEF not working, but it works with Firestorm 6 that has a previous version of CEF.

Edited June 22 by SueWorthly
Added some precisations as P.S.

[Cristiano Midnight]

1 minute ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

I rememeber thinking how overpriced it was...but in hindsight maybe not, especially considering it still works!

 

And considering how many legit works of art there are in it amongst some of the gag items. I mean hell, it could do a full sim tsunami, and the bull stampede was epic. Starax was a master and did things with prims that should not have been possible.

[Arielle Popstar]

The Lab is more concerned about appearance then functionality. Windlight, EEP and now PBR and nothing that makes it more functional and easier to manage.

[Luna Bliss]

28 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Zali has a bit of a point about some of these people: it's a cult. And they can very nasty very quickly if you seem to be slowing down the express train to The Future. I suspect LL was listening to more of that than they were to the hesitant voices here.

Grandma turned 50 and got her cane.  I love you anyway.  LOL

[KellyMorris]

The problem isn't the FPS, but the high temperatures the software is causing. I use both Alchemy and Black Dragon, and my AMD 7700X processor (which is not old at all) runs 15 degrees hotter than usual. Even with my GPU AMD 7800xt fans sounding like an airplane, the temperatures are still high, and this is happening at the same FPS I get with Alchemy. This points to a  bad optimization. This update is making my hardware run hotter than ever before, and I've never had these issues with AAA games in QHD resolution 144FPS. I had to roll back to the previous version to protect my hardware.

[Perrie Juran]

1 hour ago, Modulated said:

People in FS support are losing their GD minds with the comments...whew boy.

The lack of patience has boggled my brain.

I'd been using the Betas for several months, knock on wood,  essentially trouble free.

While I know this may not be true for everyone,  some people if they'd show a tad of patience might find a simple setting could fix their issue. I know it did for me. I had trouble with texture trashing. I tweaked one debug setting and I was all good to go.

[Modulated]

9 minutes ago, Perrie Juran said:

The lack of patience has boggled my brain.

I'd been using the Betas for several months, knock on wood,  essentially trouble free.

While I know this may not be true for everyone,  some people if they'd show a tad of patience might find a simple setting could fix their issue. I know it did for me. I had trouble with texture trashing. I tweaked one debug setting and I was all good to go.

I agree, but people being people and doing what they do, I wish I were surprised at some of the things I have seen posted there, but I am not.

[Codex Alpha]

11 minutes ago, Perrie Juran said:

The lack of patience has boggled my brain.

I'd been using the Betas for several months, knock on wood,  essentially trouble free.

While I know this may not be true for everyone,  some people if they'd show a tad of patience might find a simple setting could fix their issue. I know it did for me. I had trouble with texture trashing. I tweaked one debug setting and I was all good to go.

What debug setting is that, for those of us who choke on textures all day and is a constant bane to the enjoyment of SL

[Cristiano Midnight]

12 minutes ago, Perrie Juran said:

The lack of patience has boggled my brain.

I'd been using the Betas for several months, knock on wood,  essentially trouble free.

While I know this may not be true for everyone,  some people if they'd show a tad of patience might find a simple setting could fix their issue. I know it did for me. I had trouble with texture trashing. I tweaked one debug setting and I was all good to go.

To be fair, SL users should not have to delve into debug settings at all. Whatever setting fixed your issue should be front and center in preferences, not buried in debug.

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

possibly even a majority.

That would be extremely odd. It is on by default, I'd confidently say the average user probably never looked in the Graphics preference window though.