Firestorm PBR Release Is Out

[Codex Alpha]

30 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

It's complicated.

There really isn't a "FPS" of the eyes. Your eyes are constantly sending visual impulses. It's up to the brain to interpret it. Subconscious information such as movement and trained pattern recognition can be acted on as fast as the body can move. Images that have to be processed by your conscious brain are only processed partially and your brain guesses quite a lot to save itself some energy. The center of your vision is where the brain spends most of its energy processing, the edges are only really sensitive to movement, which the subconscious can act on.

People need to try those AIr Combat book games, where they are representing the dog fight at probably 1 fps or less per second... or in reality, brain processing an image at 1 picture per [human processing time]. People who have played these will recognize the interesting thing that happens, is that the brain eventually fills in all blanks, and can start to track the position of both planes in 'mental space', and can manouver, etc.

It's also how I could 'pwn' people in Counterstrike with a potato computer at the time, probs playing at 15-20fps, and then 'sucking' and having to learn to play the game all over again when I bought a computer that could do 60fps... it was a whole other experience, nothing worked the same, mouse sensitivity differences, etc.

[NaomiLocket]

9 hours ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

What is likely to happen is using a translation layer to use the best possible API for each platform, DX12, Vulkan, or Metal.

You mean like using an intermediary?
The only main reason OpenGL should not work or present problems is with either threading needs or raytracing specifically, not PBR. OpenGL has PBR because PBR predates Vulkan (2008 versus 2016). It is true from Blenders adaptive perspective that vulkan is expected to supersede it. They seemed to have changed tune from telling people OpenGL would not be dropped or replaced to working towards trying to remove it whether that is specifically just for the vulkan project branch or the whole deal is unlcear in the thread talking about it. Something about initial release having been dubbed opengl next. But the only real features typically described are threading, raytracing, and a tight coupling to nvidia - which doesn't suit AMD's lack of compute. Blender's been stuck for a couple of years on cuda and optix. Their vulkan side project has spent the last years attempting to reach OpenGL's performance because they have to keep open the ability to change and reprocess the glsl during runtime etc etc etc.

[NaomiLocket]

Damn wrong button.

When I said "But the only real features typically described are threading, raytracing, and a tight coupling to nvidia" nvidia refer to opengl, and the other two features refer to vulkan as positives.

ETA: I may as well make better use of this post seeing as we drifted into the territory of the frustration and annoying complexity of shader languages being so diverse. Apple just may very well be trying their own gig the same way that Vulkan is actually AMD's Mantle and is being pushed through Khronos to allow them to better fit into the market dominated by Nvidia. Every now and then when you browse this topic it comes up that AMD didn't pick up the phone but Nvidia would send engineers to help out and all that jaz.

So hlsl dx, glsl OpenGL, glsl Mantle/Vulkan not compatible, and Metal. It's a fun world.

Edited July 3 by NaomiLocket

[NaomiLocket]

8 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I am sure there are excellent reasons to move beyond OpenGL anyway, but . . .

. . . God Apple is a pain in the ******* butt.

The frickin' Princess of Tech is what they are.

They are annoying, but unless they somehow retroactively remove 4.1 hardware support and brick 4.6 compute conformance any existing mac should be always supported under OpenGL.

[Violet Vanilla]

22 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

Humans may not be able to look at 60 FPS and 144 FPS and say "I can see the extra FPS", but if you think you can't see a difference at all, that tells me you've never used a good monitor.

People's eyes and brains work differently, I have a 165hz monitor, if I move my mouse around very fast then yes, I can see a difference vs doing it on a 60hz monitor or if I look at one of those fast moving gifs that people use to test these things, I can see a difference in the motion blur.

 

Now can I actually notice a feasible difference in games? Not really, 60fps to 165fps looks the same in MMORPGs and SL to me. It might be a difference case if I played FPS games or a different genre. Honestly I cap SL at 30fps most of the time anyway since SL really doesn't need that much fluidity in motions, just to allocate more resources to other programs. If you can see a difference, that's great but in most cases I can't unless I'm really staring and trying to focus on that aspect.

[Paul Hexem]

1 minute ago, Violet Vanilla said:

People's eyes and brains work differently, I have a 165hz monitor, if I move my mouse around very fast then yes, I can see a difference vs doing it on a 60hz monitor or if I look at one of those fast moving gifs that people use to test these things, I can see a difference in the motion blur.

 

Now can I actually notice a feasible difference in games? Not really, 60fps to 165fps looks the same in MMORPGs and SL to me. It might be a difference case if I played FPS games or a different genre. Honestly I cap SL at 30fps most of the time anyway since SL really doesn't need that much fluidity in motions, just to allocate more resources to other programs. If you can see a difference, that's great but in most cases I can't unless I'm really staring and trying to focus on that aspect.

Yeah, I've never seen a need for more than 60 in SL either.

That said, in nearly every game I've played, motion always looks better with higher FPS. I'm sure there's a cutoff at some point (144 to 200+?), but I don't think monitor refresh rates are there yet.

[Coffee Pancake]

The solution is to switch to a CRT.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The solution is to switch to a CRT.

I wonder how a Vector CRT would look with Second Life? 

(Like the original Space War and Asteroids games, and later Battlezone and Star Wars games.)

Kind of like the Matrix, probably.

[Love Zhaoying]

23 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

. . . God Apple is a pain in the ******* butt.

You're supposed to EAT the apples!

Not sit on them, or whatever your butt is doing with them!!  (Don't put apples up your butt!!)

 

[Monika Skydancer]

On 6/21/2024 at 3:17 PM, Katherine Heartsong said:

I'm speced better than your machine (Intel 10700, 3060, also 1GB RAM)

You're specced better than nearly everyone lol. I doubt you'll have any probs with it.

[Bloodsong Termagant]

hey guys!

 

i'm running the FS PBR viewer at SL21B.  the thing is, my GPU temps have gone up like 2-4 degrees, but my CPU temps have gone up 10-20 degrees.

 

now the last 'big' FS update was to switch some tasks form cpu to gpu, so i would expect pbr should hit my gpu more?  do i have something set wrong?

these are my graphics card specs... not sure what they all mean :X
 

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 10067 MB
Graphics Card Memory (Detected): 10067 MB
Graphics Card Memory (Budget): Unlimited

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 31.0.15.3699
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 536.99

 

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Bloodsong Termagant said:

hey guys!

 

i'm running the FS PBR viewer at SL21B.  the thing is, my GPU temps have gone up like 2-4 degrees, but my CPU temps have gone up 10-20 degrees.

 

now the last 'big' FS update was to switch some tasks form cpu to gpu, so i would expect pbr should hit my gpu more?  do i have something set wrong?

these are my graphics card specs... not sure what they all mean :X
 

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 10067 MB
Graphics Card Memory (Detected): 10067 MB
Graphics Card Memory (Budget): Unlimited

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 31.0.15.3699
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 536.99

 

All looks fine. You might be able to bring CPU temperature down by selectively disabling some graphics features, if you want. Tick/untick boxes and see what difference it makes

If the CPU temperature is under 85c you don't really have to worry. You don't have to worry much beyond that either, CPU's protect themselves if necessary these days but the effect will be that it slows itself down a bit to try and keep cool.

If it really bothers you (or it's uncomfortable I guess) then limit frame rate, you're probably drawing way more frames than is really required. Use the Nvidia control panel to do this, it's more reliable than the Firestorm frame limiter in my experience.

Edited July 4 by AmeliaJ08

[HeathcliffMontague]

I'm not quite there yet, I guess. Most things are OK, but this bike is supposed to be black

Mainland, Midday settings, Shared Environment. Just when you think you are more or less OK you get a WTF moment now and then when you drag something out of the inventory.

[Sim Myoo]

On 7/3/2024 at 3:10 PM, Monika Skydancer said:

You're specced better than nearly everyone lol. I doubt you'll have any probs with it.

CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K (2995.2 MHz)
Memory: 32510 MB (Used: 2686 MB)
Concurrency: 32
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 11 64-bit (Build 22621.3737)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 24564 MB

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 32.0.15.5612
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 556.12

I think the new PBR viewer blows, it feels like we went back about 10 years in SL.

[shireena1]

Good luck with that lol

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 hours ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

I'm not quite there yet, I guess. Most things are OK, but this bike is supposed to be black

Mainland, Midday settings, Shared Environment. Just when you think you are more or less OK you get a WTF moment now and then when you drag something out of the inventory.

That's the "new" Midday? Not the legacy one?

[Bloodsong Termagant]

19 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

All looks fine. You might be able to bring CPU temperature down by selectively disabling some graphics features, if you want. Tick/untick boxes and see what difference it makes

If the CPU temperature is under 85c you don't really have to worry. You don't have to worry much beyond that either, CPU's protect themselves if necessary these days but the effect will be that it slows itself down a bit to try and keep cool.

If it really bothers you (or it's uncomfortable I guess) then limit frame rate, you're probably drawing way more frames than is really required. Use the Nvidia control panel to do this, it's more reliable than the Firestorm frame limiter in my experience.

im still confused why the pbr graphics are hitting the cpu more than the gpu?

i do use the fs fps limiter.  will try nvidia.

thank you!

[Bloodsong Termagant]

12 hours ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

I'm not quite there yet, I guess. Most things are OK, but this bike is supposed to be black

Mainland, Midday settings, Shared Environment. Just when you think you are more or less OK you get a WTF moment now and then when you drag something out of the inventory.

it looks black to me?  (does it look gold to you?  j/k!)

[Qie Niangao]

20 hours ago, Bloodsong Termagant said:

i'm running the FS PBR viewer at SL21B.  the thing is, my GPU temps have gone up like 2-4 degrees, but my CPU temps have gone up 10-20 degrees.

Temps are an indicator, but it's a pretty indirect measure of how much they're doing. It's possible, say, that the CPU cooling is just less effective than the GPU's. (Of course if you have experience with other balanced loads causing GPU temps to rise commensurate with the CPU's, then yeah, this would be anomalous.)

[Thecla]

I'm also seeing my CPU work much harder than my GPU in demanding environments. I was also at a party last night and saw pretty much 99% of my 32gb of ram gobbled up. I noticed that because I was talking to someone with 64gb of ram and said "pffft how can you need all that?" and then checked my ram usage. So I guess my next update is going to double my ram...

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Bloodsong Termagant said:

im still confused why the pbr graphics are hitting the cpu more than the gpu?

i do use the fs fps limiter.  will try nvidia.

thank you!

It all depends, for a GPU to work harder it needs to be fed by a CPU though, not everything is strictly GPU alone.

Generally if you're seeing higher GPU utilization - and these newer viewers definitely do utilize the GPU a lot more than they used to - it will be associated with higher CPU utilization as well.

 

Edited July 5 by AmeliaJ08

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Bloodsong Termagant said:

it looks black to me?  (does it look gold to you?  j/k!)

Yeah it's black but it's reflecting the blue sky. If they think it looks blue it's because it's a bright mid-day EEP with a strong blue sky.

[Qie Niangao]

40 minutes ago, Thecla said:

I'm also seeing my CPU work much harder than my GPU in demanding environments. I was also at a party last night and saw pretty much 99% of my 32gb of ram gobbled up. …

That RAM was viewer-related? Not Chrome or something else? 

I hadn't really looked at it before, and it's basically impossible to compare apples to apples this way, but I see Firestorm using about twice as much RAM and twice as much CPU as Alchemy in the same scene with as close to the same settings as I can see casually. Both leave plenty to spare on my machine, only like 3GB RAM used even by Firestorm. Just a quick check of the Linden viewer has it in between, maybe a little closer to Alchemy.

Somebody more serious must be benchmarking these viewers, right?

[steeljane42]

It's pretty taxing on the CPU now for sure. GPU wise I think it didn't change too much, at least if one was using ALM and high enough settings pre-pbr. I've been playing with some spare hardware I have recently to put together a couple extra towers for some of my work and decided to check how SL runs on those past PBR update, too.

Older one with 6700k@base clock/GTX960/16GB RAM was really struggling in my region (which is rather heavy on meshes and textures, and already has some pbr decor and some 2k landscaping objects) on my usual settings, but if toned down it was still passable experience.

Newer one that used to be my entertainment machine until recently has 9700k@5.2GHz on all cores/RTX3070/32GB RAM did a lot better, but CPU usage is indeed pretty high, up to 97% with my usual settings. I'm pretty sure it was around 50%-60% before, but can't really be bothered to put older FS there to try. Given the overlock and usage higher temps are expected, around low 70s (22C ambient), which is on par with gaming on that CPU, but not quite levels of stress testing via Cinebench or prime95, but that's with a good cooling.

I'll re-test my current entertainment PC with 14700k/RTX4070ti/32GB RAM more later when I finish moving it into another tower and play with bios some more as there's a lot of room for improvement there if one likes to mess with such things. But it had a lot of spare room CPU wise.

I can totally see why some people on much older machines are not having too great time with this update, though.

 

Edited July 5 by steeljane42

[Eren Padar]

I've tested the new 7.1 FS for some time now, and have (as is my habit) picked up reports from other users... most of whom are techs.  My experiences (and verifications):

* #1 complaint:  Crashing during teleports. I'm on a gamer system with a good GPU, yet have been crashing on TPS at least once or twice a day.   I never used to crash on the prior viewer.  Ever.

* While there are claims that PBR is leaner and faster than the old system, FPS reports are significantly lower than the prior viewer.

* Rezzing is slow.  This may tie in with the lowered FPS; there seems to be bottlenecks somewhere.

* Dark and super-bright. Graphics in general are much darker, and glows much brighter.  This makes vendors hard to see if they're not on fullbright, and items with glow are almost blinding.  For the first time ever... I have had to start using facelights on my avatars just so their faces don't look like they're hidden under a dark hood.  My skins look much darker than they did prior... especially if I use shadows.  As a result, I leave shadows turned off.

* Shadows are unnatural and darken the entire scene.  To get any semblance of acceptable brightness I have to turn shadows completely off.  I recognize I can enhance the brightness of the scene in general (once this was called "gamma")... but that just makes the glow items even brighter and washes out lighter items almost entirely.

* There's no way (that I can find) to turn off "reflections" entirely... and these DO slow down the system.  We can turn off mirrors and even set reflections to manual... but I get the feeling that even the existence of the reflection engine slows the system.

*When I leave mirrors OFF my movement is smooth as would be expected. When I turn mirrors ON my movement turns to glitchy "robotic" frames of movement, especially if I'm in front of a mirror-- as if the system is presenting a quick "slideshow" of my reflection rather than a smooth experience.  And frankly, neither I nor anyone I've spoken to gives a hoot about mirrors.  "Interesting special effect but no real value" is the most positive description I've heard thus far.

* Regular textures and gamma of textures simply do not look the same, even if one WANTS them to look the same as they did. PBR is changing the appearance even of non-PBR items... something perhaps it really shouldn't do.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of comments I've heard about PBR and my own experiences.  For some people (merchants, creators) perhaps PBR is wonderful.   For the average user... maybe not so much.

 

Edited July 5 by Eren Padar