Firestorm PBR Release Is Out

[AmeliaJ08]

4 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

That's a fair point but then one of the main hurdles of creating a mobile viewer is dealing with the massive amount of assets SL has and the subsequent performance issues that they create. 

The mobile app is hardly a replacement for desktop viewers, more like a supplement.  Using a typical game engine like Unreal for that purpose makes sense because you've (presumably) already taken steps to reduce the excessive amount of data/content that you're dealing with so it won't cause the same issues you'd get with a full viewer (probably far sooner and more noticeably on mobile devices). 

In order to use a traditional game engine to build a viewer for SL you have to make all sorts of compromises that, while those on mobile devices may find them acceptable, the majority of desktop users would consider completely unacceptable compared to the viewers we have now.

Sure but they're doing it and we'll have to see what the result is since it isn't finished. It's a positive step though, if it works it proves there is a way forward and away from SL's creaking, patched up entirely custom engine developed back in 2003

If it does work it'll definitely be one of the most customized versions of Unity that has ever existed to cope with the mess of content SL has, I've been a bit wary of how possible it is on LL's budget since if you look at the games that have used a very highly modified Unity they have very large dev teams and I don't think LL does.

It's not like SL's current engine is particularly capable, Unity could very well do a better job out of the box.

[NaomiLocket]

9 hours ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

Unity, UE5, all the popular engines that so many people have wanted a viewer to be made in. They are all PBR.

In either case having PBR as an accessible feature in an underlying engine is not equal to using PBR in all things the platform is used for. You would be hard pressed to find that to be the case with a lot of the indie games across ue5/unity/godot combined. Blender having PBR does not mean everyone is using PBR for everything they make either, never has been.

Generally speaking you have been correct here and future pages that the Lab should provide access and capability. However the implementation still needs to be desirable. And it needs to not get in the way of other content/styles at any point. All or nothing would never be an ideal. There's probably some miscommunication somewhere along the line about what they mean with still supporting legacy content in one phrase, but not being able to turn off certain features of the rendering pipeline at all ever in another.

[brodiac90]

So I just got the latest version of Firestorm. What sort of performance / frame rates wold you expect with my current set up? if anyone has any tips on how to optimise that would be very much appreciated. 

My system specs are as follows:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX2060

Intel I7-7800X @3.5GHz (6 cores) 

RAM - 32GB

[AmeliaJ08]

5 minutes ago, brodiac90 said:

So I just got the latest version of Firestorm. What sort of performance / frame rates wold you expect with my current set up? if anyone has any tips on how to optimise that would be very much appreciated. 

My system specs are as follows:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX2060

Intel I7-7800X @3.5GHz (6 cores) 

RAM - 32GB

30fps in busy-ish scenes, 60-100+ in less busy.

Critical factor always seems to be "Max # of non imposter avatars" of course. If you set that to something ridiculous then yeah a very busy place full of complex avatars will cripple frame rate, set it to 20 or something and you'll be fine.

I have tested a 2060 and it was just fine with the Firestorm PBR alpha/beta and that was over Thunderbolt, it'll perform even better in a normal PC.

You may even notice performance is even better than previous versions, this has been my experience. GPU utilization should be 70+%, I never got anything like that in pre-PBR viewers before and it's reflected in frame rate if that matters to you. If not just lock it at 30-60fps and enjoy the silence

 

 

 

Edited June 22 by AmeliaJ08

[brodiac90]

3 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

30fps in busy-ish scenes, 60-100+ in less busy.

Critical factor always seems to be "Max # of non imposter avatars" of course. If you set that to something ridiculous then yeah a very busy place full of complex avatars will cripple frame rate, set it to 20 or something and you'll be fine.

I have tested a 2060 and it was just fine with the Firestorm PBR alpha and that was over Thunderbolt, it'll perform even better in a normal PC.

 

 

I must be doing something wrong then because at the moment I'm getting between 20-25 fps at home with just me and my mum. 

[SueWorthly]

14 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

As far as I know the Steam Deck's GPU is roughly equivalent to a GTX1050Ti but will presumably have the usual AMD OpenGL performance penalty in SL viewers. If this is the performance you're getting though that is excellent, I'm curious to see how this viewer performs with AMD's latest iGPUs like the 780M in the new Ryzens.

 

Yes, I'm surprised by that little machine, but the Deck screen resolution is just 1280x800, that also counts, and the testing, as specified, were in a islet amid the sea (and therefore also with no other avatars around), to ensure the testing conditions were even.

During normal usage, the framerate is of course lower, but generally still good enough.

Testing instead some worst case scenario, like being inside a club full of people like Muddy's, for example, the Deck at mid graphic settings got about 35-40+ FPS, depending on the avatars and crowd there. Enabling shadows (not so important inside a club, maybe, but just for reference) it dropped to about 25 FPS and it's likely it would be even less in larger crowds; still not bad for this little and cheap machine, considering that you can carry it around as an handheld console too.

[KellyMorris]

A simply question to those say it's all fine, 75° GPU in a empty land are the same of 75° GPU in a club with 80 avi?

When the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.

[AmeliaJ08]

Just now, brodiac90 said:

I must be doing something wrong then because at the moment I'm getting between 20-25 fps at home with just me and my mum. 

Got some screenshots of your graphics prefs panel?

Specifically the first General tab and the "hardware settings" tab. Sorry I know it's awkward, wish there was a way to just print out all the graphics settings in use.

 

[brodiac90]

5 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Got some screenshots of your graphics prefs panel?

Specifically the first General tab and the "hardware settings" tab. Sorry I know it's awkward, wish there was a way to just print out all the graphics settings in use.

 

Sure, here and ty for the help! 

 

[AmeliaJ08]

15 minutes ago, brodiac90 said:

Sure, here and ty for the help! 

 

I'm seeing nothing in there that would explain low FPS, I'd expect much higher. Are you confident Firestorm is using the 2060? it'll print the GPU being used in Help > About Firestorm

Is the GPU throttling? can quickly check temperature in Task Manager or use GPU-Z or whatever for more detail.

edit: oh wait VSync enabled? try disabling it, I've never had much luck with Firestorm's VSync and I've read various accounts of it just being broken.

 

Edited June 22 by AmeliaJ08

[NaomiLocket]

18 minutes ago, brodiac90 said:

Sure, here and ty for the help!

Just going to butt in a little here. Perform yourself a little test and place your camera directly above yourself and aim it to look past you and straight into the ground (assuming home is on the ground).

If you're in a situation where there are a bunch of other homes around and you find looking at the ground gives you a significant boost - then consider reducing your draw distance as a first step.

[Rick Nightingale]

13 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

oh wait VSync enabled?

I've often heard in the FS beta group that it's best disabled, and to limit framerate* using the option in Rendering tab instead. The VSync function is completely inherited from the official viewer as far as I'm aware, so is just the same there. VSync simply (supposedly!) just limits framerate to match what the driver says the monitor can do.

* so as not to create frames faster than your monitor can show them, or limit it more if you have a fast gaming monitor and don't want your GPU melting needlessly trying to drive it as fast as possible. I cap mine at 40 on my rig that can go over 100 if I let it; 40 is fine for SL. It's not a first-person shooter where (they say) milliseconds matter. (saying this for those who wonder why they need  these settings). I did have it capped at 60 last year, but can't tell the difference at 40 other than with PBR the fans don't run as loud at 40.

Edited June 22 by Rick Nightingale

[brodiac90]

So I tried looking down at me and the ground and this made no difference to FPS. 

Think it might have to do with my display. I play SL on my 55' TV 🙃

 

 

 

Edited June 22 by brodiac90

[Danraka]

This new FS PBR viewer, and maybe PBR in general, does not like to travel at high speed.

   Meaning that if you are driving a vehicle, faster than walking speed, you'll notice a big drop in performance. Very choppy frame rate, and even input lag. And that is on a very smooth running Sky Track, with no one else in the Sim. Driving on Mainland roads can be a real challenge sometimes, even on good days. But with this PBR, it is just awful. It's such a shame, because my car, and the environment around me looks really neat with PBR, when I'm stopped!...lol  It seems that PBR doesn't really play well with a fast moving background. I think my friend put it best..."Great Visuals, Poor Gameplay."                                                                                                       

   (My Set-Up...CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (3400.03 MHz) - Memory: 16338 MB - Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB/PCIe/SSE2 - Graphics Card Memory: 2965 MB) - 1GB Fiber-optic Ethernet

    I think I'll go back to the last FS and wait...(and pray)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

[Flower Caerndow]

 

59 minutes ago, brodiac90 said:

I must be doing something wrong then because at the moment I'm getting between 20-25 fps at home with just me and my mum. 

Not a technical person here, but it looks like you have mirrors turned on - from what I have read, I thought that really affects performance.

[AmeliaJ08]

13 minutes ago, Flower Caerndow said:

 

Not a technical person here, but it looks like you have mirrors turned on - from what I have read, I thought that really affects performance.

Only if in use. If there's no reflection probes set to mirror interacting with mirror surfaces then it doesn't do anything

[AmeliaJ08]

38 minutes ago, brodiac90 said:

So I tried looking down at me and the ground and this made no difference to FPS. 

Think it might have to do with my display. I play SL on my 55' TV 🙃

 

 

 

Did you try disabling VSync? Latest Nvidia driver?

[AmeliaJ08]

45 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

I've often heard in the FS beta group that it's best disabled, and to limit framerate* using the option in Rendering tab instead. The VSync function is completely inherited from the official viewer as far as I'm aware, so is just the same there. VSync simply (supposedly!) just limits framerate to match what the driver says the monitor can do.

* so as not to create frames faster than your monitor can show them, or limit it more if you have a fast gaming monitor and don't want your GPU melting needlessly trying to drive it as fast as possible. I cap mine at 40 on my rig that can go over 100 if I let it; 40 is fine for SL. It's not a first-person shooter where (they say) milliseconds matter. (saying this for those who wonder why they need  these settings). I did have it capped at 60 last year, but can't tell the difference at 40 other than with PBR the fans don't run as loud at 40.

Yeah and I had a bug with the Firestorm frame limiter even, for whatever reason in one version I was using I had to set the limiter to 2x the value I wanted (e.g. limit to 120fps on the slider to limit at 60fps). In the end I just stopped using it and use the frame limiter in the Nvidia control panel.

I had used VSync before many versions ago and noticed that every few minutes I would get frame rate dips to 10-20fps for 5-10 seconds before it would rise right back up to 60+ as well. As soon as I stopped using VSync it stopped doing it.

 

 

Edited June 22 by AmeliaJ08

[brodiac90]

10 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Did you try disabling VSync? Latest Nvidia driver?

latest drivers yes, and I tried turning off VSynch and limiting frame rate that way and saw marginal improvement. 

[steeljane42]

1 hour ago, brodiac90 said:

Sure, here and ty for the help! 

 

Shadows are always a major fps killer, pre and post pbr alike. You probably should be getting more than 25 with just two avatars around unless it's really heavy on other things around, but that would be the first thing to turn off. Reflection coverage seems to have a pretty big impact on the GPU especially if there's lots of water (mesh one too) around. Try to put manual only and see if it makes it any better.

[elleevelyn]

57 minutes ago, brodiac90 said:

Think it might have to do with my display. I play SL on my 55' TV 🙃

probably. The less screen pixels (lower resolution) the faster it wilil draw

[Rick Nightingale]

1 hour ago, brodiac90 said:

I play SL on my 55' TV

What resolution? 'Standard' HD/2k/1920x1080? Or 4k/3940x2160? (Or are you rich and got an 8K???)

Standard HD is less than I run, and should give good framerate.

[Quistess Alpha]

haven't really decided on how I feel about the visuals yet, but HUZZAH, IT WORKS PASSABLY ON LINUX!

Kokua (my viewer of choice) had an earlier pbr release, but the linux version has a bug that made it not work with my graphics card, so, performance was unusable.

The new firestorm release seemed to stutter a lot the first time I opened it up and I was really disappointed, turning the graphics to low didn't work, but after starting it a second time (with the graphics ~starting on low) it miraculously worked perfectly. I don't like firestorm's UI, but it's good to know I have an alternative if kokua stops fully supporting linux.

ETA: and I can even get just under 90 fps on 'ultra' graphics preset. There may just be a bug when logging in for the first time, or when under heavy load from caching new objects (had never used firestorm before on this PC) that doesn't clear until relog.

Edited June 22 by Quistess Alpha

[Carolyn Zapedzki]

I have just had a fiddle with it in the SL viewer, the PBR texture looked good in the store, put it on my own floor and  quite a bit of difference, went from black in their store which I wanted to blue on my floor. I used their windlights as well that they give away for free. Performance/framerate were fine. But don't see the point in it until everyone's viewer is PBR enabled, or else they will just see plywood!

Maybe I was doing something wrong, I really don't know.

[Carolyn Zapedzki]

20 minutes ago, MadameGloom Ravenwood said:

I have just had a fiddle with it in the SL viewer, the PBR texture looked good in the store, put it on my own floor and  quite a bit of difference, went from black in their store which I wanted to blue on my floor. I used their windlights as well that they give away for free. Performance/framerate were fine. But don't see the point in it until everyone's viewer is PBR enabled, or else they will just see plywood!

Maybe I was doing something wrong, I really don't know.

Just downloaded the Firestorm PBR viewer, and wow, my fans are louder than I have ever heard from it before. So just using the older viewer now. The SL PBR viewer didn't cause the fans that much work.