Firestorm PBR Release Is Out

[graceblakeley]

Sometimes visiting this forum can be so depressing.

I don't know if I should feel grateful or suicidal for this heads-up of what's chundering down the track with this seemingly unstoppable update which will affect ALL SL users but which will likely be welcomed and appreciated and understood by so few. 

.. all the time wondering if our next TP attempt will fail while we lumber around turning in eighth-of-a-circle chunks to view this apparent improvement.

Surely there are more important underlying fundamentals to deal with which will improve SL for every player rather than this unnecessary effort which only adds to the myriad of Preference settings.

But you don't understand, Grace. You can soon see your SL world how it really is. 

Perhaps I don't want to.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

Back in the late 70's/early '80's there was a TV show called "WKRP in Cincinnati" about a radio station.

In one episode a DJ named Venus said he had gotten a job offer somewhere else. Everyone wanted Venus to stay so they offered him a raise and other enhancements.

Herb, the business manager, heard this and lied said that he'd gotten another job offer to try and get the same deal. And Herb was... Herb. So everyone just told him, "Hey, we ought to throw you party or something!"

I've been thinking about that a lot lately.

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

27 minutes ago, graceblakeley said:

I don't know if I should feel grateful or suicidal for this heads-up of what's chundering down the track with this seemingly unstoppable update

 

You definitely should not feel suicidal about a video game update. If you do, please seek help via suicide hotlines and your doctor. 

[Arielle Popstar]

49 minutes ago, graceblakeley said:

Sometimes visiting this forum can be so depressing.

I don't know if I should feel grateful or suicidal for this heads-up of what's chundering down the track with this seemingly unstoppable update which will affect ALL SL users but which will likely be welcomed and appreciated and understood by so few. 

.. all the time wondering if our next TP attempt will fail while we lumber around turning in eighth-of-a-circle chunks to view this apparent improvement.

Surely there are more important underlying fundamentals to deal with which will improve SL for every player rather than this unnecessary effort which only adds to the myriad of Preference settings.

But you don't understand, Grace. You can soon see your SL world how it really is. 

Perhaps I don't want to.

 

Do you really want to miss coming here to be told one is lazy, uneducated, backwards, impeding progress and that one should be willing to sell ones life blood for the hardware that will show the new eyecandy in living and loving color?

[discussionbot]

I feel like I might be of the minority here, I don't have time to much around with the PBR settings on FS. I happily hop on for a few minutes most days on FS 6.6, roam around on my rentals and log. Most of them are nice natural outdoor landscapes & docks, without a lot of heavy metal presence. 

I should probably be good holding out until a few more weeks with my non-PBR FS hopefully. Then either switch to a PBR viewer when I'm forced to update, or switch to non-PBR one if it's too much of a hit on visual quality. I run high/ultra quality on 240m draw distance, and I don't want to take the visual quality hit just because LL & friends want to force on this massive visual overhaul. Probably also helps me save money in the long run since I won't be as tempted to buy all the new PBR-only shiny metal things if/until I decide to upgrade. Godspeed everyone.

[graceblakeley]

2 hours ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

You definitely should not feel suicidal about a video game update. If you do, please seek help via suicide hotlines and your doctor. 

I'll bookmark the SLURLs if you have them and distribute among my alts, some of which are currently in comas so may be unresponsive.

Edited June 24 by graceblakeley
de-fibbed

[Marianne Little]

I downloaded the PBR viewer now. I have used SL default viewer with PBR before, but I can't stand the default viewer more than some minutes... But now that Firestorm has it, I am in.

So I am not impressed, I can't see much difference. I do not have any shiny and metallic to look at and admire. I have bought one landscaping set with PBR, but was not wow'ed. It was too shiny. I will see how PBR stuff look like in the SL21B.

How the viewer works... okay, I suppose. I am still fiddling with enviroments. I have not been exploring so much.

I can delete Windlight and EEP water settings, all look bad. I always want to live next to SL water, so I need water to look just as I want it to look. Lucky for me, Battlescars has some PBR enviroment settings, and they updated some of their 2023 packs for PBR. I got the redelivery and found some water I really like, so it is okay now.

For the sky, some EEP is still looking good for me. But only few.

It is going to take a while to get used to PBR and I do not see that it was needed, but LL want to make SL sound better and this is why we get this. Ugh, I need to learn how to edit things I buy with PBR, and that is going to be tough. I am so used to the tweaking colors and textures the old way.

Maybe PBR will look good when creators learn to tone it down. I still use a pack of boulders, made with materials. I have to take off Specular and set it to "none" because the creator used a white texture, so the rough surface on the boulders shine! The only rocks I want to shine like that, would be polished granite or similar sleek surfaces. So the creator and I disagree on how rough stone should look. Or, he decided to slap the highest specularity on so people should not be in doubt that he used materials. 🤷‍♀️

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

5 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

Or, he decided to slap the highest specularity on so people should not be in doubt that he used materials. 🤷‍♀️

That does seem to be an alarmingly common approach to using materials, let's just hope creators break that habit with PBR!

[Vivienne Schell]

13 hours ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

Like it or not, SL is a platform with vast amounts of user generated content, some good, some bad, some abhorrently terrible. As for "the latest AAA games", see attached image and enjoy. That's what "the latest AAA games" do when you tell them to actually use your GPU and don't turn some graphical options off. Do that with your viewer, and you will also see GPU utilisation drop.

The latest AAA games give me constant 120+ fps on high settings with a GPU workload of  average 50 %. This mess of a viewer gives me 15 fps max ( when i visit a bigger store, for example, not even crowded) on high settings in SL. Forget the gaslighting. This viewer is a mess. Alchemy and the official Linden viewer do better, not overwhelmingly better, but i get at least constant 25-30 fps (same settings, same place). Not to mention the 40-60 fps FS 6 gives me on ultra (same place) witha  GPU workload of 12 percent.

Edited June 24 by Vivienne Schell

[AmeliaJ08]

10 hours ago, discussionbot said:

I run high/ultra quality on 240m draw distance

If you're running those settings (with ALM enabled) you likely have a strong enough PC and will not notice any hit to performance. if anything you might see a performance improvement.

There's some bad information floating around as far as how new hardware needs to be to run this well, it runs more than adequately for most on GPUs from 2016.

 

Edited June 24 by AmeliaJ08

[Charlotte Bartlett]

11 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Do you really want to miss coming here to be told one is lazy, uneducated, backwards, impeding progress and that one should be willing to sell ones life blood for the hardware that will show the new eyecandy in living and loving color?

Or, come here and see some of us playing with the new updates, learning new things, breaking everything (including content), raising many bugs for the last 4 months to help get LL focused on things to make this better, creating brand new content and ideas, enjoying creativity and genuinely having a ton of fun with the little ball of new shiny available.

I know I am in camp positive, because frankly been here way too long to know the sky won't fall (yet), there will be opposing (and just as valid) views on every side.

Btw I am even worse in Camp Positive -  I AM USING A MAC, PEOPLE.   A MAC.
Take that with your GPU and CPU and integrated thingymawhatsits.

I can't even see tree leaves anymore, but by golly do my windows now shine.

Edited June 24 by Charlotte Bartlett

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Charlotte Bartlett said:

I can't even see tree leaves anymore, but by golly do my windows now shine.

A friend of mine was complaining about this phenomenon as well. What do you turn off to make that horrible thing happen?

 

BTW, I've just realized a use case for something you were talking about earlier: having a reflection probe associated with a particular item of furniture.

Mirrors. If they reflection probe they are using is too large, it will totally distort the perspective within the reflection.

[Charlotte Bartlett]

12 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

A friend of mine was complaining about this phenomenon as well. What do you turn off to make that horrible thing happen?

 

BTW, I've just realized a use case for something you were talking about earlier: having a reflection probe associated with a particular item of furniture.

Mirrors. If they reflection probe they are using is too large, it will totally distort the perspective within the reflection.

 It was a known bug with Macs raised back in March in PBR testing.  Effectively alpha blend was being a jerk with certain settings.
I just went on to Firestorm and I am seeing leaves today - no longer have the Jira but it's on the new feedback system and actually looks like it was fixed on 13 June! Wait no, was it?  No idea what tracked and complete means - but either way I am now seeing leaves with Ultra on and all the tick boxes with Firestorm's latest release.

- > https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/pbr-some-textures-with-transparency-do-not-render-in-alphablend-macos-sonoma-m1

Edited June 24 by Charlotte Bartlett

[xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane]

honestly its interesting, listen closely. my RTX 2080 Super, Intel Core I7 9700K, Gigabyte Z390 Motherboard and 16 Gigs of Ram. CAN RUN MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR 2020 ON ULTRA SETTINGS WITH TEMPS AT 75C AND NO STUDDERING!! now then... your telling me... FIRESTORM RUNS 80C PLUS on ultra with worst performance. yeah yeah yeah flight sim is newer but has raytracing. also flight sim has PBR enabled. so your telling me.. I can run something a hell lot more powerful than second life and its got better performance. also.. people are talking about head aches? brooo I have a 1080P curved moniter and never had issues but my eyes... feel soo strained like it feels like they hurt not like a eyes dry type of hurt but like the muscle hurts. anyways my input on the matter...

[Charlotte Bartlett]

31 minutes ago, xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane said:

honestly its interesting, listen closely. my RTX 2080 Super, Intel Core I7 9700K, Gigabyte Z390 Motherboard and 16 Gigs of Ram. CAN RUN MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR 2020 ON ULTRA SETTINGS WITH TEMPS AT 75C AND NO STUDDERING!! now then... your telling me... FIRESTORM RUNS 80C PLUS on ultra with worst performance. yeah yeah yeah flight sim is newer but has raytracing. also flight sim has PBR enabled. so your telling me.. I can run something a hell lot more powerful than second life and its got better performance. also.. people are talking about head aches? brooo I have a 1080P curved moniter and never had issues but my eyes... feel soo strained like it feels like they hurt not like a eyes dry type of hurt but like the muscle hurts. anyways my input on the matter...

Another poster wrote about AAA games and better frame rate than SL.

However, Second Life is a virtual world built off the back of user generated content from (mostly) hobbyists with no formal training.  Combined with a multitude of workarounds adopted over the years to "make it work".  So content is mostly highly unoptimized and that all impacts performance.  When you combine that across a region with avatars, to clothing, to mesh density,  to 1000 x 1024 textures on a small pin cushion etc all in "real-time", those different interactions of content is highly different to a professional studio closed platform output and games/simulators in that vein.

I am amazed SL can run at all considering what we users throw into it.  

Edited June 24 by Charlotte Bartlett

[xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane]

2 minutes ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

Another poster wrote about AAA games and better frame rate than SL.

However, Second Life is a virtual world built off the back of user generated content from (mostly) hobbyists with no formal training.  Combined with a multitude of workarounds adopted over the years to "make it work".  So content is mostly highly unoptimized and that all impacts performance.  When you combine that across a region with avatars, to clothing, to mesh density,  to 1000 x 1024 textures on a small pin cushion etc those different interactions of content is highly different to a professional studio closed platform output and game/simulators in that vein.

I am amazed SL can run at all considering what we users throw into it.  

I'm not even going to lie that was really beautifully written and I would totally agree as a gamer myself there are certain things that I may forget about or not even consider I suppose it was unfair took a pair of flight Sim to the world of Second Life, I'm not even going to pretend to know but in my own personal opinion from reading the comments and understanding the platform from my understanding is that Linden lab built a virtual world for *****s and giggles they didn't realize how far it was going to go now they have built an Empire over 21 years partly why I don't think they mess with their original Second Life viewer is because they don't have the Manpower they don't have the money. In fact reading the past 14 pages I think I saw somebody who basically said that they backed themselves in a corner they built this thing on what they could but in order to upgrade they just simply don't have the Manpower or the money or the infrastructure as a AAA Studio has. And while many people may be pissed off with the actions that they are taking making a mobile app or adding PBR support I do think maybe that's what's in the budget maybe that's what's in the Manpower? Honestly I've only been here for 4 years but within that 4-year frame this platform has to be one of the largest most intricate rabbit holes that one could go down in fact I think within the tech world I would say second life and petscop are one of the two biggest rabbit holes

[Omegaslayer]

15 hours ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

Another poster wrote about AAA games and better frame rate than SL.

However, Second Life is a virtual world built off the back of user generated content from (mostly) hobbyists with no formal training.  Combined with a multitude of workarounds adopted over the years to "make it work".  So content is mostly highly unoptimized and that all impacts performance.  When you combine that across a region with avatars, to clothing, to mesh density,  to 1000 x 1024 textures on a small pin cushion etc all in "real-time", those different interactions of content is highly different to a professional studio closed platform output and games/simulators in that vein.

I am amazed SL can run at all considering what we users throw into it.  

i'm amazed it didn't start crumbling sooner, it does feel like this new update is showing all the big cracks and is causing a lot of problems.

[AmeliaJ08]

There was me thinking all those years of being frustrated looking at low GPU utilization % in Firestorm were a bad thing but apparently not, some people liked it!

 

 

[Dafadilia Wayfarer]

I will be waiting to upgrade to the firestorm PBR enabled viewer for now. Just see how it unfolds a bit. Not because of my computer not handeling it, but concern about some of the blinding shine of some photos I've seen. I have ME which can cause actual physical pain if lighting is too bright or sharp. I avoid really bright places in sl just as in rl. My computer pages are always set to the darkest viewer option because of this.

So for now I'm being cautious until I see more photos and read about others' experiences. The forums as always are a great place for that!

[Dollie Pixelbottom]

It's painful on the eyes. 

[Love Zhaoying]

Have y'all considered adjusting the contrast and brightness on your monitor, and leaving SL settings alone? It could work!

 

[Vivienne Schell]

12 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Have y'all considered adjusting the contrast and brightness on your monitor, and leaving SL settings alone? It could work!

 

Thst won´t help much. What helps is:

- Use Alchemy, Cool or Linden Viewer instead of Firestorm (Doubles the performance)

- Fiddle with the driver settings (Nvidia Control Panel) for Firestorm instead of letting Firestorm deal with basic settings (Also can double the performance).

Something is wrong with this Firestorm release. It always was a bit slower and more power hungry than the other viewers, but with PBR the  difference is really striking.

[Cristiano Midnight]

4 hours ago, Dafadilia Wayfarer said:

I will be waiting to upgrade to the firestorm PBR enabled viewer for now. Just see how it unfolds a bit. Not because of my computer not handeling it, but concern about some of the blinding shine of some photos I've seen. I have ME which can cause actual physical pain if lighting is too bright or sharp. I avoid really bright places in sl just as in rl. My computer pages are always set to the darkest viewer option because of this.

So for now I'm being cautious until I see more photos and read about others' experiences. The forums as always are a great place for that!

The exposure setting in preferences can also help with this. 

[Cristiano Midnight]

18 hours ago, Omegaslayer said:

i'm amazed it didn't start crumbling sooner, it does feel like this new update is showing all the big cracks and is causing a lot of problems.

It’s weird…I have used every beta version of firestorm pbr on both a high end gaming PC (4090) and two gaming laptops that are several years old (one has a 2080 and one has a 1080). I’m not sure why but I’ve not had any major issues especially with more recent betas. What improved my performance the most was white listing. Also a clean install of the final release helped too. I’m not discounting that other people are having issues I just don’t know why there is such a wide gulf happening. 

Edited June 26 by Cristiano Midnight

[pizza7]

21 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

It’s weird…I have used every beta version of firestorm pbr on both a high end gaming PC (4090) and two gaming laptops that are several years old (one has a 2080 and one has a 1080). I’m not sure why but I’ve not had any major issues especially with more recent betas. What improved my performance the most was white listing. Also a clean install of the final release helped too. I’m not discounting that other people are having issues I just don’t know why there is such a wide gulf happening. 

that is easy, first: our hardware is incredibly varied.

                     second : the vast majority of computer users dont have much knowledge how to get best performance.

combine these and you get from 0 to 100 experience and everything inbetween.

eventually it will resolve itself as usual.

funny thread.