Firestorm PBR Release Is Out

[Rick Nightingale]

29 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

I’m not sure why but I’ve not had any major issues especially with more recent betas.

Likewise with my 10yo GTX 1080 semi-gaming rig; even on my 2560x1440 monitor. The higher utilisation is obvious, especially the GPU, but that's what it's there for.

Dealing with what PBR looks like, reflection probes, EEP and all that isn't much a 'Firestorm issue' - it's an LL/SL issue.

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I really wonder how some people are thinking about this, and if they've fully compared Firestorm (and test what they complain about) with the official viewer, with similar graphics settings on both. For those still not aware of how it works... FS inherits all of this stuff from the official viewer's codebase. Do people really think the FS devs are trying to make it worse in Firestorm?

The FS PBR release was a long time coming because they were trying to make it better from the mess that they inherited from LL, both in FS directly and by getting LL to make needed changes from their end. That then makes the official viewer and all other TPVs based on it better too!

Yes, the FS team have their idea of what 'better' means, which differs in places to what LL thinks, and what other TPV makers consider better or important. That's why we have other TPVs from other people, just like everything else in life. There's no 'one size fits all'. Firestorm fits me. I've yet to try another viewer than has the range of things I like; each one is missing something that I don't want to miss.

How much interaction do we get with the official viewer's development process and team compared to what we can (if we choose) with Firestorm?

Edited Wednesday at 09:03 AM by Rick Nightingale

[Love Zhaoying]

If utilization seems high and your PC seems slower, just press the "Turbo" button!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

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

 

Brilliant suggestion!

 

LL Fail Devs release broken sh*te, Bloatstorm Devs imitate it, with equally broken sh*te, users should fubar their PC's and pretend the sh*te isn't broken.

Outstanding.

You like to mess with music, right?

If you bought a new electronic keyboard, and EVERY SINGLE KEY was out of tune, would you complain iit was out of key, and ask how to fix that?

Or would you de-tune all your other musical equipment, and shove an ice pick into each ear so you couldn't hear how out of tune everything was?

 

[Omegaslayer]

3 hours 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. 

as with all issues in second life some people are hit others aren't, i have never really crashed on second life but i hear other users crash all the bloody time.

[Flea Yatsenko]

On 6/23/2024 at 1:10 AM, Annie Evergreen said:

I really thought I had reached the end of my SL journey. I had done everything I could think of, followed all the tips, and it still wasn't working. I finally found a video online about changing the fan speeds on my alienware, 10 minutes later I'm getting great results like I had on the previous FS version. Temperature issue gone. So, yay!

I wonder if people are having laptops with bad cooling or dirty desktops or bad fan profiles and the higher GPU usage is causing their CPU and GPUs to thermal throttle when they get too hot, thus making them run terribly. Modern laptops have terrible cooling because they have to be 3mm thinner than the last generation.

5 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

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

 

How many people do alright in the black level and white saturation test here http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php

I've got a good enough monitor properly configured to barely see the 1 square in black and the 254 in white.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

How many people do alright in the black level and white saturation test here http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php

I've got a good enough monitor properly configured to barely see the 1 square in black and the 254 in white.

I can't see the first 2 or 3 black squares, which probably just means my contrast isn't adjusted well. I have an older monitor, but it's nice quality. 

[Starr Benazzi]

I had been reading about PBR for a while, so I downloaded the new firestorm. Things looked different, like not as bright in some cases. I think that with anything new there is a learning curve. But, then my avatar's hands disappeared and I could see through her neck. 🤔 So, I changed to a system avatar, and things were ok when I switched her back.  I read Alchemy Beta worked well with PBR so I tried it and it seems to have less issues. So far. The lighting was stable, and nothing disappeared. But firestorm has a bit more bells and whistles. So, I think I'm just going to chill. I did a computer upgrade last December, so my graphics card and processor are ok.For now!!  But for people who have older systems this probably will be a pain, and I think downloading a viewer that does well with your system is the best way to go. Some people don't care about shininess, so I think getting all upset is counterproductive to having fun, doncha think?  So I'll switch back and forth until I find which settings and viewer I like. And honestly, I DO like Alchemy Beta better so far! I've been on SL for a long time so I'm not leaving anytime soon. Just use the best settings that works best for YOUR system and you, personally. As for me, I love really good graphics and performance so I'll just adapt to this or go back to where I'm happiest in my settings. It's not the viewers fault so we need to adapt, or revert back for a bit. I'm not a creator, so I can't speak for them, it's just me speaking for myself, hoping this might help someone! 😊

Edited Wednesday at 03:20 PM by Starr Benazzi

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I wonder if people are having laptops with bad cooling or dirty desktops or bad fan profiles and the higher GPU usage is causing their CPU and GPUs to thermal throttle when they get too hot, thus making them run terribly. Modern laptops have terrible cooling because they have to be 3mm thinner than the last generation.

People do not clean their laptops. At most they may sometimes half-heartedly wipe dorito crumbs from them before they give them to me.

Basically every laptop I open is choked with fluff. Manufactures do not make it clear that laptops need regular internal cleaning since of course they don't, you have to take the screws out and there's scary stuff inside.

Laptops without discrete GPUs can usually handle this situation for a number of years, laptops with discrete GPUs are generally gaming/workstation/ultrabooks that run at the bleeding edge and definitely cannot cope, even a little fluff blocking a heatsink is often enough to cause throttling issues.

Many of them are also not built to handle sustained thermal loads, it's simply not feasible without making them super chonky. They're usually configured with short power limits, even the workstation class ones to cope with this reality. 100+W combined TDP between CPU and GPU means they're going to have to throttle, usually the GPU is configured to be the priority thermal load and throttle less but it does rely on the heatsinks working at their best which they usually aren't.

Not to dissuade anyone though, you can definitely SL on a laptop with a discrete GPU. I do most of the time, it's fine but I also try and remember that every six months it needs to be opened, the heatsinks removed and cleaned thoroughly, fan blades all dusted, thermal paste replaced far too often etc. Most laptops will work well enough for gaming/GPU heavy stuff given this regular maintenance.

 

 

 

 

[Rick Nightingale]

4 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Manufactures do not make it clear that laptops need regular internal cleaning

Not cleaning makes them die quicker as well as roll off performance. Then we need to buy a new one after a few years... not that I would ever accuse manufacturers of planned obsolescence... 🤐

Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I did work in the IT industry with Dell and HP partnership for years and I still think the above.

I've never yet seen a laptop with an easily accessible (by normal people, not tech-heads like me) air duct, heat exchanger and fan. It could be done... but isn't. (Anyone know of one?)

Then we have the issue of cheap thermal paste and TIM, when even the expensive stuff has a finite life span of maybe five years moderate use; less if used heavily (and a year maybe on a buttcoin mining rig - be careful buying used GPUs from eBay!).

[Toothless Draegonne]

1 hour ago, Rick Nightingale said:

Not cleaning makes them die quicker as well as roll off performance. Then we need to buy a new one after a few years... not that I would ever accuse manufacturers of planned obsolescence... 🤐

Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I did work in the IT industry with Dell and HP partnership for years and I still think the above.

I've never yet seen a laptop with an easily accessible (by normal people, not tech-heads like me) air duct, heat exchanger and fan. It could be done... but isn't. (Anyone know of one?)

Then we have the issue of cheap thermal paste and TIM, when even the expensive stuff has a finite life span of maybe five years moderate use; less if used heavily (and a year maybe on a buttcoin mining rig - be careful buying used GPUs from eBay!).

The Asus TUF range seem to be pretty maintainable, and they even show how to take the back off and what order to remove and replace screws.

TIM compound replacement is another kettle of fish, but honestly that is a far more rare requirement on laptops, and probably best done by someone who is at least moderately qualified due to the usual lack of an IHS on most laptop chipsets.

[Modulated]

7 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

The Asus TUF range seem to be pretty maintainable, and they even show how to take the back off and what order to remove and replace screws.

TIM compound replacement is another kettle of fish, but honestly that is a far more rare requirement on laptops, and probably best done by someone who is at least moderately qualified due to the usual lack of an IHS on most laptop chipsets.

I dismantled a laptop with cooling issues some years ago to do that, for fun. I only ever did it the one time .lol So many screws, such wow!

[Rick Nightingale]

8 minutes ago, Modulated said:

I dismantled a laptop

Fun isn't it? I've done... quite a few. Sometimes I even didn't have any screws left over at the end (and hadn't even dropped them down the cracks in the floorboards).

I love it when they use thread locker on the screws 😣 although that was occasionally mitigated by watching someone else, who didn't know the trick, trying to unscrew those 😁

(The trick is to do a short, sharp shock to break the compound.)

[Starr Benazzi]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

People do not clean their laptops. At most they may sometimes half-heartedly wipe dorito crumbs from them before they give them to me.

Basically every laptop I open is choked with fluff. Manufactures do not make it clear that laptops need regular internal cleaning since of course they don't, you have to take the screws out and there's scary stuff inside.

Laptops without discrete GPUs can usually handle this situation for a number of years, laptops with discrete GPUs are generally gaming/workstation/ultrabooks that run at the bleeding edge and definitely cannot cope, even a little fluff blocking a heatsink is often enough to cause throttling issues.

Many of them are also not built to handle sustained thermal loads, it's simply not feasible without making them super chonky. They're usually configured with short power limits, even the workstation class ones to cope with this reality. 100+W combined TDP between CPU and GPU means they're going to have to throttle, usually the GPU is configured to be the priority thermal load and throttle less but it does rely on the heatsinks working at their best which they usually aren't.

Not to dissuade anyone though, you can definitely SL on a laptop with a discrete GPU. I do most of the time, it's fine but I also try and remember that every six months it needs to be opened, the heatsinks removed and cleaned thoroughly, fan blades all dusted, thermal paste replaced far too often etc. Most laptops will work well enough for gaming/GPU heavy stuff given this regular maintenance.

 

 

 

 

So true! Laptops usually aren't cleaned, and the thermal paste they use IS cheap! So, if you're going to keep a laptop, maintain it. Desktops, another story. So, my point is just go back to the favorite viewer that works, and forget about the new graphics.

 

[Starr Benazzi]

8 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Brilliant suggestion!

 

LL Fail Devs release broken sh*te, Bloatstorm Devs imitate it, with equally broken sh*te, users should fubar their PC's and pretend the sh*te isn't broken.

Outstanding.

You like to mess with music, right?

If you bought a new electronic keyboard, and EVERY SINGLE KEY was out of tune, would you complain iit was out of key, and ask how to fix that?

Or would you de-tune all your other musical equipment, and shove an ice pick into each ear so you couldn't hear how out of tune everything was?

 

Brilliant!

[SkylarRein1229]

On 6/21/2024 at 9:37 AM, William Gide said:

Not for Mac users. Or at least, not for me (and I'm running on a high-end Mac Mini, m2-pro, acquired a few weeks ago). For the first time in quite a while, the official SL viewer runs better than FS, which is choking on textures for some reason. I've attached some images of what my experience is like now with the FS PBR viewer. With the official viewer the texture loads are much snappier, which is the only time the official viewer has been faster than FS on texture loads on my home Mac in my entire SL lifetime. We won't even talk about what happens if I want to turn on shadows for a nicer snapshot.

I just deleted the new viewer and went back to the previous version. This is not a pleasant state of affairs for a supposedly supported platform. I realize this is much about decisions Apple has made, but it's still quite frustrating. I gather everyone out there with less snappy PCs are in the same boat. I do wonder how far LL thinks people will keep visiting if the tech costs keep mounting.

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

It may be your firewall.  Read up on this and try it

[SkylarRein1229]

On 6/21/2024 at 10:56 AM, Mr Antfarm said:

I'm surprised no one brought this up yet. If you use CalWL, or Nams Optimal Skin 2 be prepared to change windlights after you update. 

You can change your exposure in Avatar>Preferences>Graphics

[Arielle Popstar]

2 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Not to dissuade anyone though, you can definitely SL on a laptop with a discrete GPU. I do most of the time, it's fine but I also try and remember that every six months it needs to be opened, the heatsinks removed and cleaned thoroughly, fan blades all dusted, thermal paste replaced far too often etc. Most laptops will work well enough for gaming/GPU heavy stuff given this regular maintenance.

I've taken my share of laptops apart and even put them back together successfully but my normal method of cleaning is to just use a blast of air through the openings to dislodge debris and dust. When I do that on a fairly regular basis, it keeps my own laptops reasonably clean and dust free. I realize one has to go deeper then that for a client who likely brings it in for service every few years but a good air dusting semi annually work ok for me.

I do slide a thin screwdriver through the slots to stop the fans from spinning while shooting short blasts of air through.

[SkylarRein1229]

On 6/21/2024 at 11:38 AM, SylviElle Zaftig said:

Yeah, no thanks, just re-installed the last FS.

Too bright, which makes my head hurt (migraine level). I do use NAM's Optimal and when I changed it to Noon (legacy) it was nicer. But, FPS went down considerably. I am running - CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 8-Core Processor   (3900 MHz) / Memory: 65463 MB (Used: 1087 MB) /Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050/PCIe/SSE2 (8G), not the newest by any means but am getting 100+ FPS on my platform with Shadows on. 1TB Fiber up/down, I rarely ever have problems rezzing anything.

Ran new FS and at the most was getting 30FPS and textures were loading really slowly. TPing around made my mesh body/head invisible (Lelutka/reborn) and even spending 20 minutes after tping, the body/head never rezzed (weirdly enough my clothing did).

I hope this isn't something we HAVE to use in the future. I don't think my eyes can take the strain.

You can change the exposure in Avatar>Preferences>Graphics

[JeromFranzic]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I've taken my share of laptops apart and even put them back together successfully but my normal method of cleaning is to just use a blast of air through the openings to dislodge debris and dust. When I do that on a fairly regular basis, it keeps my own laptops reasonably clean and dust free. I realize one has to go deeper then that for a client who likely brings it in for service every few years but a good air dusting semi annually work ok for me.

I do slide a thin screwdriver through the slots to stop the fans from spinning while shooting short blasts of air through.

I blow out the dust from the exhaust with quick bursts of compressed air, and clean the internal fans free of dust with a soft brush used for cleaning photo lenses. Currently do this with three laptops. Much easier for me in the newer one I primarily use for SL and most other 3d programs. The older ones are lower end, 12 year old PC's... typing on one of them right now, with a Rufus* hacked Win11 install (with a valid license), the other one runs Lubuntu. 

If you use a cooling pad with fans, don't forget to swipe the dust off of those! 

*Rufus is a piece of software for Windows, used to create bootable OS installers onto small USB drives.
 

[Jonny Rudyard]

Been having some minor issues with v6.6 I hoped this would solve...but it's far worse. HUGE lag that wasn't there before (using same settings). FWIW I would avoid.

[shireena1]

Here's a list of other viewers for you to try out 😁   https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory

Edited Thursday at 03:02 AM by shireena1
I'm so over the "firestrom dont load on my pentium 2 mmx" threads ...

[PheebyKatz]

On 6/21/2024 at 4:17 PM, Sid Nagy said:

If Firestorm would just adopt the LL viewers engine and stay away from what is over their heads, the Firestorm viewer would have functioned as the Linden Lab viewer since day one of PBR and that is not too bad.
The Firestorm devs should stay with what they know: Fiddling a bit with the look and feel of the interface and rename functions.

I've tried other TPV's, some are good, but I'm just used to Firestorm. Every other viewer is missing something I like. Main drawback of FS is that every time I finally get it to run the way I want it to, they force me to use a newer release. I'm not looking forward to being forced to use the new release.

If the official viewer was still available for my operating system I would probably use it, at least for uploads and testing things. It just isn't available for my computer.

In my opinion, having the official viewer available for every OS would have been more worthwhile than making everything even shinier. Regardless of the viewer program, I'm going to turn off anything that makes my computer into a toaster, anyway. I'm not selling a kidney to get a machine that makes my dress-up dollies time look better than my eyesight could even recognize.

It's like HD 4K video, what use is that to me? I don't watch TV on the side of a barn, my screen is like, a cubit wide, LOL

Edited Thursday at 08:43 AM by PheebyKatz

[Ico Kiyori]

Update : Finally noticed what's up with the new viewer and how do PBR does work with it.

In short => I had my viewer setup at locked 60 FPS. For some reasons, even with mirrors turned off, I couldn't run the viewer at good framerate.

The reason is fairly easy to understand. My laptop can run at 165 hz. I do have Nvidia-G-Sync active.

With the fps limiter.. the viewer is constantly struggling. So if you do have the limite framerate active, please go and disable that. Went from 45-50 fps to 80-110+ from just doing this. Baffling to see that slider still a broken mess.

Also it is worth pointing out that, the Graphic Speed tool in the viewer, does revert back from default "Mirrors" (if you do have disable them in the graphics settings), but it does not for the Screen Space Reflection.. Weird.

Edited Friday at 12:09 AM by Ico Kiyori

[Amir Seoung]

I've read through some of the comments here (but not all 16) pages, and I had to go back to Firestorm 6.6 because of an issue I'm not seeing mentioned (so far in my limited scan of comments).

I am running a fairly powerful desktop (Ryzen 7900X, RTX 4080, 32GB RAM, fast NVMe drive), and with the new PBR Firestorm, I wasn't at all seeing a decrease in performance, except at Ultra settings, but even with the graphics turned way down, mirrors off, shadows off, my GPU is running at 100% and 10 degrees Celsius hotter than it was on the last viewer with Ultra settings.  Nothing I turned off seemed to change this, so I had to go back to the previous Firestorm.

Anyone else experiencing this?  I've no idea how to fix it.

[Daniele Tatham]

So, here is what i am thinking about this release, and why i had to switch back to the older version of Firestorm.

My PC isnt the newest, but i manage to run SL above 60 fps most of the time, and that was the same with the new version, after some tweaking. While the earlier automatic presets worked well for most people, i think, this time thats not the case. Seems the priority has been to show off the new super duper shiny stuff, nobody really has ever asked for. Maybe some have, but i guess they are a minority.

The two biggest flaws for me, who is working as a DJ in packed clubs with often 60+ people, is first of all that the viewer reacts like rubber. All inputs are delayed half a second or so and over time that drives me nuts and is unacceptable for me. AT ALL! And it happens with 100fps+, no matter where i am, even on my demo platform, thats at 2km height and empty. I am working with this viewer and that stresses the hell out of me. No new behaviour by the way. I had exactly that bug since the second Beta of PBR, and have mentioned it to the Beta group. It was so bad that i even stopped trying the beta versions.

Second: I understand and appreciate that SL is evolving. Not being an early adopter i am not eager to always have the newest shiny things only because they are new, but in the end i have mostly welcomed it, because you always gave us the oportunity to tweak things in a way it was acceptable, nice, or even amazing. But this new “look” can’t be tweaked. It is by far too bright and if you turn that down parts of the screen become just black holes. Plus the creepy light behaviour on water. I have a decent orange cloud EEP that looks so pretty around my stilt home but with PBR the water shines brighter than the sky and is RED instead of orange. Completely off how this could be released. Thats it? Really? Suggestions are i may fumble with my Monitor to make it look better, THATS NUTS! Because then i have other problems with other software. We need the ability to adjust The Picture. Completely: Brightness, contrast, color intensity the least.

I am a Firestorm User since the first version of Emerald Viewer and i feel sad that i have to write such criticism, because i cant even imagine how hard everyone has been working to make this work for all of us. So in the end, even if i may not be a Firestorm user anymore when the last version will be blocked one day, i also want to say thank you for the hard work!

Dani