Linden Lab your PBR is giving me a headache

[vacotton]

I couldn't upgrade my trusty old Dell Inspiron with it's I7 4790 to Win 11 so I went out and got a new Del with 14th gen I7 and an Nvidia RTX4060TI GBU and 16 gigs of ram.  I was a happy camper getting 400 down and 60 fps (throttled).

Then the Ttnkerers at Firestorm released this latest abomination which brought my system to its knees.  Now, if it happened to me with a very strong system, I can only imagine what others with older systems are experiencing. 

So I will logged on to the Firestorm group and told them that the job wasn't finished and was met with bullying language from those folks about insulting their precious brainchild.  I simply responded by telling them that in my humble opinion the job wasn't finished.  Full stop.  And the job IS not finished. 

So I rolled back to the prior iteration and all is well for the time being until I am forced to install that trainwreck of a viewer.  I am not going to beat a dead horse as the preceding posts tell it all.

Cheers,

Jack Aubrey, Host Hall of Famer and 10 year veteran of SL

[CaithLynnSayes]

11 minutes ago, JUSTUS Palianta said:

Attack of the screaming barbie.

Sorry if you don't like facts kiddo. I typically don't sugarcoat things.

You "feeling" attacked doesn't mean i actually did attack you.  

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, CaithLynnSayes said:

That's a bit overly dramatic, isn't it? Firestorm has recently been released with PBR. It took them a while but that's beside the point. Firestorm has this policy that they keep 3 (or 4, i forget) previous versions alive. So the 'suddenly and unexpectedly"-aspect of what you say is not as sudden as you may claim it to be.

It is unexpected for most people -- until VERY recently, I was mostly hearing the answer "Pabst Blue Ribbon?" from people I was asking in-world about PBR. And most of those people have almost NO idea why the new FS they've just downloaded doesn't work as well as the old one, and makes the world look like crap for them.

Absolutely this will eventually sort itself out. People will upgrade computers (although some will simply leave). PBR isn't the end of the world as we know it -- it's manageable. And, as I've been saying for literally a half year plus here, I understand and support its implementation (although the roll out sucks).

But explaining how to manage it is rather more helpful than patting them on the shoulder and explaining that in two years this will all seem very normal.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, vacotton said:

10 year veteran of SL

Only 10! ❤️

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

5 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

OP has had expensive Quadro graphic cards worth over 1000 USD in his PC to run Second Life to get the best possible graphics. It made little difference in my experience so now I look for normal standard graphic cards which cost 3 times less and work fine.

The main reason I use standard graphic cards is not to save on their cost but because I need to have a similar experience as regular Second Life users. When customers tell me they experience lag for example I need to be able to detect this. If I have a system three times more powerful than an average user I will not experience the same and will not be able to properly detect what customers are complaining about.

I still think that my current graphics card should be more than fine enough to run Second Life at the moment. 

I also doubt that many update their graphics card every year so they can max it and run Second Life at highest settings. Only a certain amount of users does this.

As for complaining about plastic. I do not use Advanced Lighting and shadows and ocean water reflections. I strongly dislike when things look like plastic and and have always been able to just turn off these settings. I use standard Midday daylight without junk that burns my eyes because of saturation overload and the light being too hard.

When I log into a new viewer with PBR I expect things to look normal and I expect I have the option to set my graphics as I normally do and things need to look fine by default.

The image below is how I have things set on Midday, good water nothing shiny, no saturation and it looks good. Doesn't burn my eyes or causing me a headache.

 

Quadro cards are for professional applications; they won't improve Second Life performance because that's not what they're designed for. A semi-truck is more expensive than a passenger car and will pull much heavier loads but that doesn't mean it will go faster because that's not what it's designed to do.

You're contradicting yourself - you say you want to "experience what your customers experience" but you turn off Advanced Lighting, which is has been the default for even mid-range systems for years. If there are excessively shiny things on your land that means that you bought them and didn't realize it.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

14 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

I have no performance drop whatsoever on the LL viewer. I did experience a huge performance drop on the beta PBR FS viewer. So not sure why LL should be explaining how to fix performance in the FS viewer. 

Now to be clear, my performance with the newly released FS PBR viewer is very good.

One of the problems we've had here over and over again has been the fact that we are almost all of us using slightly different configurations of hardware and/or operating system. I have a massively out of date CPU, but a really good GPU. I can get top-notch graphic quality when I need it in most contexts, but performance is spottier just doing things like shopping. (I also have a newish laptop with an Adeon GPU that is pretty good, but for some reasons doesn't handle crowds well.)

So, I'm always a bit leery about basing conclusions on personal experience: what is working for me may well not be working for someone else.

I think the LL viewer actually HAS done a good job of minimizing the performance hit -- but for me it's still there. I need to play with the new FS viewer a bit more, but it is not as good so far. Black Dragon, weirdly, is actually very good.

But I am very aware from talking to others here, in-world, and in various in-world group chats, that there are people whose computers are struggling. In many or most cases, those problems are fixable, or at least can be ameliorated somewhat. But someone, and it really should be LL, should be telling people how to do that. LL is NOT doing itself any favours by its failure to respond to the noisy panic I'm hearing all over the place right now.

Edited June 24 by Scylla Rhiadra
Typo of course

[CaithLynnSayes]

6 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Quadro cards are for professional applications; they won't improve Second Life performance because that's not what they're designed for.

I was going to say that, but i think OP hates me enough as it is already, lol.

[Count Burks]

4 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Quadro cards are for professional applications; they won't improve Second Life performance because that's not what they're designed for. A semi-truck is more expensive than a passenger car and will pull much heavier loads but that doesn't mean it will go faster because that's not what it's designed to do.

You're contradicting yourself - you say you want to "experience what your customers experience" but you turn off Advanced Lighting, which is has been the default for even mid-range systems for years. If there are excessively shiny things on your land that means that you bought them and didn't realize it.

I never had a good experience with advanced lighting, for me it is a useless resource drain. I prefer speed since I have to navigate a lot. People are allowed to configure their viewer as they wish for their needs. This is a post about logging in after a so called "enhancement update" and being confronted with a product that is subpar in standard because of poor coding.

The entire "your graphics card isn't good enough anymore" excuse I am not buying. For nearly two decades you could configure the viewer to your needs but now they force a so called advanced lighting model on you that you no longer can turn off.

I am sure that plenty will be said about this and Linden Lab their programmers will be forced to further work on this.  

[Blush Bravin]

6 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

One of the problems we've had here over and over again has been the fact that we are almost all of us using slightly different configurations of hardware and/or operating system. I have a massively out of date CPU, but a really good GPU. I can get top-notch graphic quality when I need it in most contexts, but performance is spottier just doing things like shopping. (I also have a newish laptop with an Adeon GPU that is pretty good, but for some reasons doesn't handle crowds well.)

So, I'm always a bit leery about basing conclusions on personal experience: what is working for me may well not be working for someone else.

I think the LL viewer actually HAS done a good job of minimizing the performance hit -- but for me it's still there. I need to play with the new FS viewer a bit more, but it is not as good so far. Black Dragon, weirdly, is actually very good.

But I am very aware from talking to others here, in-world, and in various in-world group chats, that there are people whose computers are struggling. In many or most cases, those problems are fixable, or at least can be ameliorated somewhat. But someone, and it really should be LL, should be telling people how to do that. LL is NOT doing itself any favours by its failure to respond to the noisy panic I'm hearing all over the place right now.

Even with the new FS PBR release, my computer performs much much better on the LL viewer. I'm hoping that FS can tweak their build enough to get to the same level of performance as the LL PBR viewer. But I'm not gonna hold my breath. I still prefer FS over the LL viewer, but the LL viewer has always performed better for me than FS. And that's on this and my past two computers. So, this has been the case in both viewers for years. It didn't start with PBR.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

21 minutes ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

Sorry if you don't like facts kiddo. I typically don't sugarcoat things.

You "feeling" attacked doesn't mean i actually did attack you.  

You've been a beta tester for quite a while and did your complaining about PBR in the beta group channel when you had a choice which viewer to use. Now you have it sorted for yourself and that's wonderful but why you complaining about those whom it is now being forced on and trying to figure out how they are going to manage it? Let them voice their concerns as it was to the beta testers in all the months preceding the full release.

[Love Zhaoying]

16 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

One of the problems we've had here over and over again has been the fact that we are almost all of us using slightly different configurations of hardware and/or operating system. I have a massively out of date CPU, but a really good GPU. I can get top-notch graphic quality when I need it in most contexts, but performance is spottier just doing things like shopping. (I also have a newish laptop with an Adeon GPU that is pretty good, but for some reasons doesn't handle crowds well.)

Plus, nobody brings up network speed (besides me, occasionally) in this thread as a potential factor. Maybe I'm dumb. There, I said it!!

Or, like in the Nirvana song "Dumb", maybe I'm just happy.

 

[PermaRuthed]

4 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Shoulder Devil: "Aren't you going to say anything about the profile picture?"

Shoulder Angel: "We are going to say NOTHING about the profile picture. ABSOLUTELY. NOTHING."

[CaithLynnSayes]

2 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

16 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Quadro cards are for professional applications; they won't improve Second Life performance because that's not what they're designed for. A semi-truck is more expensive than a passenger car and will pull much heavier loads but that doesn't mean it will go faster because that's not what it's designed to do.

You're contradicting yourself - you say you want to "experience what your customers experience" but you turn off Advanced Lighting, which is has been the default for even mid-range systems for years. If there are excessively shiny things on your land that means that you bought them and didn't realize it.

I never had a good experience with advanced lighting, for me it is a useless resource drain. I prefer speed since I have to navigate a lot. People are allowed to configure their viewer as they wish for their needs. This is a post about logging in after a so called "enhancement update" and being confronted with a product that is subpar in standard because of poor coding.

The entire "your graphics card isn't good enough anymore" excuse I am not buying. For nearly two decades you could configure the viewer to your needs but now they force a so called advanced lighting model on you that you no longer can turn off.

I am sure that plenty will be said about this and Linden Lab their programmers will be forced to further work on this.  

 

Oh you sum it up so nicely. You're actually admitting you don't want to use ALM because you don't like it while most of us have been happily living with it for years.

 

You say it's "useless"..

 

It's slightly annoys me that you almost arrogantly suggest you can't go back while you actually can. You can set your graphics in a near similar way then what FS was last week. It won't be completely the same, but close to it.

 

I think it's a bold statement to call what you don't like bad coding. You remind me of my grandpa. Sweet old man but he yells at just about anything new and different these days. I'm sure you won't mind if the vast majority will dismiss just about anything you say. Specially me since you've demonstrated a lack of understanding of graphics cards and repel new things like they are a something that can kill you.  

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, Dorientje Woller said:

Does RockStar provides you with new GPU with each update and addition of Grand Theft Auto?

No, they don't.

But...

Rockstar ae not STUPID. They pay attention to useful information, such as Steam's regular "Hardware Survey" results, about what kind of PC's games players actually use.

Rockstar generally don't ty to exclude the majority off their customer base.

LL on the other hand, by comparison...

 

Edited June 25 by Zalificent Corvinus

[CaithLynnSayes]

13 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

You've been a beta tester for quite a while and did your complaining about PBR in the beta group channel when you had a choice which viewer to use. Now you have it sorted for yourself and that's wonderful but why you complaining about those whom it is now being forced on and trying to figure out how they are going to manage it? Let them voice their concerns as it was to the beta testers in all the months preceding the full release.

In the early stages PBR was really not ready at all. As time evolved it got better. It's still not there yet all the way, but i'm excited about what it will eventually be.

I think I've made it clear that i'm open minded about improvements (yes, that's what this is) because that's why i beta test this viewer and share my thoughts on it to the developers.

I am not complaining about people being "forced" and I've said it before, they can still quite happily use FS for close to about 2 more years the old way. By then things will have become better.

Edited June 24 by CaithLynnSayes
Giant typo. I hope not too many of you saw this, it was very embarrassing!

[Irina Forwzy]

39 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It is unexpected for most people -- until VERY recently, I was mostly hearing the answer "Pabst Blue Ribbon?" from people I was asking in-world about PBR. And most of those people have almost NO idea why the new FS they've just downloaded doesn't work as well as the old one, and makes the world look like crap for them.

Absolutely this will eventually sort itself out. People will upgrade computers (although some will simply leave). PBR isn't the end of the world as we know it -- it's manageable. And, as I've been saying for literally a half year plus here, I understand and support its implementation (although the roll out sucks).

But explaining how to manage it is rather more helpful than patting them on the shoulder and explaining that in two years this will all seem very normal.

Jumped on the bandwagon, thought I'd crash.  I downloaded this firestorm in my D drive rather than C.  I am playing it now, performance wise I see about the same as I did before 50-60 FPS with high-graphics.  But everything that's PBR looks dark as heck even when I shift between all of my PBR Environments.

So not even sure what's going on but it does seem like something is not jiving.

The answer to everyone is "buy another PC" but then I've seen and known of scenarios where people get a new pc that's from a store with a top of the line graphic card and are sitll in similar boat.   This needed to be slowed down enough on initial roll out with potential tutorials.

[Theresa Tennyson]

2 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

No, they don't.

But...

Rockstar ae not STUPID. They pay attention to useful information, such as Steam's regular "Hardware Survey" results, about what kind of PC's games players actually use.

Rockstar generally don't ty to exclude the majority off their customer bae.

LL on the other hand, by comparison...

 

...has data on the computers and settings that Second Life users are actually using on the service.

[Irina Forwzy]

2 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

...has data on the computers and settings that Second Life users are actually using on the service.

Clearly not enough when Rockstar has more active users playing their game franchises than we do.  So her point in this stands.

 

[Paul Hexem]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

No, of course not.

But I'd expect better from my local governance than to have them mindlessly sneer that it's obviously my unwillingness to move into the future, rather than my straightened financial state, that's the issue.

See, the problem is you're giving people the benefit of the doubt. You're expecting us to give them the benefit of the doubt. Said people then turn around and make an incredibly stupid post detailing that they shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 hours ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

I can't speak of the SL Viewer because i barely use it, but Firestorm is smart enough to detect what graphics settings should be ok-ish to start with and give you a reasonable experience.

No, it's not.

In a post not that many weeks ago, a well known FS dev admitted that today, FS uses EXACTLY the same criteria for setting "default graphics settings" as the Official Fail Viewer.

An LL policy best described as "See more, but see it utterly crap".

Using the default graphics settings, straight out of the box, with Fail-Viewer or new unimproved Bloatstorm, is whats referred to technically as:

"Bloody Stupid"

 

3 hours ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

Speaking of graphics cards. It doesn't have to be a new one, you know. Just google around foor good refurbished ones or something. they usually are a fraction of the price of a new one. Steer very clear of cards that have mined bitcoin. Those are thrashed

And how exactly do you tell if a 2nd hand GPU cad has been thrashed to death mining ArseCoin? 

Oh that's right... It'll be a high end 20x0 or 30x0 GPU, that's been "reconditioned".

And NEVER buy a covid-era 3080/3090, no matter how cheap it looks. THOSE wee the ones they rushed production on to meet ArseCon Mining demands, where they used the WRONG thinness of thermal pads in side to connect the gpu/vram chips to the heat sink bars, so the cads un 20 deg F hotter than they ae supposed to, right up at 105 deg F, which is the border where the cards performance starts to tank from heat induced failure.

There's a wonderful tech video about it on Youtube, showing the problem, and how to dissemble the card and replace the thermal pads, and how that knocks 20 deg F off the overheating problem.

 

Problem is, you CAN'T tell if a 30x0 series card on ebay is one with the right thermal pads or the wrong thermal pads, by looing at the casing.

 

3 hours ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

I just gave an example of how you can upgrade cheaply. All that's required of you is to use a little common sense when buying.

Common sense says "Don't listen to screaming barbie".

 

Edited June 25 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

 

No, of course not. Nor am I expecting LL to 1) hold back on updates because people can't afford new hardware, or 2) provide new GPUs.

What I DO expect is something a little less tone-deaf and insensitive to people who can't afford new computers (or GPUs) than the above "you want to stay in the past" post.

No, people don't want to "stay in the past." We'd ALL love shiny new computers with the latest NVidia "WowXXX.60 GPU" installed. The brutal (and it can be literally brutal) reality is that there are lots of people surviving pay cheque to pay cheque out there.

 

A lot of your posts on these topics have a certain "Think of the children!" feel.

I am not as heartless as I may come across; I care about the children.

But sometimes they're actually children...

Annnnd sometimes they're just big babies.

Many people who are the most vocal with their complaints have computers that should be able to run the PBR viewer fine; at least as well as mine, which I'm pretty happy with. Some of them have problems of various kinds. Yes, we should help them try to fix them if possible. But in order to do that, they need to acknowledge that there might be something they should be doing on their end. And that not liking something doesn't constitute a crisis for anyone else.

[Theresa Tennyson]

10 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Common sense says "Don't listen to screaming barbie".

Theresa Tennyson cups her fist over her chin and looks up and to the right.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

20 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

...has data on the computers and settings that Second Life users are actually using on the service.

And unlike Rockstar, they just ignore iit.

Also, remember when they said they KNEW that 60% of us used Awful Mac whyPhones, without even bothering to ask us?

That's why they decided their FIIRST MobileLife Faii-viewer, the text only one that was 10 yrs out of date the day they launched it, was Awful Mac whyOS only.

I'm now permanently doubtful of any "What people use" figures quoted by LL.

 

[SylviElle Zaftig]

The absolute smugness of some people in this and other PBR posts is amazing. AMAZING I tell you.

[Amata Karas]

7 hours ago, Count Burks said:

...  Beautiful looking waterfalls with rock formations created by Alex Bader look horrific. It is like a lot of the content in world is now sprinkled with some type of plastic coating or varnish. ...

 

If only. The coating might keep our boats from taking on water. 🤣