Does anyone know when the next PBR update to fix all the hot dramas is coming out?

[AtomicShrink]

I'm sorry but PBR sucks, PCP or Mac, it just sucks! Does anyone know if LL and FS are trying to fix this hot mess?

[Aishagain]

"Hot mess"?  If you mean the heat caused by GPUs running much more intensively that they did, the most likely answer is that it cannot be fixed it is an innate characteristic of PBR that is uses more resource.

The Bugs that remain on the LL viewer will be addressed and squashed in time - just how much time is open to speculation.

The Bugs that afflict the new PBR Firestorm are being worked on even now and progress is being made.  When will they be sorted...."SOON"

There is one expensive solution to many overheating issues - buy a more capable computer.  Easy if you have the money, not easy if you don't.

After 6 hours online today my PC was very warm and it is what most folk consider "top-end" so I as sure many have it worse.  It never got more that running warm in the past.

Edited June 24 by Aishagain
spelling: I kan't spel.

[Jase Devin]

I'm sure they are trying to fix, no doubt.

Should be in Alpha testing but its on the main download link, which is a Huge Mistake!

Think about a new user coming in and his/her impression is nothing loads, lag everywhere 10fps and then crashes.....

[AtomicShrink]

Aishagain, thank you for responding. As for my "hot mess," it has nothing to do with my computer heating up. My issue is the textures are all squares, nthing is rezzing properly, the lag is insane and y avi is just standing in an unpopulated place. That kind of hot mess.

[Jase Devin]

Well it does get hotter, if you pull up task monitor you will see your gpu being utilized 100% now vs 10-50% before.

[Aishagain]

@AtomicShrink are you using an Apple instrument? Or a WindowsPC/Laptop

[Baiphen Quintessa]

12 minutes ago, AtomicShrink said:

Aishagain, thank you for responding. As for my "hot mess," it has nothing to do with my computer heating up. My issue is the textures are all squares, nthing is rezzing properly, the lag is insane and y avi is just standing in an unpopulated place. That kind of hot mess.

That's my issue as well. I'm replying here because (for the first time since I came to the Forums) I'm terrified of the response I'd get on the other threads in regards to the new viewers. I'm not computer literate and I've been trying to make things run better through Google and what has been said here in the Forums. I'm trying. I'm a Mentor and I'm supposed to be able to help the new comers to Second Life and I'm in fear of them asking about PBR. I don't hate the new shiny, I just wish there was an option to use any viewer that doesn't have PBR already in place. That way I can irritate my sisters kids to help me when they (and I) have time to sit down and figure it out. I know that my laptop can handle PBR, but I don't know how to do it on my own. 

There are many threads about this and the overwhelming majority think that the SL users like myself are being tone deaf and unwilling to change. It isn't that. It's not having the know how to dig into our computers to make it work, and not having anyone to turn to to help us. 

[Jase Devin]

2 key things to do for the people you are trying to help.

If they newly updated to version 7 (pbr).

#1 Clear Cache 

#2 Whitelist the right files >>  https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

 

 

[Baiphen Quintessa]

34 minutes ago, Jase Devin said:

2 key things to do for the people you are trying to help.

If they newly updated to version 7 (pbr).

#1 Clear Cache 

#2 Whitelist the right files >>  https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

 

 

Thank you! I'll let them know to try that. That's definitely a step in the right direction.

[AmeliaJ08]

8 hours ago, Baiphen Quintessa said:

That's my issue as well. I'm replying here because (for the first time since I came to the Forums) I'm terrified of the response I'd get on the other threads in regards to the new viewers. I'm not computer literate and I've been trying to make things run better through Google and what has been said here in the Forums. I'm trying. I'm a Mentor and I'm supposed to be able to help the new comers to Second Life and I'm in fear of them asking about PBR. I don't hate the new shiny, I just wish there was an option to use any viewer that doesn't have PBR already in place. That way I can irritate my sisters kids to help me when they (and I) have time to sit down and figure it out. I know that my laptop can handle PBR, but I don't know how to do it on my own. 

There are many threads about this and the overwhelming majority think that the SL users like myself are being tone deaf and unwilling to change. It isn't that. It's not having the know how to dig into our computers to make it work, and not having anyone to turn to to help us. 

If you know your laptop is capable of it - and it should be so long as it has a dedicated Nvidia GPU (usually there would be a sticker with "Geforce RTX" or something on it) - there is really nothing you need to do. A PBR viewer should install, fire up and work fine. You may want to look at the graphics preference panel and enable/disable features.

With any major release it is sometimes wise to clear the cache though, I don't know what version you are coming from so could not say if this is a good idea but at the absolute worst all this will cause is slow rezzing for a little while as the places you visit/people you see/stuff you see re-downloads.

 

[JeromFranzic]

14 hours ago, Aishagain said:

"Hot mess"?  If you mean the heat caused by GPUs running much more intensively that they did, the most likely answer is that it cannot be fixed it is an innate characteristic of PBR that is uses more resource.

The Bugs that remain on the LL viewer will be addressed and squashed in time - just how much time is open to speculation.

The Bugs that afflict the new PBR Firestorm are being worked on even now and progress is being made.  When will they be sorted...."SOON"

There is one expensive solution to many overheating issues - buy a more capable computer.  Easy if you have the money, not easy if you don't.

After 6 hours online today my PC was very warm and it is what most folk consider "top-end" so I as sure many have it worse.  It never got more that running warm in the past.

I average about 80-85c for CPU temps, and about 65-70 for GPU temps. On an older laptop with 8th Gen i7 CPU and GTX 1050 GPU. I keep the cooling system clean, thermal paste the CPU and GPU once a year and use a cooling pad with five fans at full speed (3500 RPM). I run at high settings, and the average temps I listed are for Windows 11. I can get it to run slightly cooler in Linux, partly due to a less intensive desktop environment (LXqt/Lubuntu) and fewer OS resources needed to operate overall. 

It doesn't matter much which viewer I use for PBR... FS, LL, Alchemy, Cool VL, Megapahit, Kokua... more or less the same in all of them in the temps dept.

You don't like the hot temps? Use Cool VL with PBR and ALM turned off, run on the iGPU only, low-mid graphic settings and 96m draw distance. 😃 (I did this recently with a 12 year old laptop BTW... you may have seen the screen shot in one of the avatar threads... Bladencat body.)

Edited June 25 by JeromFranzic

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, JeromFranzic said:

You don't like the hot temps? Use Cool VL

Wait, is THAT why it's called "Cool VL" viewer?  Because it doesn't require your CPU to get as hot?

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

25 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Wait, is THAT why it's called ”Cool VL” viewer?  Because it doesn't require your CPU to get as hot?

Nah, it's ”Cool”, because it's damned Cool stuff !

But it's pretty Hot stuff too... Thus the burning ice logo/icon.

Note that I was on the verge to rename it ”Burning Ice” when LL came up with their ”no SL no Second no Life” policy for third party name branding (back in that time, my viewer was named ”Cool SL Viewer”)... But I thought that a minor change in the name was better to avoid users getting lost (the viewer already existed for two full years).

[Jackson Redstar]

switch on FPS limiting to keep the GPU from pegging 100%. I have mine set around 32. Sometimes I'll uncork the beast if I'm shooting an event or something, but otherwise everyday use 30fps is fine for a smooth experience. if it still is struggling just switch off shadows that will help alot

[AtomicShrink]

What I meant by a hot mess, was literally a ***** show. But everyone interpreted this as something to do with temperature of the computer. I understand everyone's having computer issues. I'm having other issues. Textures are not working. Land controllers are not working, the lag is notorious, that kind of a hot mess last ***** show.

[Aishagain]

1 hour ago, AtomicShrink said:

I'm having other issues. Textures are not working. Land controllers are not working, the lag is notorious,

So, have you whitelisted all the .exe files and three folders that are the holy grail?  What OS and hardware are you using? (Top UI menu "about Firestorm" (other viewers are available).

I'm not sure how many times you've been asked this but without it no one can genuinely troubleshoot the issue unless they're clairvoyant.

Edited June 26 by Aishagain

[animats]

Well, I installed Firestorm 7 on two Linux boxes (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS), and it worked perfectly. It's sluggish on the machine with the old NVidia 640 GPU, but it doesn't crash or mis-draw. The machine with the NVidia 3070 works great.

If you think you have GPU hardware problems, run The Valley. This is an Unreal Engine benchmark and test. It looks like a game, but it's just nice scenery with a tour; there's no gameplay. The Valley displays, among other things, GPU temperature. If your GPU temperature gets too high running The Valley, you probably need, at least, a fan upgrade.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

LL is working on it, there's already some fixes committed and PR'd that should help with VRAM consumption, system memory consumption, mirror culling issues, and overall performance (one PR in particular is showing doubled performance in some situations).

Most of their ongoing fixes are public and can be found on their Github: secondlife/viewer: 🖥️ Second Life's official client (github.com)

[Flea Yatsenko]

On 6/24/2024 at 7:53 PM, AtomicShrink said:

Aishagain, thank you for responding. As for my "hot mess," it has nothing to do with my computer heating up. My issue is the textures are all squares, nthing is rezzing properly, the lag is insane and y avi is just standing in an unpopulated place. That kind of hot mess.

The slow rezzing has nothing to do with PBR. It's from an update to another part of the viewer they made that absolutely killed rez times. No amount of upgrading your computer or anything is going to help with that. You just have to wait on LL. Which is a huge bummer because I actually like PBR but I won't use the new viewers beyond building on my platform because the rez times for textures are so bad. The only thing that might help is antivirus whitelist for the cache but I have no AV since I'm on Linux and it still rezzes poorly.

Lag isn't specific enough, do you mean things just not responding well or do you mean your frame rate? SL always seems to be kind of a mess for an SLB, I think Lindens are too busy partying.

[Henri Beauchamp]

33 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

The slow rezzing has nothing to do with PBR. It's from an update to another part of the viewer they made that absolutely killed rez times. No amount of upgrading your computer or anything is going to help with that. You just have to wait on LL. Which is a huge bummer because I actually like PBR but I won't use the new viewers beyond building on my platform because the rez times for textures are so bad. The only thing that might help is antivirus whitelist for the cache but I have no AV since I'm on Linux and it still rezzes poorly.

Try the Cool VL Viewer... I did not backport LL's totally lame changes to the texture fetcher; LL removed the priority queue (in which most important textures are always fetched and decoded first) to make it a simpler (and totally naive/inadequate) ”first queued, first fetched” (FIFO) queue, and even worse, when a texture cannot fetch ”in time”, it gets re-queued at the end of that FIFO queue (meaning important textures can take forever to get fetched) !

Instead, I much improved the old texture fetcher and texture discard bias algorithms, and also implemented an auto-cleanup algorithm for unused ”no delete” textures that would otherwise be kept clobbering your VRAM for the full viewer session duration.

Edited Saturday at 01:24 PM by Henri Beauchamp