Pros/Cons PBR Viewer whats your take

[Jase Devin]

15 minutes ago, Modulated said:

There is more than enough hardware there to chew through PBR, it is likely configuration .

I don't have any problems running PBR on this machine. There is a performance hit big time though.

I worry for the rest of my fellow gamers that have mid/low machines 60%+  ?

[AmeliaJ08]

2 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

What i have is  My C : drive is an Internal SSD drive and my E: drive is a Sata Drive, I believe is what they are called, which I normally send my viewers when they ask for which drive I would like to install on, to my E: drive..

Then I have my F: drive which is my external SSD stick, which has a terabyte that I've been installing the PBR viewers to..

I'm gonna uninstall both of the firestorm viewers and save my settings and chats and then do a clean install of the FS PBR and see if that helps with my performance any, since the older version and the newer version seem to be sharing the C : drive files.

Because I have all my same settings and chatlogs in my PBR version that are also in the previous FS version. I just want to make sure there isn't something bogging down  because of them sharing the same thing is all.

I'll probably still put the PBR version back on the SSD external stick, because it's probably faster than the sata drive, from what people tell me..

I just really love ❤️ my firestorm and want to try everything to keep using it.. hehehe

Yeah unless you've told the viewer to put it elsewhere it will always choose C:\Users\<yourusername>\Appdata\Local\Firestorm_x64 (or whatever) to store cache files to. Settings, logs etc are always stored at C:\Users\Appdata\<yourusername>\Roaming\Firestorm_x64 (or whatever) too and persist between viewer updates, it just looks to see if there is anything there and if there is it will use whatever it finds. If there's nothing it will make new files.

 

Edited Friday at 07:29 PM by AmeliaJ08

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Jase Devin said:

CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-13600KF (3494.4 MHz)
Memory: 65376 MB (Used: 2498 MB)
Concurrency: 20
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 11 64-bit (Build 22631.3737)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 8192 MB

Oh yeah should be zero issues with a 3070

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Ceka Cianci said:

My biggest curiosity was if both the older and the newer versions sharing the same system files from the C : SSD drive would impact anything?

I know it used to be a thing where we had to uninstall in  the older days and do a clean, before installing a newer version.. I just wonder if it has any impact with two versions dipping into the same place.

It hasn't been a problem in my experience, I don't know if that applies to everyone since I pretty much always kept up to date with Firestorm versions and was running the PBR alpha/beta for a long time now but I haven't experienced any issues with having a large cache that is probably full of lots of old files.

The PBR betas/alphas also allowed you to increase it to 20GB so I immediately did that and it's pretty much full and has maybe all been overwritten at this point.

Old settings files from older version seemed to work just fine as well but of course old graphics presets didn't have all the new options so I've had to set those.

 

Edited Friday at 08:02 PM by AmeliaJ08

[BriannaLovey]

9 hours ago, Jase Devin said:

I actually run a Ram Disk which every know it all in this forum thinks is overkill or just crazy.

Can be found here https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/

But I go to crowded places and if you watch the behavior of SL then you will see why.

First Cache - Sl is constantly writing to cache, as new AV's enter the region its downloading and WRITING to the disk.

Second windows pagefile - when you run out of memory it writes to the pagefile (disk).

So what ends up happening is all is ok for a while in a crowded place, then about 30 min into it your memory gets filed and writes to page file, and while its writing to page file its writing to disk cache as well. This is a double whammy, at that point you cant pan around and fps drop a bit and things start to stutter.

This is on my older laptop, i also run on my main machine, but the older laptop really benefits a lot from this, you can see the difference in this benchmark, left is ramdisk. https://gyazo.com/2363c2e8935c6ce95ca8f79d8bc642ce

So if you are able write to disk cache 15x faster it helps heaps!

I do the exact same thing with /dev/shm on Linux. You do have to copy it back to your disk every time you shut your computer down if you want it to be persistent though, which can be either done manually or via bash scripting.

[Jaylinbridges]

11 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Old settings files from older version seemed to work just fine as well but of course old graphics presets didn't have all the new options so I've had to set those.

 

Well not exactly.  I switch between the old (6.6.17) and new (7.1.9) Firestorm all the time, and the Graphics presets do get messed up and changed when I switch viewer versions..  Even though I have different presets for PBR and non PBR, they all keep changing when I switch.  Partly because FS PBR insists on changing the presets when I log in.  It always forces mirrors on for instance, even though I turn Mirrors Off in the preset.  So I need to re Save the preset again.  Same with shadows - it ignores my old presets when I switch.

I have not found out what command line --set switch I need to make  a different preset folder for the old and the new.

As it is I have to redo some of the presets every time I switch, and then Save each one.  Just annoying extra work.

Edited Saturday at 07:23 AM by Jaylinbridges

[AmeliaJ08]

3 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

Well not exactly.  I switch between the old (6.6.17) and new (7.1.9) Firestorm all the time, and the Graphics presets do get messed up and changed when I switch viewer versions..  Even though I have different presets for PBR and non PBR, they all keep changing when I switch.  Partly because FS PBR insists on changing the presets when I log in.  It always forces mirrors on for instance, even though I turn Mirrors Off in the preset.  So I need to re Save the preset again.  Same with shadows - it ignores my old presets when I switch.

I have not found out what command line --set switch I need to make  a different preset folder for the old and the new.

As it is I have to redo some of the presets every time I switch, and then Save each one.  Just annoying extra work.

I just made the necessary additions to my presets and they seem to stick in 7.1.9. Haven't gone back to pre-PBR though so I guess that's it.

Would be good if you could specify presets by versions but then I don't think I have any intention of going back to pre-PBR releases so meh.

Edited Saturday at 07:27 AM by AmeliaJ08

[PatricaC]

Frame Rate Sucks and for us old timers who been in SL for yearswe are not even sure how to turn off the PBR even though I have seen the screenshots I still don't understand it 

[Jaylinbridges]

.

Edited Saturday at 07:42 AM by Jaylinbridges
I hate this forum's editing.

[Henri Beauchamp]

13 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Oh yeah should be zero issues with a 3070

There is one, yet: in super-big venues (with 200+ avatars), the VRAM fills up faster in PBR mode than in ALM mode, and the 8GB of VRAM in my RTX 3070 are starting to feel a bit too narrow... 🙀

In such venues, the vertex buffers memory consumption can easily reach 5-6GB (avatars' attachments are vertex-buffers-hungry pigs !); add 2GB for textures (on the condition to limit their downloaded/rendered size to 512x512, else you will need 2.5GB to 3GB), and what is left is not enough for all the PBR render target buffers, when ALM only needs half or a third of PBR for those (and forward rendering even less, with less textures too)...

Edited Saturday at 08:33 AM by Henri Beauchamp
typo

[AmeliaJ08]

5 minutes ago, PatricaC said:

Frame Rate Sucks and for us old timers who been in SL for yearswe are not even sure how to turn off the PBR even though I have seen the screenshots I still don't understand it 

You can't turn it off.

Please post the output of Help > About Firestorm if you're looking for help, it tells useful information about the system.

[Jaylinbridges]

17 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I just made the necessary additions to my presets and they seem to stick in 7.1.9. Haven't gone back to pre-PBR though so I guess that's it.

Yes, they stick fine if you don't go back.  But I don't like havimg my CPU max out with the new one, when I am doing nothing at home, so I use the old FS, which does everything I need at half the CPU load, including running ALM and Shadows.

This is the SL parameter page - I can see specifying a filename, but not the whole folder as a command line switch.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_parameters

Who knows how up to date that is.

Edited Saturday at 07:44 AM by Jaylinbridges

[Jase Devin]

14 hours ago, BriannaLovey said:

I do the exact same thing with /dev/shm on Linux. You do have to copy it back to your disk every time you shut your computer down if you want it to be persistent though, which can be either done manually or via bash scripting.

The one I linked to there copies back on shutdown.

[JeromFranzic]

15 hours ago, BriannaLovey said:

I do the exact same thing with /dev/shm on Linux. You do have to copy it back to your disk every time you shut your computer down if you want it to be persistent though, which can be either done manually or via bash scripting.

I use /mnt/ramdisk on my lubuntu setup when I can be bothered to use a RAM disk.

[JeromFranzic]

26 minutes ago, Jase Devin said:

The one I linked to there copies back on shutdown.

ImDisk works on Linux? Looks like that version has to be built from source... I'm OK with that though, I do it for several apps I use in Linux. At least I don't compile kernels anymore... hehe.

Edit: NVM, requires MinGW... Windows only then, that's OK, not too hard to make a RAM disk in Linux for me.

Edited Saturday at 07:44 PM by JeromFranzic
read the readme in the source zip for imdisk

[PatricaC]

13 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

You can't turn it off.

Please post the output of Help > About Firestorm if you're looking for help, it tells useful information about the system.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Core Processor              (3792.88 MHz)
Memory: 8109 MB (Used: 985 MB)
Concurrency: 12
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19045.4598)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 4096 MB

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 32.0.15.5612
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 556.12

RestrainedLove API: RLV v3.4.3 / RLVa v2.4.2.70368
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1l zlib/1.2.11.zlib-ng nghttp2/1.40.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v8.4.1
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.02.18
Dullahan: 1.12.4.202209142021
  CEF: 91.1.21+g9dd45fe+chromium-91.0.4472.114
  Chromium: 91.0.4472.114
LibVLC Version: 3.0.16
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.10.0000.32327.5fc3fe7c.571099

[AmeliaJ08]

Just now, PatricaC said:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Core Processor              (3792.88 MHz)
Memory: 8109 MB (Used: 985 MB)
Concurrency: 12
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19045.4598)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 4096 MB

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 32.0.15.5612
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 556.12

RestrainedLove API: RLV v3.4.3 / RLVa v2.4.2.70368
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1l zlib/1.2.11.zlib-ng nghttp2/1.40.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v8.4.1
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.02.18
Dullahan: 1.12.4.202209142021
  CEF: 91.1.21+g9dd45fe+chromium-91.0.4472.114
  Chromium: 91.0.4472.114
LibVLC Version: 3.0.16
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.10.0000.32327.5fc3fe7c.571099

Frame rate should be OK with the right settings, I've got a 1650Ti in this laptop and it seems to handle it reasonably well. It's not great but 30-60fps should be expected normally, maybe down to 20 in busy scenes.

Graphics preferences?

[PatricaC]

4 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Frame rate should be OK with the right settings, I've got a 1650Ti in this laptop and it seems to handle it reasonably well. It's not great but 30-60fps should be expected normally, maybe down to 20 in busy scenes.

Graphics preferences?

I've tried them between Low and Med but putting a check mark by things that be there with High Settings and my frame rate is below 20 even at my own land 

But with the 6.6.17 there over 100 so doesn't make sense

Edited Saturday at 09:14 PM by PatricaC

[AmeliaJ08]

Just now, PatricaC said:

I've tried them between Low and Med but putting a check mark by things that be there with High Settings and my frame rate is below 20 even at my own land 

I know it's a pain but can you post a screenshot of the first graphics preferences screen and the hardware tab?

Is this at 1080P resolution?

[Tripp Foxtail]

I'm a small scale, independent builder and I'm feeling frustrated by this new PBR system. I have found much of my older inventory which had materials applied specularity (shininess), now looks wonky. The sky is reflected on shiny chrome, regardless of the object being indoors or outdoors, turning down to specularity to remove the sky makes the chrome look like plastic. 

[HeathcliffMontague]

The only real con I've noticed is that so many things have a blue tint now. Mostly no problem, but on more than a few of my bikes the previously black or metallic is now super blue (or have a blue tint...). These are bikes from experienced and well reputed builders who are supposed to know their stuff. That's super annoying. Using FS.

Haven't noticed any real performance issues to speak of, and I'm only using an AMD Radeon RX 6500M GPU these days, nothing fancy.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

6 hours ago, Tripp Foxtail said:

I'm a small scale, independent builder and I'm feeling frustrated by this new PBR system. I have found much of my older inventory which had materials applied specularity (shininess), now looks wonky. The sky is reflected on shiny chrome, regardless of the object being indoors or outdoors, turning down to specularity to remove the sky makes the chrome look like plastic. 

You may have probes disabled or autoprobes didn't generate at all. Make sure your Probe Coverage is set to Manual + Terrain and place down some reflection probes. I have some tutorials here: 

 

[NaomiLocket]

8 hours ago, PatricaC said:

I've tried them between Low and Med but putting a check mark by things that be there with High Settings and my frame rate is below 20 even at my own land 

But with the 6.6.17 there over 100 so doesn't make sense

You might just want to make sure both Mirrors and Screen Space Reflections are unchecked/blank boxes on the graphical preferences tab. Walking back the features to get the new rendering system as close to your previous benchmark would help get a sense of what your prospects look like. Your card doesn't have a whole lot of vram to play around with needlessly. But you might still get to enjoy the change in lighting. And have shadows set to how you are used to them.

There are a bunch of feedbacks on reflection probes being tracked so mirror turning off may be hit and miss for a while until they solve that.

 

[NaomiLocket]

7 hours ago, Tripp Foxtail said:

I'm a small scale, independent builder and I'm feeling frustrated by this new PBR system. I have found much of my older inventory which had materials applied specularity (shininess), now looks wonky. The sky is reflected on shiny chrome, regardless of the object being indoors or outdoors, turning down to specularity to remove the sky makes the chrome look like plastic.

Technically the environment gloss used to make use of a stand in simple low resolution image or conversion as "the sky". Are you sure it is the specular (Glossiness:) part of the shininess, or the environment gloss (Environment:) part of the shininess that is overlaying the sky on your bike that will never be blocked by anything.

If you are only using the drop down to set the shininess you'll be stuck with it. But you can test by changing the image to Blank and setting the Environment to 0, but increasing the Glossiness to make your local lights noticable. You can then flip the Environment between 0 and 255 to comfirm that it is only the environment map being the issue and not the rest of specular.

It'll be up to you from there if you make a proper image for the specular or not.

ETA: If you're converting or using the old materials as a base for a PBR material there's some videos out there that can help using using the old textures as a starting point for the PBR material with minimal changes.

Edited Sunday at 06:16 AM by NaomiLocket

[elleevelyn]

On 6/26/2024 at 8:53 PM, Extrude Ragu said:

You can see a performance chart here (order by G3D mark) to see how GPU's stack up against each other in reality.

 

this is probably the best advice for people looking at getting/upgrading for SL

sort the list by rank then go down the list till find a graphics card that fits the budget