The End Of An Era and what was a wonderful, enlightened virtual world....

[Luna Bliss]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There are a bakers dozen on the forums having a moan.

We have GOT to get rid of those ugly baked textures for sure!

[JeromFranzic]

4 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Using the last FS release pre-PBR, I was getting about 24 FPS in the club. Using the LL PBR viewer, it dropped to about 15. Not great, but actually manageable. Using the new FS PBR release . . . I was getting 4 FPS.

Huh? That slow? I took this screenshot a few minutes ago. On fairly high settings here. 1050 GPU loaded laptop from 2018. In Lubuntu... Win11 would use about 3-5GB more RAM for me because of some of the OS 'junk' (some of which can't be turned off unless a debloater mod is used). 

I'm next to that orange cloud BTW. OK, this is slow but not 4 fps slow. Shadows off, FS 7 PBR viewer.

ETA: if that htop screen wasn't on... my fps would be at 15-20.

Edited July 16 by JeromFranzic

[Madi Melodious]

5 hours ago, BriannaLovey said:

Third-party viewer developers need to start gathering anonymized hardware data about their users, and see how much of a priority should be spent on improving performance.

What a perfectly horrible idea.  

If third party viewers want to gather hardware data, they need to ask me what I want to provide them and when to do it. 

[BriannaLovey]

17 hours ago, discussionbot said:

100%, this will be inevitable. If anyone has been following the in-world Firestorm helper’s group which is massive, it’ll be obvious how bad the new update has landed with the average SL user with almost daily complaints/comments from surprised users trying their best to make it work. 
 

Of course it’s not an absolute measure but still serves as a good temperature check (along with forum & feedback website comments) about where things stand generally with the shoddy new update. 

I have said this before, but the real determining factor will be whether or not they have a more stable release after 6.6.17 gets blocked.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, JeromFranzic said:

Huh? That slow?

I used all the viewers with the same settings, so as to get a good comparison. I probably could have increased it a bit by lowering my settings more -- but not by a lot.

I'm not sure if my computer is odd or not. I can take 6k shots in Black Dragon, usually with a fairly high depth of field, without too many problems. What causes lag for me is people: anything much more than a dozen or so, and my FPS begins to drop precipitously. Warehouse 21, for instance, is usually a nightmare.

[animats]

Here's a useful way to think about what's happened. I see this because Sharpview, my experimental viewer, designed for gamer machines, has even worse problems than Firestorm on low-end machines.

Viewers up to 6.x worked by having the CPU just draw over and over, with some help from the GPU. If there was too much stuff to draw, things slowed down, in proportion to how much stuff needed to be drawn.

Firestorm 7 is doing more of the job in the GPU. This works great if the GPU has enough memory to store and enough power to draw everything in view without too much help from the main CPUs. But if the scene won't fit in the GPU, coping strategies turn on to try to keep drawing even though there really aren't enough resources. When that happens, there's a big hit on performance.

There's an even worse hit if the viewer runs out of main memory and starts swapping to disk. That's really slow. If things are slow, check memory usage. Memory is cheap. Upgrade if necessary.

That's why there's such a drastic divide among users on this. When the GPU fills, the performance drops abruptly. For users with high-end GPUs, or even medium-level GPUs (say 4GB), things are good to great. At the low end, where the viewer is frantically trying to cram stuff into an undersized GPU, it doesn't.

(Beq, please check me on this.)

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, animats said:

Here's a useful way to think about what's happened. I see this because Sharpview, my experimental viewer, designed for gamer machines, has even worse problems than Firestorm on low-end machines.

Viewers up to 6.x worked by having the CPU just draw over and over, with some help from the GPU. If there was too much stuff to draw, things slowed down, in proportion to how much stuff needed to be drawn.

Firestorm 7 is doing more of the job in the GPU. This works great if the GPU has enough memory to store and enough power to draw everything in view without too much help from the main CPUs. But if the scene won't fit in the GPU, coping strategies turn on to try to keep drawing even though there really aren't enough resources. When that happens, there's a big hit on performance.

There's an even worse hit if the viewer runs out of main memory and starts swapping to disk. That's really slow. If things are slow, check memory usage. Memory is cheap. Upgrade if necessary.

That's why there's such a drastic divide among users on this. When the GPU fills, the performance drops abruptly. For users with high-end GPUs, or even medium-level GPUs (say 4GB), things are good to great. At the low end, where the viewer is frantically trying to cram stuff into an undersized GPU, it doesn't.

(Beq, please check me on this.)

 

What this seems to suggest is that FS has been rebuilt to take advantage of the more powerful GPUs loaded into most mid to high end computers, which makes it more efficient on such machines, but with the result that those with older machines that likely have less powerful GPUs (or integrated graphics) are going to get hit commensurately harder. In other words, the new viewer is deliberately focused upon new machines, at the cost of older ones?

Does this sound right? It's a bit like something someone here once said about the LL viewer too: that in order to take advantage of new tech, it was consciously (and unfortunately) going to hit low end machines harder than it otherwise might have. That would explain why some people report performance increases with the new viewers, while lots of others are being hit hard.

[BriannaLovey]

10 minutes ago, animats said:

Here's a useful way to think about what's happened. I see this because Sharpview, my experimental viewer, designed for gamer machines, has even worse problems than Firestorm on low-end machines.

Viewers up to 6.x worked by having the CPU just draw over and over, with some help from the GPU. If there was too much stuff to draw, things slowed down, in proportion to how much stuff needed to be drawn.

Firestorm 7 is doing more of the job in the GPU. This works great if the GPU has enough memory to store and enough power to draw everything in view without too much help from the main CPUs. But if the scene won't fit in the GPU, coping strategies turn on to try to keep drawing even though there really aren't enough resources. When that happens, there's a big hit on performance.

There's an even worse hit if the viewer runs out of main memory and starts swapping to disk. That's really slow. If things are slow, check memory usage. Memory is cheap. Upgrade if necessary.

That's why there's such a drastic divide among users on this. When the GPU fills, the performance drops abruptly. For users with high-end GPUs, or even medium-level GPUs (say 4GB), things are good to great. At the low end, where the viewer is frantically trying to cram stuff into an undersized GPU, it doesn't.

(Beq, please check me on this.)

 

It isn't just memory. Newer GPUs have a lot more cores the integrated GPUs found on most Intel CPUs. Because of this, they can perform better at parallelizable workloads, like rendering.

[Love Zhaoying]

15 hours ago, xXSuicidalIdolXx Candycane said:

16 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Paul was being facetious / sarcastic. 

then yall have a freakin odd way of humor.. whatever ✌️

It's just a lesson in "not taking things at face value". Also, just because someone is being facetious or sarcastic, doesn't mean they are trying to be "humorous". Peace be unto you, also.

[HeathcliffMontague]

2 hours ago, animats said:

Here's a useful way to think about what's happened. I see this because Sharpview, my experimental viewer, designed for gamer machines, has even worse problems than Firestorm on low-end machines.

Viewers up to 6.x worked by having the CPU just draw over and over, with some help from the GPU. If there was too much stuff to draw, things slowed down, in proportion to how much stuff needed to be drawn.

Firestorm 7 is doing more of the job in the GPU. This works great if the GPU has enough memory to store and enough power to draw everything in view without too much help from the main CPUs. But if the scene won't fit in the GPU, coping strategies turn on to try to keep drawing even though there really aren't enough resources. When that happens, there's a big hit on performance.

There's an even worse hit if the viewer runs out of main memory and starts swapping to disk. That's really slow. If things are slow, check memory usage. Memory is cheap. Upgrade if necessary.

That's why there's such a drastic divide among users on this. When the GPU fills, the performance drops abruptly. For users with high-end GPUs, or even medium-level GPUs (say 4GB), things are good to great. At the low end, where the viewer is frantically trying to cram stuff into an undersized GPU, it doesn't.

(Beq, please check me on this.)

 

It kinda makes sense, at least in my case. I'm currently on a typical mid-range laptop if there ever was one:

Ryzen 5 5600H
Radeon RX 6500M (4GB GDDR6, as you mention)
16 GB RAM 

I've had no noticable difference in performance (FS, LL Viewer). No worse, no better. Only the Environment stuff that many people have had issues with.

[MoiraKathleen]

1 hour ago, animats said:

That's why there's such a drastic divide among users on this. When the GPU fills, the performance drops abruptly. For users with high-end GPUs, or even medium-level GPUs (say 4GB), things are good to great. At the low end, where the viewer is frantically trying to cram stuff into an undersized GPU, it doesn't.

I wonder if this is the reason I see better performance, especially FPS, between my desktop PC which is 7 years old but has a 1060 with 6 GB memory, and my laptop which is 2 years old and has a RTX 3050 TI with less memory than the 1060 card has.  I get better performance with the desktop PC.  

When I look at the About window, both show cache size of 3993.6 MB (100% used) but the texture memory for the laptop is only 4095 MB compared to 5284 MB on the desktop.   

The only other settings difference I see in the About information is that I have 3000kbit/s bandwidth on the desktop PC and 1200kbit/s bandwidth on the laptop, but my understanding is that the bandwidth setting has to do with some other  type of network traffic than textures?  (I'm not really very hardware knowledgeable). 

With either the laptop or the desktop, though, performance is good enough for me - I don't really feel that there has been such a huge drop that it affects my ability to do the types of things I like to do inworld.  It was just interesting to me that the older machine with the older graphics card seems to perform better.  Being as I mostly use the LL viewer (or Kokua very rarely) I don't have the FPS number up on the top bar of the viewer, so I don't really fixate on the actual FPS I'm experiencing.  I just look at it via statistics occassionally when I seem to be experiencing some lag or I'm checking statistics for a parcel I'm considering buying or renting.    

I'm not an artist or a skilled photographer, so I also didn't spend any time comparing scenes between a non-PBR viewer and a PBR viewer.  Things did not look so different to me as to cause a concern leading to reinstalling an older viewer just to compare visuals. I've been using the LL viewer for a long time so I've gotten quite used to how things look with PBR. 

[Ziggy Starsmith]

6 hours ago, Codex Alpha said:

And that's the long and short of it. People want stuff working out of the box, and that's all that matters in the end to them. People just want to play a game, not join a cult.

Exactly...you got it! 🙂

[JacksonBollock]

Reading this thread, and the others about PBR, is like reading a stack overflow topic!

It's 2024 and people just want to click on an app, have it open, and for it to look and act roughly like the marketing blurb promised on the website.

This expectation isn't a sad indictment of today's youth or unrealistic entitlement on the part of people who just don't have the necessary grit, it's how things should work and actually do work for most people most of the time.

Yeah, once you're a bit further down the line and more invested, you might want to delve further into the personalisation options, but as long as you're meeting the published recommended tech requirements you should be good to go right out the gate 

All this talk of monitoring FPS, drilling down 3 menu levels to tweak sliders a, c and f, or worse - swap out for some specific variant of Linux (great for servers but a bag of spanners for most people on the desktop), is just a great way to send prospective new customers hurtling headlong into the arms of Roblox 

Truthfully, if I was a competitor of SL, all I'd do is stick a link to this thread on my website in the sure and certain knowledge I'd never lose another customer to SL again.

[Ziggy Starsmith]

deleted - no sense in posting with a few griefing idiots who mock, bully and belittle others on here. Toxic loosers basically with no life!

Edited July 16 by Dune Ravenwood

[Istelathis]

45 minutes ago, MoiraKathleen said:

I wonder if this is the reason I see better performance, especially FPS, between my desktop PC which is 7 years old but has a 1060 with 6 GB memory, and my laptop which is 2 years old and has a RTX 3050 TI with less memory than the 1060 card has.  I get better performance with the desktop PC.  

My last computer was a lower budget gaming computer, with a 1050ti.  I was likewise impressed with PBR, it ran pretty well as far as my expectations were concerned.  What fascinated me was that even though the FPS was not incredibly high, it just felt more responsive than it did with ALM enabled on Firestorm. Of course, CoolVL ran better, and I was impressed with how spectacular it looked with even ALM and PBR turned off, but PBR itself on Linden's viewer was impressive.

If it were not for a screen that was dying and giving me severe eye strain, along with a hinge that was broken, as well as my fascination with running various AI on my computer that required more VRAM I probably would have stuck with it for another year or two before replacing it.  It served me well for five or six years, I should give it a proper burial 🤣  

The most dramatic improvement I made on that computer, was upgrading the ram, and then creating a ramdisk specifically for SL.  It shot up the performance dramatically, and was well worth the money spent.  I had 24gb of ram on it, and assigned 2.5gb for the ramdisk, it was like night and day, and was remarkable after I had made that change.  The only place I could allocate cache to was on a hard disk, and it was so slooooow.  Even when I did find space on my tiny SSD for cache it ran pretty lousy, that ramdisk though really came through.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

9 hours ago, Janet Voxel said:

I feel like that’s where he got his numbers from

It is, it's the exact same survey page II posted a couple of months ago, to b*tch slap a clueless Futureness Cultist who claimed that "the average Steam gamer has a 3060 or better".

 

2nd most popular card on that list, is a 1650, with what, 4 GB of VRAM, that's years old, and which Futureness Cultists keep telling us is "no use for SL".

 

9 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

If you're going to simply shrug it off and pretend everything is just swell, I'm not going to bother with you anymore.

From HIS PoV., everything IS "swell". He's been pushing a line for years, that basically goes "Delete the 99% of the content that's more than 3 months old, and ban anyone who has a PC older or cheaper than mine, this will save SL, and attract more people like ME ME ME ME ME".

He WANTS to get rid of the "dirty poor old people who are holding him back by not buying a new PC every time he does."

Then there's his "you can get a modern graphics card for $150 easy." nonsense, I posted in another thread about that, showing what cards you can buy here in the UK and what the current prices were, where the BEST card you could get for under $200 was a 1030, with 2GB of VRAM, that will have issues running Bloatstorm Ruined-By-PBR Edition.

 

Edited July 16 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Aethelwine]

7 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There are 39,595 people playing the game right now.

There are a bakers dozen on the forums having a moan.

Little perspective goes a long way.

I imagine 35,000 are probably using pre-PBR viewers.

The forums seem focused on PC performance where modern graphics cards are now becoming a requirement. But I think I have read statistics to indicate Apple now has about 50% market share. Everything I have read is that performance on MACs is abysmal. Is there anything they can do short of selling their computers and putting money in a desktop pC gaming rig that will include them in the platforms future?

[Scylla Rhiadra]

59 minutes ago, JacksonBollock said:

All this talk of monitoring FPS, drilling down 3 menu levels to tweak sliders a, c and f, or worse - swap out for some specific variant of Linux (great for servers but a bag of spanners for most people on the desktop), is just a great way to send prospective new customers hurtling headlong into the arms of Roblox 

Truthfully, if I was a competitor of SL, all I'd do is stick a link to this thread on my website in the sure and certain knowledge I'd never lose another customer to SL again.

So much this.

Except you forgot that new sign-ups should also IM Paul to get help on building a new computer from the ground up.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

12 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

From HIS PoV., everything IS "swell". He's been pushing a line for years, that basically goes "Delete the 99% of the content that's more than 3 months old, and ban anyone who has a PC older or cheaper than mine, this will save SL, and attract more people like ME ME ME ME ME".

He WANTS to get rid of the "dirty poor old people who are holding him back by not buying a new PC every time he does."

I think this is being a little unfair to Paul, especially the first bit. And I don't think he thinks they are "dirty poor old people." I think he thinks they are lazy.

But yeah.

It's a cult.

[Luna Bliss]

I am so glad that SL is now replicating real life, where we see oil spills all over the once pristine waters...

[Dorientje Woller]

44 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

The most dramatic improvement I made on that computer, was upgrading the ram, and then creating a ramdisk specifically for SL.  It shot up the performance dramatically, and was well worth the money spent.  I had 24gb of ram on it, and assigned 2.5gb for the ramdisk, it was like night and day, and was remarkable after I had made that change.  The only place I could allocate cache to was on a hard disk, and it was so slooooow.  Even when I did find space on my tiny SSD for cache it ran pretty lousy, that ramdisk though really came through.

RamDisk is only good if you are using mechanical harddrives. With SSD's & NVMe's the usage of a RamDisk is pretty much extra work for no gain.

[Marianne Little]

I am not baking a cake and inviting to a party to celebrate PBR... yet.

I am carefully optimistic. At least I know that I can make PBR work really nice on the Alchemy viewer. I have always been a Firestorm addict, but I am not missing the bells and whistles as much as I thought. Only Area Search is really hard to live without. When I get tired, sometimes my fingers slip and things go in a wall or under the floor. Using the camera is slow when I try to zoom in the building to find it, moving the house is very very inconvinient. But I have written down the exact coordinates of the house in a notecard, so if I must... I can make it work. Cursing when I think how easy it was with Area Search.

I can adapt to Alchemy, so my SL joy is not going down the drain. And it might be better in the future, when more top creators release PBR. So far my response has been Wow! about one single update, the rest PBR has been okay, a little better, and see no difference. Not a total amazing visual improvement over Binn-Phong so far. Mirrors is the main disappointment. Overrated so much. Not even with 2048 texture size is it a sharp reflection. But I turn off mirrors, so I do not suffer from the extra power needed for it.

What I have noticed when I grabbed all the free PBR material textures from the Marketplace and experiment with them, is that they rez much, much faster than Binn-Phong. That is where my optimism comes from.

[CaerolleClaudel]

Current results FWIW:

Performance good for number of avis: In-world metrics

Graphics settings; set what I think is pretty low, and less than I used a few days ago: Preferences

Firestorm version and system info: System Info

Enormous amount of memory used by FS; was ~12MB when I first landed and all the avis rezzed, dropped over time. Relog started at 6MB and increased to ~10 GB. Most I recall in the past is maybe 2 - 3 GB: Task Manager - Processes

GPU details; usage not that high, temp not really that high: Task Manager - Performance

[steeljane42]

46 minutes ago, Aethelwine said:

But I think I have read statistics to indicate Apple now has about 50% market share

Might want to read it again, because they certainly don't, not even with mobile market. Various stats show around 85%+ if non Apple users for the last year as far as non mobiles are concerned. But most Apple cultists will never learn that this overpriced junk is not suitable for gaming.

As for the SL - hard to say, might depend on the circles you're familiar with. When it comes to people I know all run PBR viewers now, and most of the issues some of them had were resolved within 1-2 days of updating to it, with adjusting EEP presets taking a bit longer. But I have no doubts that some people/circles that don't care about extra shiny stuff one bit (and some of them didn't care about mesh either, apparently) have reverted to the older versions, because it does absolutely nothing important/good for them, while demanding a lot more resources.

Edited July 16 by steeljane42

[Clem Marques]

To anyone having issues with the latest version of FS, I highly recommend switching over to the official LL viewer and giving it a shot. Sure, some features aren't present there, but it's worth it if it means the FPS is much better and textures show up faster, instead of being faced with a bunch of grey loading textures. That has been my experience with it. My laptop was really struggling with the latest PBR FS, but it is able to run the LL viewer smoothly and things look great. I was used to Firestorm after using it for years, but I've had to abandon it now. IMO the LL/official SL viewer has been surprisingly good lately, by comparison.

Edited July 16 by Clem Marques