LL Reaches Out on PBR

[Theresa Tennyson]

54 minutes ago, WeFlossDaily said:

Here are two examples of what I'm talking about.

Those involve processing on top of pre-existing videos. For that to work in Second Life, the avatars would still need to be moved, and rendered, and then the effects would be put on top of that.

[Kathrine Jansma]

1 hour ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

iGPUs isn't necessarily low-end hardware.

Will be interesting, once AMD Stryx Halo APUs hit the market, as they claim to get GPU performance on NVIDIA 4070 levels.

[WeFlossDaily]

1 minute ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Those involve processing on top of pre-existing videos. For that to work in Second Life, the avatars would still need to be moved, and rendered, and then the effects would be put on top of that.

It would work in SL, and even if it was simply used as a reshad applied to the tail end of the rendering pipeline, it would still work and increase performance. We already know that the RenderResolutionDivisor stuff can be messed around with in the debug setting. But the effect makes SL look like a terrible pixelated mess at the benefit of making it more usable on the low-end. However, an ASCII renderer or reshade would both take advantage of that and require such image degradation as a starting point for creating it's visual output.

I'm not saying watch this video to see my point. But if you want to see some cool examples of an ASCII render, click around near the end. The guy also covers the whole image degradation process toward the beginning.

If it wasn't so complicated and I was smarter, I'd be trying to build this style of rendering pipeline, because I think it's cool.

If I had to make it an argument, then my argument is: SL would benefit more from a variety of rendering pipelines then it would from embracing any single one and discarding everything else.

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

6 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

I agree. I'm so bored with this forum I think I'll stop reading it, or only read what I call 'the outer edges' and comment there, like the sane people do -- how does your avatar look, what's new in Belli, mesh, and the Marketplace..

oh, you mean the boring stuff 😂

[Arielle Popstar]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

They would have fixed it without all the drama. I promise!

 

Extraordinaire claims require extraordinaire evidence but from you I will accept even a smidgeon other then just empty meows. 😃

[AmeliaJ08]

3 hours ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

iGPUs isn't necessarily low-end hardware. OK, in an SL context it often is, I'll give you that, but just putting it out there. And people with ARM Mac-a-likes are struggling with DOOM  

Yes, some people seriously need to upgrade from their Office Dell. But that's an old stereotype if there ever was one. 

iGPUs are basically always very low end in the context of GPUs. It's not a criticism it's just a fact, even the fastest currently available iGPU (Radeon 890 available on the very latest Ryzen CPUs) is barely comparable to an Nvidia Geforce 1650 and only really in certain tasks. They're hobbled, basically.

Apple Silicon is a special case I guess, give it something Metal to work on and it's pretty fast but it's not particularly great at the OpenGL we're relying on.

Of course iGPUs can be found in relatively high end systems it's just they aren't powerful enough to be of a whole lot of use in SL but that Radeon 680/780/890 iGPU might be close.

Edited August 24 by AmeliaJ08

[AmeliaJ08]

51 minutes ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

Will be interesting, once AMD Stryx Halo APUs hit the market, as they claim to get GPU performance on NVIDIA 4070 levels.

Yeah that is one to watch.

AMD OpenGL performance on Windows though... we'll have to wait and see. On paper it should be more than enough and AMD really should have had this chip out long ago given it is basically the same as the Playstation 5 APU, or very similar anyway.

Could be a game changer as far as APU's/iGPUs go.

[Arielle Popstar]

10 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I'm not saying LL didn't massively drop the ball in many ways with the introduction of PBR but the fact that they're rushing to try and fix things and improve performance for those having trouble disproves a lot of the recent claims that they're actively trying to push out users on older hardware.  Personally, I'd rather see immediate incremental improvements than weeks or months of apparent inactivity, even if it does mean they fumble things occasionally in the process.

Maybe not trying to push people out but trying to force them to upgrade. I think however they got caught by surprise by how many who had ok hardware but were not willing to accept the downgrade of performance, increased fan noise and extra heat from the GPU with little to no graphical improvement to compensate.

[AmeliaJ08]

51 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Maybe not trying to push people out but trying to force them to upgrade. I think however they got caught by surprise by how many who had ok hardware but were not willing to accept the downgrade of performance, increased fan noise and extra heat from the GPU with little to no graphical improvement to compensate.

There was me sitting frustrated watching SL barely able to utilize 40% of my GPU before the PBR update... I thought everyone found that annoying.

I guess I like everything to run as best as it can and pre-PBR SL was a terrible use of available resources. It's still not great but a damn sight better.

 

Edited August 24 by AmeliaJ08

[Scylla Rhiadra]

19 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

There was me sitting frustrated watching SL barely able to utilize 40% of my GPU before the PBR update... I thought everyone found that annoying.

No, Amelia, 99% of us had no idea because we're too busy doing things in-world to pay attention to our GPU usage.

Does not the idea that an update is "good" largely because it utilizes your hardware more efficiently seem . . . odd to you?

No, eh?

[Gabriele Graves]

4 hours ago, Rita Vhargon said:

Are you saying people complained too much? If you are, I beg to differ. As someone pointed out, it took the Firestorm release and the meltdown that followed for LL to finally pay serious attention.

There is a valuable lesson here, and that is for regular forum posters to put themselves in other's shoes when they desperately seek your help. And use common sense. It was obvious that there was a major problem, hence the strong flow of posts and new topics flooding the forums. 

No, I think it was pretty obvious that I wasn't saying that.

I also disagree with your statement about regular forums posters.  Help was offered and mostly ignored by people who didn't seem to want any help making things work.  People were being told that the problem wasn't affecting everyone and that things were working well for some but that was being ignored too.  Requests for hardware information were being ignored and all of that made it not obvious at all that there were major problems for the majority of people.

Though there were some people who were less than sympathetic, there were also those who were and still are.  I guess their (our) posts were generally ignored as well.

Edited August 24 by Gabriele Graves
typos

[RicDelMoro]

I downloaded this optional update Second Life Release 7.1.9.10515727195 (64bit) and from what I felt things went well, the fans didn't go crazy and the fps seems ok. I know most people don't use LL viewer, but other viewers will follow the improvements in a short time  ( I hope ).  I'm using Firestorm "no PBR" daily , and to get used with PBR new LL viewer and Kokua ( this one  follows LL closely but hasn't released that improvement yet ). So  there is a light at the end of the tunnel .

[Istelathis]

8 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

I agree. I'm so bored with this forum I think I'll stop reading it, or only read what I call 'the outer edges' and comment there, like the sane people do -- how does your avatar look, what's new in Belli, mesh, and the Marketplace..

I left for a few days, then got bored and felt the pull of the forums, calling my name.

"... stella ...  stella .. come to the forums"

/me shakes head "no!"

".. stella .. stella.. they are talking about bots again"

/me jumps on forums

 

Damn bots.. why do they have to fascinate me so?

---------------

I've been keeping an eye on our residents (and bots?¿) and have not seen any reason to be concerned about the imminent doom of SL.  I don't think we are in a 2012 scenario, quite yet.  It is not quite the comet of destruction, right?

"We really did have everything, didn't we"

"AAAAhhharg!"

 

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

9 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Concurrency figures for the "Great Bot Viewer Outage" and the same time/day the week before and the week after prove fairly conclusively that it's more like 3,000 bots, not 10,000, or 15, 000, or 25,000, or any of the other made up numbers spouted by clueless paranoid bot-hating Captain Oldbies, worried that an "Army of Bots is scraping their IP" because when they went to some venue in a 2006 system avi with no AO, nobody bothered to IM them and beg for SLex.

 

 

My number is of course totally made up, just from my impression from looking around the world map. So often i see a stack of green dots, tp in and see two dozen avatars in the sky over a dead club. Bots, or just avatars people keep logged in 24/7  to drive traffic numbers.

Either way,  it’s one login that does nothing for the social aspect of SL

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

There was me sitting frustrated watching SL barely able to utilize 40% of my GPU before the PBR update... I thought everyone found that annoying.

No, only a TINY percentage of PC users feel the need to have a third party "performance monitor suite" running, with a FPS counter overlaid on their "immersive game" so they can brag about their "framz" in team pvp games.

Or whine that only x% of their GPU is in use, or that the game isn't running properly unless their GPU is roasting at 100 degrees C.

 

Tech-Illiterate Performance Snobs for the most part. too busy being anxious that their expensive hardware isn't being pushed to the max to actually ENJOY just using their PC for something.

You see a bunch of videos on SpewTube from these people, whining that they are "only getting 140 framz" from the latest "unoptimised game" on their 4090, and how it's not right that they had to pay $70 for a game that "runs so badly".

 

I was watching a video of a streamer playing a CLASSIC game, and one of these performance junkies joined the stream chat, and demanded to know why the streamer was playing "on the lowest resolution" why no "leet grafix" in 4k, and had to have it explained to him that it was a CLASSIC game from 2009, that's still a popular choice.

 

When I play a game, I play the game because I ENJOY playing it, not to brag about my "framz" and post screenshots of "JerkTools" showing how hot my hardware is running and kewl graphs showing all the cores maxed out.

 

Ironically, one of the latest brag ware items is "InZoi", the Korean Life simulator, the one with the "oh so kewl realistic characters". A Sims 4 video poster, posted a video of herself trying the demo for it, and stated that she can't run the game, and that even the "character editor only" demo was making all her CPU cores run at 98 degrees C, and maxed out usage. ALL cores.

 

Yes it's true, many of us do NOT plan our game purchases on the basis of "How can I spend as much money as possible, on a game with limited replay value, that melts my PC".

 

There's good reasons why an industry survey carried out earlier this year showed that over 60 % of all player hours, take place in games OVER 6 years old. Why a newish game like Helldiver 2, now has about 1/3rd of the concurrency figures of SL.

Why people slammed Jedi Survivor when it came out for having nice graphics but dreadful performance issues, why Cyberpuke 77 got so much flak at release.

 

Newer and fancier is not always better.

 

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

No, Amelia, 99% of us had no idea because we're too busy doing things in-world to pay attention to our GPU usage.

Does not the idea that an update is "good" largely because it utilizes your hardware more efficiently seem . . . odd to you?

No, eh?

Scylla gets it, we use PC's to have fun, not to worry that our CPU/GPU are not as good for frying eggs as some 15 yr old clown on teamspeak.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Requests for hardware information were being ignored

Sorry but NO.

"There is no FPS loss, works fine for me!

What are your specs?

You can reverse the FPS loss that doesn't exist by simply lowering ALL your other settings by 25%!

What do you mean I'm not helping! You luddite peasants need to buy a better GPU!"

 

That isn't "helping people".

 

 

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

18 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

I was watching a video of a streamer playing a CLASSIC game, and one of these performance junkies joined the stream chat, and demanded to know why the streamer was playing "on the lowest resolution" why no "leet grafix" in 4k, and had to have it explained to him that it was a CLASSIC game from 2009, that's still a popular choice.

Theresa Tennyson smiles warmly, offering applesauce and a Nice Blanket.

[Crim Mip]

On 8/22/2024 at 6:49 PM, WeFlossDaily said:

LL can reach out all they want to and try to be all caring and put their best PR face on but I ain't buying it.

I despise PBR and I hold LL responsible for infecting SL with it.

Like it or not, it's here to stay. It's a graphics standard used in many games just as mesh objects are. The more standards SL incorporates, the more quality content we'll get. I can tell you the latest alpha Firestorm version has significantly better performance and many fewer bugs than the release version.

[Crim Mip]

On 8/23/2024 at 12:06 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yeah, I suppose it's a vindication of a sort (and it's odd how all of the voices huffing that "It's just a few whiners and complainers" have gone quiet now, especially in the Phoenix-Firestorm group).

But the really important thing is simply that they've committed to fixing it.

And that, mirabile dictu, they are actually communicating with us.

The latter is pretty major. LL doesn't usually admit any issues with a major update. Remember Pathfinding? That just sort faded into obscurity.

[Crim Mip]

On 8/23/2024 at 1:40 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Even if that is true, why on earth would they release a "first draft" that is a mandatory update, rather than field test it properly first, fix the bugs, and then release it? Or at least make it an optional update?

Whatever, I'm just glad they're addressing the issue now.

They had no choice. They don't have enough using the beta grid. They'd probably benefit from an official preview group, like Firestorm has. As it is, they are kind of relying on Firestorm's preview group.

[Arielle Popstar]

2 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

There was me sitting frustrated watching SL barely able to utilize 40% of my GPU before the PBR update... I thought everyone found that annoying.

I guess I like everything to run as best as it can and pre-PBR SL was a terrible use of available resources. It's still not great but a damn sight better.

 

I like everything to run as efficiently as it can and the fact that the Lab feels it can eke out more for the low end machines tells me it isn't as yet optimized to where it could be. This is supposed to augment our secondlife which it is not doing as yet in spite of it running a little better for a small segment of the residents. 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

6 hours ago, Rita Vhargon said:

It's a joke that anyone even thought LL only wanted people who can afford high end computers, and the rest of their customers can say goodbye. 

I have to agree, it's a ludicrous claim to make and the only reason I can see for anyone to make such a claim is to further sew division and anger in the midst of an already chaotic situation.

There are plenty of valid concerns when it comes to PBR and lots of people who are adversely affected by it's introduction and there are also plenty of people that are genuinely trying to help by replying with suggestions and advice and trying to discuss the issue sensibly.  Unfortunately there are also a few who seem more interested in antagonising others into attacking each other and making wild accusations.

 

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Maybe not trying to push people out but trying to force them to upgrade. I think however they got caught by surprise by how many who had ok hardware but were not willing to accept the downgrade of performance, increased fan noise and extra heat from the GPU with little to no graphical improvement to compensate.

I don't know exactly what LLs motivation was for introducing PBR (and despite all the "experts" who'll claim otherwise, neither does anyone else outside of LL) but whatever the reasons they must have believed that it was necessary despite the obvious upheaval it would cause.  Whatever those reasons were I'm pretty certain it had nothing to do with trying to force people to upgrade their hardware.

On it's surface this update seems to have caused no end of problems while delivering very little in the way of improvements, however that's to be expected since nobody can really make any PBR content until the feature has been implemented.  I suspect that LL were hoping that creators would jump on the bandwagon and start pumping out PBR content from day one, unfortunately they didn't take into account that most creators are only interested in creating things that people will pay money for so without a crowd of people all eagerly waiting to throw money at them in exchange for PBR content most are happy to continue churning out whatever stuff makes them the most profit.

Granted a wealth of PBR content isn't going to change the performance issues that people are experiencing but I think it's a little early to say that the new features don't provide any graphical improvement, they may not be very apparent at the moment but in the long term I think they'll be far more impactful.

[Crim Mip]

On 8/23/2024 at 2:39 PM, WeFlossDaily said:

So does anybody believe LL can make PBR work on low-end machines?

Obviously, I'm pessimistic.

But perhaps somebody knows stuff or something.

That depends on how low end. I wouldn't expect it to ever expect it to work well on anything much earlier than a 1000 series Nvidia card or equivalent. Once they switch over to Vulcan (probably later in the year) anything too old to support Vulcan drivers won't work anyway. If you currently have 8GB of ram, you probably ought to upgrade to at least 16GB. That's not just for SL. That's been a good base amount for some time.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Crim Mip said:

They had no choice. They don't have enough using the beta grid.

THAT is what happens when you break the beta grid login, the one that allowed people to just log into the beta grid if they had an account on the main grid. 

Then when people discovered the change password/change it back hack to bypass the broken login, they broke it again, and NEVER fixed it, so the only way to get access is to send a begging letter to support, a process that wasn't made publicly known for some years, and when it was announced, was announced on an obscure wiki page most people didn't even know existed.

 

The "shortage of users on the beta grid" is ENTIRELY LL's own fault.

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

18 minutes ago, Crim Mip said:

They'd probably benefit from an official preview group,

They HAD a preview group, it was filled with Futureness Cultist Hardware snobs who kept telling them "All is well, works great for me cos my Gamerz rig r leet"