LL Reaches Out on PBR

[AmeliaJ08]

24 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

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

Oh for sure, there's more to be had.

I've always come at this PBR argument with my own personal experience of it running better simply due to being able to use the GPU more (I heard some calculations have also been moved from CPU to GPU in PBR codebase) than previous versions but I do understand this isn't desirable for everyone or everyone's experience at all.

I would guess the tweaks for lower end hardware are probably going to be texture related, there's definitely a bunch of weird bugs in the releases so far. I hope they can squeeze a little extra out of lower end hardware but given they never really managed to make ALM suitable for iGPUs I doubt they'll be able to work miracles here.

There may well be a mixup over terms here as well, "low end" GPU hardware seems to mean different things to everyone. I would hope they look at iGPU performance on systems from around 2018 onwards and consider this their low end target (Intel UHD series, AMD Radeon/Vega integrated iGPUs) but there's a possibility they're looking at "low end" dedicated graphics hardware which is a completely different story and faster than just about any iGPU available today.

I personally don't think there's much they can do for stuff like the UHD series and those older Radeon integrated chips, they're just not enough. I hope I'm wrong but you can't work miracles and many people seem to want them to - in these cases I think the only solution would be to tell the user to stick to older viewers.

Edited August 24 by AmeliaJ08

[Gabriele Graves]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Sorry but NO.

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

You can deny this all you want but the fact that for some of us the FPS loss just was not there.  Perhaps it was offset by FPS gains, not sure but I do know experienced some observable FPS gains in some places.

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

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".

Disagree.  No matter how much you want it to be otherwise, you cannot help people unless you know what hardware they have.  All support groups ask for this as a starting point.

Suggestions to lower settings was based on the fact that people with lower end hardware were now using ALM for the first time and of course that would have an impact.  Perfectly reasonable suggestions to make to try to help people.

Advice to upgrade was to let people know that minimum hardware specs have likely been lifted and they need to plan for this.  Yes, in some cases this was done crudely and without sympathy but otherwise a perfectly reasonable piece of advice.

Mainly though people weren't even getting to this stage of allowing helping others help them.  It was just a straight up rant in many cases.

Edited August 24 by Gabriele Graves

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

You can deny this all you want but the fact that for some of us the FPS loss just was not there.  Perhaps it was offset by FPS gains, not sure but I do know experienced some observable FPS gains in some places.

Zali can correct me, but I think you're missing her point here.

It's not that there weren't people who had no problems with FPS using the new viewers. Indeed, as you say because they use the GPU differently, and more efficiently, than older viewers, those who had up-to-date, good GPUs were undoubtedly experiencing better performance.

But a great many of those same people, in my experience and as seen here on the forums too, seemed not to understand that others were having issues. Or they didn't care.

They weren't "lying" about their own experiences. They were dismissing the different experience of those who didn't have reasonably good or high-end hardware.

[Gabriele Graves]

6 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Zali can correct me, but I think you're missing her point here.

It's not that there weren't people who had no problems with FPS using the new viewers. Indeed, as you say because they use the GPU differently, and more efficiently, than older viewers, those who had up-to-date, good GPUs were undoubtedly experiencing better performance.

But a great many of those same people, in my experience and as seen here on the forums too, seemed not to understand that others were having issues. Or they didn't care.

They weren't "lying" about their own experiences. They were dismissing the different experience of those who didn't have reasonably good or high-end hardware.

I don't think there were a "great many of those same people" doing this from what I observed.  If by "seem", it was just giving their experiences as a counter data point then that isn't dismissing anything.  Often all people can offer is that it's not everyone having these problems, especially when a lot of what was said boiled down to "everybody is having these problems".  That is a valuable piece of data in trying to establish how much of a problem there is.

I'm not excusing people who acted callously but I think we need to be careful we don't read too much into what might just be someone offering their own experiences.

Edited August 24 by Gabriele Graves

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

I'm not excusing people who acted callously but I think we need to be careful we don't read too much into what might just be someone offering their own experiences.

Exactly...if someone came onto the forum and just added some data and it showed no decline in performance, they were often seen as callous and not caring about those who were having trouble.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Zali can correct me, but I think you're missing her point here.

There's one of THOSE people, who keeps repeating "If you could run ALM you can run PBR, with no loss of performance!"

 

Quite apart from being technically WRONG, the fact that they just dismiss the existence of anyone who's not seeing the frankly unbelievable results they claim, is just condescending, and unhelpful.

That "PBR Loving Helper" makes more enemies for PBR than they eliminate.

 

10 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Yes, in some most cases this was done crudely and without sympathy but otherwise a perfectly un-reasonable piece of advice.

Telling people they just need to buy a 2nd hand thrashed to death by crypto bros GPU card that's no longer made, isn't "reasonable advice".

Nor is claiming you can have a decent gamerz rig for $400-$500 when the GPU alone will cost anywhere from 350-400 depending on the model.

Another claimed you could buy a PBR ready GPU for "under $150", I checked prices at one of the cheaper parts suppliers in my country, and all you could get for $200 was a 1030, with 2 GB of VRAM, that's going to really struggle with PBR.

 

Half the "helpful advice" given out is trash.

 

[Luna Bliss]

10 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But a great many of those same people, in my experience and as seen here on the forums too, seemed not to understand that others were having issues. Or they didn't care.

They weren't "lying" about their own experiences. They were dismissing the different experience of those who didn't have reasonably good or high-end hardware.

You did a lot of imagining, like with Cube, accusing him of having this 'big machine' and what that implies, and not caring about those who had low-end computers. He never once said he did not care. I believe your character assassination was removed.

[Gabriele Graves]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

There's one of THOSE people, who keeps repeating "If you could run ALM you can run PBR, with no loss of performance!"

Quite apart from being technically WRONG, the fact that they just dismiss the existence of anyone who's not seeing the frankly unbelievable results they claim, is just condescending, and unhelpful.

That "PBR Loving Helper" makes more enemies for PBR than they eliminate.

Telling people they just need to buy a 2nd hand thrashed to death by crypto bros GPU card that's no longer made, isn't "reasonable advice".

Nor is claiming you can have a decent gamerz rig for $400-$500 when the GPU alone will cost anywhere from 350-400 depending on the model.

Another claimed you could buy a PBR ready GPU for "under $150", I checked prices at one of the cheaper parts suppliers in my country, and all you could get for $200 was a 1030, with 2 GB of VRAM, that's going to really struggle with PBR.

People are often wrong on the forum you know, nobody is immune to this.  Nobody.

I'm not denying there were some callous comments, nor am I defending those people.

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Half the "helpful advice" given out is trash.

That's great, that means half wasn't trash.

[Luna Bliss]

For me, to set the record straight, I always believed some were having trouble, but that it was not the amount some claimed. It was overblown. Things were getting super 'end of the world' dramatic. It was making the forum and SL seem like crazytown.

It could have been easily fixed via going back to the old viewer version and awaiting updates. But many just continued with their 'end of the world' posts. Apparently many just love whining.

[Arielle Popstar]

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

It could have been easily fixed via going back to the old viewer version and awaiting updates. But many just continued with their 'end of the world' posts. Apparently many just love whining.

It made the Lab sit up and take notice and actually promise to do something, so mission accomplished.

[Luna Bliss]

Just now, Arielle Popstar said:

4 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

It could have been easily fixed via going back to the old viewer version and awaiting updates. But many just continued with their 'end of the world' posts. Apparently many just love whining.

It made the Lab sit up and take notice and actually promise to do something, so mission accomplished.

I believe the Firestorm group did...but not the forum, at least not much. The forum is known for negativity and people who dislike LL, people who complain and slant everything toward the negative.

[Gabriele Graves]

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

It made the Lab sit up and take notice and actually promise to do something, so mission accomplished.

Did it though?  Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.

Edited August 24 by Gabriele Graves

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

But many just continued with their 'end of the world' posts. Apparently many just love whining.

 

4 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

I'm not denying there were some callous comments, nor am I defending those people.

Mhmmm.

 

3 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

It could have been easily fixed via going back to the old viewer version and awaiting updates

Heads up, sorry to pop your tech-illiterate bubble here. but this started when the LL official Fail-Viewer came out, and was worthless trash, and people could NOT roll back to the older version, because...

Forced Auto-Eff-Up-Dates.

Also, there was, and still is, NO guarantee that the "updates" would/will fix a damn thing.

 

The late betas of Bloatstorm, apparently worked far better than the all singing all dancing Bloatstorm 7 release, which was worthless trash.

Now we're being told, "another Eff-Up-Date LL-soon-ish will fix everything!" and it WON'T.

 

[WeFlossDaily]

43 minutes ago, Crim Mip said:

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.

Industry standards . . . 

Not something I feel we should be too worried about. When it comes to open-world shopping simulators, we are still at the top of the food chain.

I deleted Firestorm over year ago because it was bloated and optimized and required too much of my system pre-PBR.

36 minutes ago, Crim Mip said:

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.

SL needs to run on a laptop somebody buys at the store. Anything short of that WILL cost SL users.

I'm open to seeing if LL can make Vulcan work.

I'm hoping the PBR disaster will lead to the TVPs experimenting with a larger variety rending pipelines.

Here's the system requirements, according to LL:

https://secondlife.com/system-requirements

They need to update them or meet them.

You are completely right about the RAM, though. 4 gigs probably can't even run a word processor on windows 10 at this point and I was struggling trying to use the 8 gigs that my machine came with to do anything. After upgrading to 32 gigs, which baffled the computer store worker as to why I needed so much, I am having a much better time.

I also greatly respect the way that you conveyed your point of view, especially because I tend to get a little snarky and hyperbolic when it comes to PBR. Sorry. Ironically, I pretty much agree with everything your saying.

[Love Zhaoying]

23 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But a great many of those same people, in my experience and as seen here on the forums too, seemed not to understand that others were having issues. Or they didn't care.

My problem was things looked shiny and dark. That seems so long ago now!

But anyway, many of us live "solitary" Second Lives and wouldn't know about other's experiences except for "assuming" and "projecting".

[Arielle Popstar]

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I believe the Firestorm group did...but not the forum, at least not much. The forum is known for negativity and people who dislike LL, people who complain and slant everything toward the negative.

Have you followed the Firestorm group chat? I saw it for the short amount of time I was on today and noticed quite a bit of negative discussion regarding the new releases.

If you don't like the negative why read the thread? And it is not like you don't contribute your own form of negativity here

[Luna Bliss]

Just now, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Heads up, sorry to pop your tech-illiterate bubble here. but this started when the LL official Fail-Viewer came out, and was worthless trash, and people could NOT roll back to the older version, because...

The LL viewer has been out a long while, and not many experienced problems with it.  I tried it out way last year and posted a video with it, and knew others using that viewer who didn't notice even the slightest difference in performance. Not saying some didn't, but it surely was better than the more recent Firestorm release.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Suggestions to lower settings was based on the fact that people with lower end hardware were now using ALM for the first time and of course that would have an impact.  Perfectly reasonable suggestions to make to try to help people.

The fact that the new viewer that they're recommending to people on low end hardware now has certain options disabled by default pretty much proves this point.  It's not a solution for everyone because some people are on hardware that already required them to run at the lowest possible settings so aren't going to see any benefits but it should help to improve performance for at least some people and some of those who heeded the advice have already seen an improvement.

 

5 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

They weren't "lying" about their own experiences. They were dismissing the different experience of those who didn't have reasonably good or high-end hardware.

Let's be honest, there have been times over the last few weeks where anyone daring to utter the words "I'm actually enjoying PBR and am personally not having any real issues!" would get shouted down by some for even daring to say anything positive and accused of being insensitive for not agreeing how terrible PBR is.

 

14 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But a great many of those same people, in my experience and as seen here on the forums too, seemed not to understand that others were having issues. Or they didn't care.

I can't speak to what went on in the in-world groups during PBR testing but I don't recall seeing gangs of people on the forums being intentionally callous to those having issues.  It really is starting to feel like anyone who actually approves of PBR and isn't having problems is being tarred with the same brush and judged by the words and actions of a few insensitive jerks, meanwhile those who disapprove of PBR are happy to sit around while a handful of their ranks spew wild accusations, nonsensical conspiracy theories and thinly veiled insults at anyone that dares to say "PBR isn't that bad", and will even defend them by saying "well the point they're trying to make is ..." then conveniently filtering out all their insane nonsense and expecting the other person to just ignore the attempted character assassination that just occured.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

7 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Did it though?  Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.

Thinking the Lab was spouting empty promises? You could be right but it won't go over well.

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

6 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I believe the Firestorm group did...but not the forum, at least not much. The forum is known for negativity and people who dislike LL, people who complain and slant everything toward the negative.

Have you followed the Firestorm group chat? I saw it for the short amount of time I was on today and noticed quite a bit of negative discussion regarding the new releases.

If you don't like the negative why read the thread? And it is not like you don't contribute your own form of negativity here

As has been said, yes Firestorm received complaints, and likely that's why LL took notice. But it's easy to get the idea more are having trouble than is really the case because the tons of people having NO problems don't come into the Firestorm group to complain about anything.

Why read the thread?  I post to set the record straight, to clear up distortions...it was getting skewed too much to the other side yet again...claiming that all these people weren't respectful toward those having problems -- that's simply NOT TRUE.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

[Redacted]

Edited August 25 by Scylla Rhiadra
Removed unncessary personal reference

[Gabriele Graves]

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Thinking the Lab was spouting empty promises? You could be right but it won't go over well.

I think you know that's not what I am saying.

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

It really is starting to feel like anyone who actually approves of PBR and isn't having problems is being tarred with the same brush and judged by the words and actions of a few insensitive jerks, meanwhile those who disapprove of PBR are happy to sit around while a handful of their ranks spew wild accusations, nonsensical conspiracy theories and thinly veiled insults at anyone that dares to say "PBR isn't that bad", and will even defend them by saying "well the point they're trying to make is ..." then conveniently filtering out all their insane nonsense and expecting the other person to just ignore the attempted character assassination that just occured.

I think if one of them had uttered "let's kill the people who like PBR" those who I previously thought had a rational mind and a conscience would have just stood by and smiled!!   lol     being a bit hyperbolic here...but damm...can't believe what I saw...and how my impressions of people changed over this.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

claiming that all these people weren't respectful toward those having problems -- that's simply NOT TRUE.

Hmmm.

 

18 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Apparently many just love whining.

12 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

people who complain and slant everything toward the negative.

 

4 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I post to set the record straight, to clear up distortions...it was getting skewed too much to the other side yet again...claiming that all these people weren't respectful toward those having problems -- that's simply NOT TRUE.

Yeah, right.

 

[Luna Bliss]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

25 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

You did a lot of imagining, like with Cube, accusing him of having this 'big machine' and what that implies, and not caring about those who had low-end computers. He never once said he did not care. I believe your character assassination was removed.

  

 

On 7/10/2024 at 6:11 PM, Cube Republic said:

Quote

Is there a way to block PBR items ?

Yeah - ctrl Q

Uh yeah...after you insulted his 'big machine'...

And...you do have to take into consideration that people were calling creators selfish if they didn't spend xtra time creating non-PBR alternatives.   So yeah, I feel the same....if you're going to trash me because I won't spend twice as long just for you, well, log off or go find some content u like!

Edited August 24 by Luna Bliss