DNArt
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Posts posted by DNArt
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looking ..
https://gyazo.com/308d6c92bb6bc1d5b6a58948b760d038
those are all set at max the land LOD does have effect. 2 fps difference between 1 and 4.
I'm not unhappy or things like that but i do find it a bit disappointing the SL viewer runs at almost the same speed as it did on my previous system (1080ti )that i used up to 2 years ago the hardware is an overkill now. and doesn't mind most SL throws at it. The CPU seems to not get the draw calls there in time when the draw distance is increased and thats the limit that restricts the fps rate on my 2080ti. If LL don't start addressing CPU/GPU communication soon i will not notice any difference in speed or looks when i upgrade in like 3 years time. those with laptops will because there low end GPU's will run faster and have a different bottle neck.
ETA: thats handy to know thanks i never looked at the nVidea control panel
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Hi Solar im generaly happy with fps over 15 over 20 is joy i did redit an early post and did add some screen grabs because i moved LOD from 4 to 1 just to try. I didn't move which could be cheeting? but i noticed no difference in FPS maybe because even at a setting of 1 the amounts of draw calls getting issued stayed the same and the GPU could easily handle the more triangle per call? and CPU/GPU communications is the bottle neck for my graphics card? (2080ti) Im sorry if i pressed a button in your irritation zone but i appreciate your contribution
https://gyazo.com/a95582864bc05f0250f1e857b6febd5a https://gyazo.com/89c9f9db952c2c3c50182fa63b450b36 lower LOD doesnt change that much btw in framerate at the moment
just did it again the weird thing is yes i see things disapear at LOD 1 that are there at LOD 4 but fps is marginally higher at LOD 4
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Hi Solar
For me the 6.5 fps was not the issue i maxed out the settings to illustrate where the bottle neck is.
If you test things its often good to test extremes i been told so problems present them self more clearly. What i tried to illustrate is that lots of CPU/GPU power stays unused currently and even more so in the future. so now we have to lower draw distance which i find a shame and which in my opinion shouldn't be necessary the constant popping up of object or altering there shape also limits a feeling of immersion maybe im more visual oriented, no clue but to me these things brake parts of the illusion.
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@ Gage Wirefly i gues the problem is that 88m draw distance sounds not that appealing to me in an open world game. thrust me system speed/ configuration and network are no bottlenecks. With a low draw distance -> viewer draw calls the CPU-> GPU botleneck disappears. and suddenly the GPU can do what its for. but when you rent or visit a sim or like to use vehicles to explore the need for a bigger draw distance grows.
https://gyazo.com/a95582864bc05f0250f1e857b6febd5a https://gyazo.com/89c9f9db952c2c3c50182fa63b450b36 lower LOD doesnt change that much btw in framerate at the moment
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@gage wirefly
yes a big draw distance leads to many more draw calls of even viewer triangles so highly in effective since they draw the LOD level with very view triangles from the distance sims.
I did put the distance so high just to illustrate that bottleneck even more. they could maybe better send us some imposter textures from those sims
hard to notice details from that far but great to see something at all when flying or sailing https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/game-tools-imposter-textures/ oh look what google did find. https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/707584-automatically-grouping-objects-for-impostoring/5429455/ <---- LL using imposters for distance sims probably saves money server side and makes SL more fun for vehicles
@Ardy Lay you are right Ktris/s would be less arbitrary. and that 70 triangles on average for a draw call was something i did read a long while ago. But i can still imagine it to be true since current LI calculations lead to almost near 2 triangle at the highest LOD level for many products.
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Hello Animats
I can only give like a simplistic explanation due to limited knowledge but here https://www.howtogeek.com/194756/cpu-basics-multiple-cpus-cores-and-hyper-threading-explained/ they explain the hardware part of your CPU very well. My CPU has 16 real cores but also a virtual core per core so they appear to have 32 cores for the operating system.
As far as i did read firestorm uses a max of 4 cores (please someone correct me if i'm wrong ) so as it stands now in theory the SLviewer can use 32/4 = 12.5% of my CPU
If you scroll down abit on this page https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html you can see modern CPU's have lots of cores and they wil get more and more each year.
Additional info.. At the time when the SL viewer was first build decades ago
the principle of giving CPU's more cores was not very common and the operating systems probably also didn't fully support that. In those days a CPU had 1 core so 1 unit did all the tasks and if you wanted to have more done you had to boost the speed at which the CPU operated. At a point in time they reached a speed that made the processors melt so they had to come up with an other strategy for faster processors. More cores per processor. Where there was once 1 worker (core) to do the tasks we now have a team (multiple cores), and each year the new CPU's give us bigger teams. That means the tasks has to be spit preferably in such a way all members of the team stay busy. Of course LL knows this for years already and they do try to spit parts of the job to several workers if one is available. But because the whole order of things was made up at a time when just a view people where thinking in teams, the way in which you can spit of tasks is far from optimal. The correct approach would probably be to rebuild huge parts from the ground up with compatibility and multi treading in mind. Something very view people would jump up from joy todo. To make things even more complicated ......
As mentioned before by several people, SL cant do standard tricks that other games + game engine's use. This has lots todo with precompiling the graphics data. Standard in games after they been developed the computer analyses the data and makes optimisations. because SL allows us to change textures in a sim, move objects, rez items etc etc . all the things we so love about SL and all at anytime we like, most of those are impossible todo before the data is send to our computer. toi make things worse our content creators are more concerned about selling there products and how many LI they cost than about how easy to render they are. Understandable from there point of view.
in an ideal world the CPU would call the GPU once each frame and tell it here is the data do your thing. This call is called a draw call. The ideal world doesnt excist for any game, but still the general rough rule of thumb is less draw calls leads to => higher fps so a draw call in AAA games make the GPU draw thousands of triangles at once (GPU's have many thousands of cores. here you have an overview of GPU's from 2 generations ago https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/10series/compare/ to see for yourself) and in SL just 70 triangles on average. this means our CPU will be busy lots with sending data to the GPU and sadly our viewer doesn't uses all the workers in our CPU. Here we see one of our bottlenecks a GPU that appears to be idle and a CPU that sleeps as well since just a view cores are used.
So the graphic cards will get more cores in the future but our draw calls hardly use those cores since SL's draw calls there super small. and our future CPU will get more cores but just 4 appear to be useful since the current viewer cant spit the work load much better. it all leads to a trend that doesn't favor our viewers performance.
I fear it needs serious rethinking over the way the viewer now operates, leading to rewriting huge parts of the code and libraries. We can just hope they also come up with some creative tricks to let all those idle cores do some ad hock optimisations as well. So it will need LL to sit down and make this there priority its to huge a task to be done by 3th party developers.
From engadget "With Sansar off its books, Linden Lab is now "a very profitable company," according to Altberg. "Second Life is an older, very established cash machine that works really wel" I would say this is realy great to hear but please invest a bit in the future of your cash machine so it keeps up with it time and keeps generating cash!
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sure MoiraKathleen
the nice thing about multithreading is that it could be made scalable and adopt to the hardware at hand. and even low end portable CPU's have multiple cores now.
adding more cores is the modern way to keep CPU's an increasing overall speed boost with each new generation for a while already
So its a bit of a win win. lol i feel like a salesman now
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Hello KjartanEno
Mainland. Svalbard i think or Erle .. those fps are extreme low for me and i just looked for a location to make a point. i generally have something much more expectable and a CPU use is than even more down and peaks at 7.5 %. my GPU can get up to 50%
Thinking of it i should have opened the statistics window to better see why it only did get 6.5 fps
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You are right about me not quite understanding the other issues that are fundamental on a technical level (i do understand the practical problems a little, things like many libraries would probably have to get rewritten for using multi treading in a proper way). Mayor work. i don't expect LL looking forward to that.
and i really do appreciate your effort to enlighten me in this.
I'm not expecting 60+ frames but i do hope it will use more of the computing power that is at hand. At least that would make me feel the viewer is trying its best.
The alternative would be that our beautiful game would stay unrivaled in concept but feel outdated in implementation of that concept.
I just started this post because i hope more users ( hopefully some of those work for LL) wonder why it starts to be useless to get a faster computer when it comes to playing SL.
My previous computer did run the viewer at a similar pace. Using 11% of CPU and 15% of a GPU, while running at ultra on 4K, is a bit underwelming for a graphical 3D game. don't we all agree on that ?
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Its stays hard to accept the viewer could not potentialy run much faster on modern hardware for me still.
Because when i run multiple viewers simultaneous frame rates stay sort of the same and i feel more the drop that is noticed is be cause of lack of focus of the program then limitations in the hardware.
Those other viewers do each use additional computer power (cores) of course and plenty of power and vram on my graphics card stays unused by a single viewer .
The development of hardware is to more and more cores. it feels our viewer is missing out on the changes the industry made to add more power to programs.
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Hi Solar
Yeah i understand it can never be as effiicient as pre-compiled stuf. But than still i would expect in someway the bootleneck would end up to be in hardware.
Things like my GPU running out of memory to keep all that stuff or my CPU being busy to try to do something to speed things up but non of that
My internet speed is not used at all but still you have to wait for minutes for textures to load.
The only thing that keeps popping up in my mind is that the viewer is just very bad at using modern hardware (lots of cores)
Dont get me wrong i love this amazing game.
I just fear it will become harder and harder to sell to new users who have modern hardware.
Most of us are used to these low frame rates and learned to accept it.
But that was in the days SL would fry our hardware gaming PC or not.
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Hello Gage thanks for your reply, sure i can lower that and its the main thing that will help.
I did put it at 1000 to make the point the viewer could use so much more of the computers power. its such a waste it just sits unused.
Whit what the users could do .. i was more referring to a partition to motivate LL . Or other ways to make them clear the gap between gaming computers capabilities and there viewer is getting huge and growing by the day.
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Hello Coffee Pancake
I know you know very well what your talking about.
Do you have any suggestions what should be done by LL (and can we, the users, speed that up) to make sure the viewer doesn't run at just 6.1 fps and lets our computers sleep?
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Thank you all for your reactions.
@MarissaOrloff good idea and yes working on the server will surely help to do i have no idea how more performance there would cost LL in fees to Amazon.
@panterapolnocy thank you for the link that was useful and enlightening to watch.
@Flea Yatsenko @ Ardy Lay i always wondered if some user selected (use a new flag) objects couldn't get compiled and optimized (for instance during a sim restart) to help with proper occlusion and faster rendering.
Watching the video of the meeting did convince me even more that they for now still give priority to other topics than rewriting the engine from the ground up as would be needed for proper multi threading. Currently firestorm on 4k and ultra peaks at 7.5% of my CPU and the max load on my CPU is around 50%. even when framerates go down under 10fps my computer is left to sleep. It simply uses to view cores. The way things are going i don't see those issues addressed. And as a user I feel powerless to help the viewer go faster since its practically useless to buy faster hardware.
SL did grow rapidly in years when it made all computers fry there graphics cards and CPU. How wonderful it would be if the viewer would just use the power we have available right now. My network doesn't even know its being used and yet i have to wait minutes before grey textures show a picture. The gab between available computer power and SL performance will only grow and grow making SL feel like a badly programmed game to most newcomers with a reasonable Computer.
Rebuilding the engine for multi treading is a mayor (years ) undertaking so that decision has to be taken at the top. LL doesn't seem to be jumping from joy to start doing that.
I don't see any reason why switching to PBR would brake the current content in a very serious way . The defuse map and normal map would still be used and al do i do use the specular map most of the times .. it doesn't have a mind-blowing effect since no proper environment reflections are rendered anyway so taking the grey value would work i guess. And speaking of shader's maybe the switch to Vulcan could give us several new shaders? Like a ground shader available for mesh and some thing to keep the water out of our boats.
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Hello all.
I have been looking into ways to improve fps and general SL performance, probably like most of us did at some point in time.
Of Course i did read many useful tips (thanks) but I learned the giant and overall bottleneck is our single core viewer.
My PC sleeps when running SL at its highest settings and it can easily run multiple viewers without a huge drop in frame rates.
I know I dont have the general hardware with 16 cores BUT it's not hard to imagine how much faster SL could run if more cores were used. I'm guessing 4+ times in my case.
Multi cores have been around on midrange and low end PCs for decades and I'm unsure if you even can get a single core PC these days.
The trend in CPU's is still towards more and more cores.
So it's likely that at some point in the future LL will realise making a multi threaded version of their viewer is a must to keep their game running at acceptable frame rates.
For everyone with a gaming computer it feels ancient for many years already and today's gaming PC are tomorrow's mobiles.
Soo why not start development towards a multi threaded viewer now instead of 10 years down the road?
Sansar no longer eats the lindens, that we happily pay for playing our beloved SL, please give the users something that surely will make all of us happy, even those with the 10+ year old multi core PC and laptop, it will have to get done at some point in the future anyway.
I understood this is no trivial amount of work at all so I would expect multiple years and not months.
But in my eyes that just gives more incentive to start working on this A.S.A.P.
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@Monty Linden, lol yeah
it sure is. Google still found it for me do to illustrate CDN is in use quite a while. Should have added the date of Quote thanks for pointing out.
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oh wow @Qui Ninangao @ChinRey & @ animats yeah that sound exactly like it thanks for that info. The changes seem to always appear after a server reset maybe this could give LL a hint on where to look. With more and more advanced graphics objects (like decals) in a region i hope LL realize the bug will become more and more annoying. Alwin pointed out this is a user forum, are Jira's the way to talk with the Lindens? or do they have a more custom friendly way to get/give feedback? what the team was doing in Sansar (having weekly meetings with users) was kind of nice and more direct. I hope they realize in time SL is do lacking lots in graphics speed and shader quality by far there better unique and still money making product
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@animats the changes stay very consistent over any number of logins once they happen after the restart. so yeah i always keep some textures that are missing random but this really is some sort of server issue it seems
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@Alwin i meant CDN Alwin.
With CDN a lot of that data is now pivoted away from the simulator host, as it is now supplied by the CDN’s servers. The frees-up capacity on the simulator host for handling other tasks (an example being that of region crossings), leading to additional performance improvements across the grid.
Highwinds, a CDN provider Linden Lab initially selected for this project, has 25 data centres around the world and a dedicated network from and through which essential asset data on avatar bakes, textures and meshes (at present) can be delivered to SL users
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Hi LL every now and than after a sim restart the server messes up the alpha mode of some of the textures. its either set to none or the wrong blending type. since it takes a sim now longer to load all textures assets etc (at leased for me since the move to the cloud) it means each time after restart i have to wait and wait long to check which group of trees or whatever decals etc are effected if any that is. a guess would on be it happens like 8 to 9 times a year to me and of course now 2 weeks in a row
but its a real pain to correct and cost hours on the whole sim to fix and check. specially the decals under other decals etc well you get the picture I'm sure. Because its such a random mistake i took it for granted as part of the pain from SL but with using more and more decals and knowing others have the same at leased the friends i checked. I take the liberty to ventilate my frustration over this here in the hope some one at LL can pick this up.
hard to notice details from that far but great to see something at all when flying or sailing 
it sure is. Google still found it for me do to illustrate CDN is in use quite a while. Should have added the date of Quote thanks for pointing out.
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Second Live 2.0 in Unreal engine
in General Second Life Tech Discussion
Posted · Edited by DNArt
im currently standing in kare
your welcome . But i doesnt suprize me you get better framrates . my hardware now is an overkill 
and yours better tweaked