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TheBenchmarker

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Everything posted by TheBenchmarker

  1. As soon as SecondLife moves to Vulkan instead of OpenGL, things will improve massively. Vulkan is a much more modern Graphics API, and has shown that running games through programs like DXVK, which is a DirectX to Vulkan call switcher, that it can run faster through DXVK than natively so I'm very optimistic to hear that. On another note, I think if LL introduced some sort of Texture control things might not be as bad as they are but it might limit creativity for creators who don't know how to optimize their meshes. I think if LL introduced some Vector Graphic Mesh sort of similar to what was done with BOM it might also continue to improve things. Similar to how AMD's FSR works.
  2. TheBenchmarker here, Just making sure this thread doesn't get lost. Few more things; With AMD's recent improvements to OpenGL performance on their Windows drivers. AMD cards can now be recommended, only making it more curious how SL will run on low end hardware since I've only ran SL on AMD's high end or once high end Graphics card. Something I'm willing to test, is what is the lowest spec computer that can run SL well. Sub $300 would be the budget for the entire PC. I'll come back with more numbers and thoughts once I can verify what runs SL well and what doesn't.
  3. I know that Quadro is the exact same silicon as GeForce cards, only a few examples of when that wasn't the case but my post was more of a thought experiment, and my further testing has shown that running SL on Quadro cards has no benefit.
  4. Sadly I've found this to be true from my limited experience using a Quadro for SL, It actually seems the nVidia control panel in the Quadro drivers have less options for OpenGL which might actually be harming performance. Sad to see, but onwards the goal moves. I'm glad to hear SL is running so well on a laptop 1050, Which is strange since this sounds like a much smoother experience than my 3090 has on desktop but SL was running at 1440p which might explain the performance difference. Testing SL again; I recently ran a test on SL running a RX 5700 XT on a 1080p monitor, I went to London City again and walked around for a little bit and to my surprise, it ran amazingly with near 30FPS constantly even with lots of avi's on screen. It seems SL does actually run at the resolution of the viewport and it doesn't scale up a fixed render resolution which is what I thought it was doing. SL is an oddity when testing and I'm still convinced their will be a mix of Windows Versions, Drivers, and hardware that will be gold for running SL on. More testing shall follow.
  5. Which is why I gave the example of Windows Server Core, which is a command line only version of Windows.
  6. I'll give Linux a try, I know you develop your own Linux viewer and I'm happy to give it a try, I have noticed that the official SL Viewer for Linux seems to be ancient. Which is strange because, as you said. Most of the open source libraries that SL runs on are developed on Linux. I'm a user of Linux but for gaming I have always went back to Windows due to the hoops that are usually needed to jump through to get games to work but being fair. If Windows is stripped down like how versions of Windows Server Core are built, Both Windows and Linux can be as streamlined as each other.
  7. Does SL simply run better on Linux because of Linux's better implementation of OpenGL or is it more of a driver issue?
  8. This is sadly a big annoyance with SL that it doesn't easily seem to follow normal conventions of "Faster is better" The research I am and everyone else in the thread is conducting will hopefully allow for a better understanding of why SL runs badly, and what we can do to fix it. I'm thankful people have started to comment and reply since this needs more and more discussion to get anywhere.
  9. I'm very thankful someone has said this because this is the exact problem with SL these days, is simply because it's running on old code. Vulkan has been around for quite a few years now so LL's slow transition is part of the problem on why SL might be loosing market share, because it runs terribly. Also I have noticed this, I was using a SATA HDD for my secondary drive and it was getting accessed constantly. I'm curious to see if Intel Optane might be a fix for this since the latency to NAND flash is half. SL also seems to be dependent on lots of ram because I only have 8GB in the PC I'm testing and using Windows 11 that has been debloated. It's constantly sitting at near 90% usage. I have also acquired a Quadro card to test with, a Kepler based card. Just to see if my theory was correct. Currently, with the lowest settings but with shadows and the advanced lighting turned on I was getting 50FPS at The Firestorm Starter place, which was quite impressive. Going back to London city the FPS tanked to around 15FPS. It seems the benefits that the Quadro cards get for ISV certified applications like CAD applications doesn't seem to apply to SL, but maybe for someone who is developing a viewer *cough* maybe could apply these driver pathways to SL. I also tried Firestorm but saw no difference between the default LL viewer and the Firestorm viewer. It seem's SL is simply bottlenecked by a few things, that only more research will uncover. Is SL bottlenecked by storage speed/Latency? (Will Intel Optane help) Does SL prefer purely single core/multicore performance or does it prefer a Generation/Platform of Processors. (Since SL is strange we can simply put all logic aside) Is SL bottlenecked by RAM speed? (From what Arluelle has said, possibly.) Finding the specs of LL's Dev Workstations would help quite a lot, since I assume they know that their software runs like garbage on mostly everything. What the ultimate goal of this thread is, is to make a configuration that is the best for SL and hopefully have people not wasting money. I know AMD's cards used to be terrible for OpenGL performance because I had a really terrible time with an AMD Vega 64 a few years ago that caused me to sell the card because I was getting 10FPS at the most but it has me wondering now if SL would like the massive memory bandwidth that comes with HBM2, more testing would need to be done.
  10. Owner of a 5800X3D here, It doesn't help SL at all. Runs almost identically to my 3800x.
  11. SL is like a Ferrari with a diesel engine from an old tractor. Shiny on the surface, rusty underneath.
  12. I haven't tried Firestorm in a while simply because I couldn't use their interface since it reminded me of years gone by. I'll give it a shot though.
  13. Why is SL a slideshow on Powerful PC's? Hello all, I just want to start this thread of by saying, Thank you for reading or even participating. I believe the community can make SL better. SL, Second Life, "The Old Metaverse" etc, Is known by many names and by many people around the world. It is also known to do one thing, Bring PC's to their knees. For years I thought it was Anecdotal experience that SL ran badly, but research and time has taught me this it not the case. TheBenchmarker, is not just me, or you or her or him. It should be something that everyone on SL can give to, a Knowledge base of what makes SL run smoothly and what doesn't. I want to start off this topic by giving some of my anecdotal experience from being on SL for nearly 10 years at this point. SL didn't run as poorly years ago, This is mostly because things weren't as developed and textures and other things used by creators weren't as taxing. SL now runs poorly on everything. My personal system is as follows; Ryzen 7 5800X3D 32GB of RAM RTX 3090 I run SL at 2560x1440p, Now because SL runs in a Window I didn't take into account it is actually rendering at that size but it does. A previous system I had with a 1700x and a GTX 1070 ran SL like butter.... for two weeks until I updated a driver and it started running badly again. I however, also ran a RX 6800 XT up until a few months ago, SL performed significantly better with AMD's Pro drivers installed, which I elaborate on further on in the post (Linking mostly to nVidia) SL isn't a game! With the way SL is designed with user submitted content, textures and everything. SL can't be thought of as a game when thinking of performance and maybe putting together a computer for specifically SL. Unoptimized textures? Massive Mesh's? Sounds like CAD. SL can be thought of as more like a CAD program than a Game. I think the exact same type of system that would run a CAD application like Maya or Revit would be exactly what SL needs, but this needs further musing to actually be proven. Currently; I have built a test system to see what works and what doesn't work and I'll post more detailed How To's and findings in the responses. Specifications; Ryzen 7 1700x 16GB DDR4@2666 SATA SSD 2ndry HDD (Cache Location) GTX 1070 Ti. With this system, running at 1440p and at high while walking through London City. SL ran like hot garbage, as to be expected. Switching everything to low helped slightly but not by much, The average framerate while running at 1440p low was 28FPS (Anecdotal - No idea how to properly measure FPS other than looking at the statistic bar) and then while walking moving, it dipped down to 5-7FPS. With quite a lot of avi's on screen, it runs badly but when alone it'll run at 60FPS plus but everyone can agree no one plays SL only on their own land doing their own thing *all* the time, So let's be real. It's unacceptable that this is how it plays on still fairly mid-range hardware but trying to optimize SL on the development side of things is a rock and hard place type of situation. Also to dispel some rumors, SL takes more than two cores to run well, The LL viewer seems to target 4 Cores. Which makes sense. But...But... This is promising. Doing a few small tweaks to SL brought the frame rate up from 30FPS at Low to 35FPS at Ultra and a dip down to only 20FPS. The tweaks were; Moving Cache to secondary drive and maxing it out 9984MB Maxing the Networking slider Doing a few tweaks inside nVidia control panel (Will elaborate in next post) Doing these few things, brought the framerate and more importantly the frame-times up to a steady smooth level, so being curious. I then tried with the nVidia Studio driver which is the driver that you can download for GeForce cards which apparently has some more optimization for more creator type things. Using the studio driver brought the frame-times up even more.. Which leads me to think. SL may run better on Professional grade hardware, like a Quadro or Tesla. Quadro's, Titan's and Tesla's from nVidia have specific optimizations in the driver path for CAD and professional applications such as the ones mentioned earlier like Maya and 3DS Max, Revit etc. All of these applications use OpenGL in one way or another and all of them recommend Quadro's. I know somewhere on LL's site it says Quadro's aren't recommended but there's also a current thread from LL talking about how SL runs better on Windows Vista so I think we can safely ignore all of the written documentation for now. Thinking on the type of workstations that run these programs well, It all simply seems to come down to Pro level graphics and single core performance, which lines up with my research about SL. So, questions still to be answered. What does SL run best on? What does LL target hardware wise with development? Is it current low end hardware like the GTX 1650? 1650 Super? or is it still older hardware? If SL does run better on older hardware, We can hopefully give a recommendation to simply go with older hardware. It would make sense, like how games for DX9 run better on DXVK because the older API's simply can't handle modern hardware. What is the specifications of the workstations that LL are using to develop? They must know what runs better on their own machines? The only currently available knowledge on this is the old Youtube video's that show LL running mostly Mac's. Which I'd hardly guess they're still using considering OpenGL got dropped from MacOS a while back. Does SL run better when put through a translation layer such as DXVK, would running it on Linux be better? (I know there's one guy on the forums who developed his own viewer on Linux and says its better, if you're reading this then HI!, I'll give it a shot) Thank you for reading this far and I hope I can invite some of you to comment down below, because that is what this is all about. I'm hoping this type of research excites more than just me.
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