Please help me understand frame rates versus your equipment

[Steve Mahfouz]

Hello all. I've been playing SL for almost 11 years now. My frame rates per second in crowded sims have steadily been getting better but I remain perplexed.

I just upgraded my gear to a high-end i7 Intel processor, 32 gigs of RAM, a very high-end Nvidia card, and a PCI-E hard drive. I'm not willing to get into overclocking, so that's ruled out. My ISP is 50 megabits per second download.

I'm still only pulling 6 frames a second in a very crowded club. I'm not going to name the club, because that feels like "calling out" to me. Granted, I have all the " eye candy " turned on. I understand, of course, that I can get higher frame rates by going to lower settings. I know that avatars, scripts, and very large textures, among other factors, influence frame rate. 

Is my experience in line with others ? As I said, I'm not willing to get into overclocking. Thank you for your time and patience.

Steve

on edit: I just did an experiment. I put my Firestorm viewer on Ultra, with Shadow Quality cranked up to 4.0, Scale of Terrain Texture Rendering up to 24, Anti-Aliasing up to 16X, Anisotropic Filtering enabled, and Lossy Texture Compression disabled. I went home to my very low lag sim, in my Linden home. So, these are more or less ideal conditions. My FPS topped out around 61 FPS with all the ultra-ish settings on. So, 61 fps is my more or less theoretical max right now.

[Freya Mokusei]

Maybe! 6 FPS is probably typical for a "very crowded club" with "eye candy" on.

I'm on a 4Gb Nvidia 970 and rarely sink this low, though maybe 10-15FPS. I'm pretty good at muting folks who are lagbutts and I don't really go to busy clubs. It's been a while since I've done any performance testing, but I don't really experience what other folks refer to as "lag" even from the UK.

You do forget to mention some important factors that might be telling of poor experiences - Geography, Sim Ping, graphics RAM, caching space and speeds, operating system (OS X always runs at fewer FPS than Windows, IME). Some viewers see performance gain over others, but this varies a lot.

Second Life's a bit hard to measure like this, computers are complicated, networks are complicated, and rendered scenes can go from like 3000 triangles to 130,000. If you have a well-optimised network and PC you can almost certainly always squeeze slightly better performance but I'm afraid I wouldn't know what to suggest.

[Steve Mahfouz]

You do forget to mention some important factors that might be telling of poor experiences - Geography, Sim Ping, graphics RAM, caching space and speeds, operating system (OS X always runs at fewer FPS than Windows, IME). Some viewers see performance gain over others, but this varies a lot.

 

I'm in the southeast USA. Sim ping at this club varies wildly, from 125 ms to 350 ms at times. Graphics RAM is 12 gigs (Titan X). Caching space, I usually leave it at default for Firestorm. Caching speed, not sure about this. OS is Windows 10 x64. Viewer is Firestorm x64, latest version.

[Perrie Juran]

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Steve Mahfouz wrote:

You do forget to mention some important factors that might be telling of poor experiences - Geography, Sim Ping, graphics RAM, caching space and speeds, operating system (OS X always runs at fewer FPS than Windows, IME). Some viewers see performance gain over others, but this varies a lot.

 

I'm in the southeast USA. Sim ping at this club varies wildly, from 125 ms to 350 ms at times. Graphics RAM is 12 gigs (Titan X). Caching space, I usually leave it at default for Firestorm. Caching speed, not sure about this. OS is Windows 10 x64. Viewer is Firestorm x64, latest version.

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I hope one or more of our Interweb Gurus pops in but your Sim Ping seems a little high.  And it shouldn't have anything to do with the club per se because:

"Ping Sim: How long it takes data to go from your computer to the region you're currently in. This is largely dependent on your connection to the Internet."   http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewerhelp:Statistics

But how relevant it may be is a whole other question.  See this thread and note Oz Linden's comments toward the end.

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/quot-Ping-Sim-quot-in-viewer-statistics-window/td-p/2846746

[Nalates Urriah]

6 FPS… I get that with an old Quad-Core 2.6ghz and 8GB of ram running one step below Ultra.

This is currently a viewer issue across the range of all viewers. Some handle avatars better, some worse.

There is a fix coming… but, it will be a slow fix that takes time to take root. But, we can change our viewer settings and get an immediate benefit.

Problem

Mesh avatars and clothes are a good thing and a bad thing. If the mesh clothes and avatars are well made, they improve performance. Most of my new mesh outfits are half the render cost of my older system and sculpty outfits. But, many of those making avatars and clothes have no real idea what they are doing and know little or nothing about optimizing their creations. In that lack of knowledge lies the problem.

The basic SL default avatar is about 7,000+ polygons. Adding ‘system’ clothes to it adds nothing to the polygon count.

Mesh avatars being sold now are all over 7k polygons, at least those I've seen. Some clothes and body parts approach 100,000 polygons per item and some have so many polygons we see people asking in the SL forum how to solve the upload problems caused by such big meshes.

Solution

The RC Quick Graphics viewer has a feature named Avatar Complexity Settings and a new value/rating we will be seeing and hearing much of in the future: Avatar Complexity Information (ACI). Both of these are about controlling the render cost of mesh avatars and clothes.

You can read about the details here: http://blog.nalates.net/tag/arc/

When the viewer with ACI promotes to the main viewer, things will start to get better. The viewer will let you control how much energy your viewer spends rendering avatars. Those that you have decided are too costly to render, they slow you down too much, you can render as a Jelly Baby, a Gumby-looking character.

The person with the high complexity avatar gets a message prompt in their viewer that x many people in the region are refusing to render their avatar. So, what is the point of having a hawt avatar if no one is seeing it?

When we put on new clothes or body parts the viewer will flash a new ACI value for our avatar. That gives us information about the items we are wearing. I have mesh hair do's that have an ACI value of 3,000 and others at almost 250,000… There is well made hair and poorly made hair...

Getting information about how many people aren’t rendering us and seeing what each item costs to render will bring awareness to the quality of things we buy in SL. That in turn will put pressure on designers to do a better job. So, just as we see 1-prim furniture advertised in the marketplace. So too I think we will see low ACI items promoted there.

As more people adopt low ACI avatars and clothes, things will get better.

Alternate

In the meantime Google how to optimize your Second Life graphics settings for better performance. There are some changes you can make that will hopefully let you keep your FPS up in the 20’s or better.

Personally I turn my graphics settings to MEDIUM and then begin turning on individual features until I get the quality render I want. I also notice which features cost me the most FPS.

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

So, what is the point of having a hawt avatar if no one is seeing it?

 

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I sometimes set the maximum number of non-imposter avatars to one.

I'm not hawt for all of you, I'm hawt for meeeee!

;-).

[Steve Mahfouz]

Thanks so much for all the info, Nalates! :smileyhappy:

[Buttacwup Float]

One other nice feature of the viewer with aci is that it will also allow you tobsave graphics preference and adjust on the fly. So you can have and Uber ultra setting for exploring and taking pictures, and a medium settings for out shopping and another for the super busy club.

 

One thing I see people do when they get a new PC as well is Jack all the settings up including draw distance. If you upped DD bring it back down . I find 160 is a good trade between seeing and performance.

[Callum Meriman]

Maybe the CPU is likely just too busy calculating shadows to be able to feed the video card information fast enough?

(and yes, definately drop the draw distance as suggested above)

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Perrie Juran wrote:

...your Sim Ping seems a little high.  And it shouldn't have anything to do with the club...

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Running ping to the same region (the domain name is available on Help About) outside of SL will show a more accurate figure of true network "distance" i think.

The SL viewer code is a bit long in the tooth. It isn't really current-day multi threaded, multi core technology. The busier the place the wilder that number looks.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Now I have a rig BUILT to handle anything thrown at it,  no BS.   I get typically 40 to 60 fps even crowded areas.   mostly because of NO Shadows.   Draw at 30m.  and not trying to over work the gpu.    most people "BUT I NEED TO SEE MORE THEN 30M"  no, no you do not in a crowded area.    take it from a person who spent years on a single core amd pos with a 64mb video card.     But if your question is,  "can you use higher" yes, yes I can.   I can make it out to 1024m. and still get 20fps.  but I prefer the high fps so everything is smooth and not matrixy.

 

Settings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey)
Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)
Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 30 m
Bandwidth: 1400 kbit/s
LOD factor: 4
Render quality: Ultra (7/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: Yes
Texture memory: 1024 MB (1)

 

 

CPU: Intel® Core i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz (4124.98 MHz)
Memory: 32669 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 10240)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2