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Mid-tier GPU + High-tier CPU, SL still has extremely low FPS


Suki Hirano
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I have a Lenovo Ideapad Y510P with a Nvidia GT750M (mid-tier GPU according to notebook GPU benchmark list) and a 4th-gen i7 CPU (high-tier according to CPU benchmark), running Windows 8.1, and my SL still suffers from low framerate problems. At home on our sim my FPS hovers between 20-30 even though besides our house, the surroundings are mostly empty. While shopping the FPS drops below 20 most of the time, and if I dare go to a very popular event/fair (like hair fair, skin fair, uber, etc), the FPS will drop to like... 1 or 2, and half the time my SL would simply freeze and crash. Even if I lower graphics to the absolute minimum, at these events my FPS never goes above 10. My graphics are about on-par with medium settings by default (object LOD = 3, avatar = 4, view distance = 100, max # of non-imposters = about 5, lighting/shadows unchecked, atmospheric shaders unchecked, basic shaders checked, local lighting checked).

Is this normal? SL is not even some video game released in 2015, why am I getting such low performance? I can play the latest games on medium settings with no problem yet I can't handle something like SL with its last-decade graphics...

Edit: The GPU is being used for SL so it's not a problem with Optimus, I have the Nvidia GPU monitor enabled and it's showing SL as using GPU not integrated card.

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Suki Hirano wrote:Is this normal? SL is not even some video game released in 2015, why am I getting such low performance? I can play the latest games on medium settings with no problem yet I can't handle something like SL with its last-decade graphics...

 

Games are heavily optimised as far as mesh content, texture maps and tight integration with graphics card features.

SL is none of these.  User created content, usually hopelessly unoptimised geometry, ridiculously high numbers of triangles in mesh content (just keep hitting subsurf in everything until it looks smooth enough and upload), content that you'd never see closely in a game is a few triangles yet in SL, the creator assumes everyone will zoom into a necklace to examine the fine detail of a billion polygons etc.

Textures, in your games are hugely optimised, single texture maps to be loaded and re-used as far as possible whereas in SL, lets just throw 1024x1024 textures at every face... get the idea?

In your games you've got local content, SL has to download it because of the dynamic user creation abilities.

There's just no comparison really, your complaint has little to do with the age of the software, it's not like taking a 2008 game with optimised content for 2008 and running it in 2015 which is where you get the benefit of an old game with current hardware.  Also remember that SL isn't "old" in that sense, features such as the introduction of advanced lighting and mesh were not in the 2004 version and in the life of SL are still somewhat recent.

 

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Since your on a laptop might want to verify that your power settings are not limiting either the video card or CPU. Also my laptop gets about 50% of the performance of my desktop. Ram is very important for SL as well since the client can end up using a ton. If you don't have 8 gb of ram likely beat to close everything else down to ensure that the SL software doesn't need to cache bits to disk.

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Yeah I have 8GB of RAM, and power settings set to not affect performance. It's just quite shocking and makes you wonder what kind of computer can even run SL smoothly in those busy sims without turning graphics all the way down to minimum... funny thing is even though SL textures aren't compressed, they still look terrible when zoomed in anyways, way worse than most games.

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couple things going on here.

The user created stuff isn't the problem. In a dense population area my vert buff is only hitting 5-7k. <-- this is super low. On a modern game, the main character can be 12-25k verts, while the whole scene can go as high as 2-5 million verts.

The problem is in the engine. The engine isn't optomized to run on newer hardware. I had an old gtx670 (3 year old card) that would play this game in the oculus rift, between mid-high, and get 80fps. Out of the rift i was seeing fps in the 120 range.
My current system is an i7-4770k, gtx TitanX 12gb vram, 32gb system ram. Massive upgrade from my old system, so you would expect better fps. However, on the absolute lowest settings im getting about 30fps. If i push the system to anything above mid, my fps drops to about 12-17. 

So IF it is the user created stuff that is unoptomized and hard to run, explain to me how a 3 year old gtx 670 was getting 100+fps while a brand new TitanX maxes out around the mid 30fps on the lowest settings?

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PyroSteel wrote:

 

The problem is in the engine. The engine isn't optomized to run on newer hardware. I had an old gtx670 (3 year old card) that would play this game in the oculus rift, between mid-high, and get 80fps. Out of the rift i was seeing fps in the 120 range.

So IF it is the user created stuff that is unoptomized and hard to run, explain to me how a 3 year old gtx 670 was getting 100+fps while a brand new TitanX maxes out around the mid 30fps on the lowest settings?

Unsuited drivers.

You didn't see 120fps, 100fps or even 80fps everywhere with that GTX670.  Quiet places yes, moderate unlikely and certainly not in heavily dense areas.

I have a GTX680 and very dense areas when looking at stupidly dense mesh can bring this to single figure fps.

fps is a very difficult measure in SL in the first place because it varies wildly per scene and unless you're comparing like for like, you just can't say "I get x fps" and compare it to what someone else gets in a different region with a completely different scene.

Content isn't optimised.

 

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PyroSteel wrote:

couple things going on here.

The user created stuff isn't the problem. In a dense population area my vert buff is only hitting 5-7k. <-- this is super low. On a modern game, the main character can be 12-25k verts, while the whole scene can go as high as 2-5 million verts.

The problem is in the engine. The engine isn't optomized to run on newer hardware. I had an old gtx670 (3 year old card) that would play this game in the oculus rift, between mid-high, and get 80fps. Out of the rift i was seeing fps in the 120 range.

My current system is an i7-4770k, gtx TitanX 12gb vram, 32gb system ram. Massive upgrade from my old system, so you would expect better fps. However, on the absolute lowest settings im getting about 30fps. If i push the system to anything above mid, my fps drops to about 12-17. 

So IF it is the user created stuff that is unoptomized and hard to run, explain to me how a 3 year old gtx 670 was getting 100+fps while a brand new TitanX maxes out around the mid 30fps on the lowest settings?

SOMETHING is hosed in your new machine. A possible problem is most high end gaming machines are tuned to run DirectX while Second Life uses OpenGL. It's possible certain tweaks were done in setup to boost DirectX performance but are counterproductive for OpenGL.

And "optimizing things for new hardware" isn't going to make any friends with the many SL users who BAWWW if they have trouble running it on their eight-year-old hardware.

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Many users are experiencing this, I think over all its fustrating to put a bunch of money into a system for a world such as this only to get medicore results.

 

The best think I ever did was give up on trying to run shadows fulltime.  For those who are experience with Witch 3. Think of them like Nvidia hairworks. "The optimization just isnt there to justify the performace loss" 

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

SOMETHING is hosed in your new machine. A possible problem is most high end gaming machines are tuned to run DirectX while Second Life uses OpenGL. It's possible certain tweaks were done in setup to boost DirectX performance but are counterproductive for OpenGL.

And "optimizing things for new hardware" isn't going to make any friends with the many SL users who BAWWW if they have trouble running it on their eight-year-old hardware.

 Im only having fps issues in SL. My newest two games are GTA5 and witcher 3. Both of which are maxed out, running at 60 with an occasional dip in the mid 50's. I think your right about the OpenGL part though. I'll have to do some more reserch into that.

 


Sassy Romano wrote:

 


Unsuited drivers.

You didn't see 120fps, 100fps or even 80fps everywhere with that GTX670.  Quiet places yes, moderate unlikely and certainly not in heavily dense areas.

I have a GTX680 and very dense areas when looking at stupidly dense mesh can bring this to single figure fps.

fps is a very difficult measure in SL in the first place because it varies wildly per scene and unless you're comparing like for like, you just can't say "I get x fps" and compare it to what someone else gets in a different region with a completely different scene.

Content isn't optimised.

 I have had driver issues with this card, so that is very plausible. And i forgot to mention, those 670's i talked about were the ftw 4gb versions in sli. So it was a bit more than just a normal ol 670. I upgraded to the TitanX because Unreal Engine and Unity weren't utilizing that setup very well and that introduced major issue when Unreal 4 went free and Unity 5 came out. 

The last region i was in with that sli setup and the rift was the same region i logged into when i got my Titan. I was excited to crank the settings up to at least high in VR, but alas. I cant get the 75fps needed for smooth vr with the Titan, even on the lowest settings.

 

Sorry if i came off a bit brash before. Its just a bit upsetting to upgrade your hardware, then take a massive performance hit. It'll just be a while i sappose till i log in again. 

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PyroSteel wrote:

  I have had driver issues with this card, so that is very plausible. And i forgot to mention, those 670's i talked about were the ftw 4gb versions in sli. So it was a bit more than just a normal ol 670.

Sorry if i came off a bit brash before. Its just a bit upsetting to upgrade your hardware, then take a massive performance hit. It'll just be a while i sappose till i log in again. 

SL doesn't support SLI so it wasn't that either. :)

I don't take responses here personally so don't worry, it's the internet, everyone is really just a cardboard box but I know what you mean about the hardware, you do have to throw silly hardware at SL to make it reasonable but the fact remains that games are developed by pros with known, carefully crafted content, scenes optimised, written for the latest API's and drive your hardware properly.

...SL doesn't.

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Getting good performance with SL is no simple task. Nor is there a single set of settings that work for everyone.

We talk about CPU and GPU most of the time and mention memory amounts. But, there are more aspects of the computer that affect performance.

The motherboard’s max bus speeds can bottleneck the viewer.

Memory speed can bottleneck the viewer. 16gb of slow memory will give worse performance than 8 gb of fast memory.

The bus speed to the hard disk affect performance. One can add a 6gb/sec SSD drive and be frustrated by a 3gb/sec drive controller in the motherboard.

Laptops tend to overheat. Keep the airways clean. Check the case for hot spots.

Use something like Open Hardware Monitor (free) to see what the components in the laptop are doing.

Read through this to tweak your viewer and video settings for SL: http://blog.nalates.net/2010/12/17/graphics-tweaking-for-second-life/

Some are saying SLI does not work with SL. It does and doesn’t. There are people running SLI with SL and getting a performance boost. But, you’ll have to dig out the settings needed to make use of SLI with SL. It doesn't work without special tweaking.

Most games run DirectX graphics and games are optimized for those cards and their DirectX drivers. SL uses OpenGL and the content creators are not big on optimizing for any driver. The Lab thinks 10FPS is good enough… So, if someone gets 20… its AWESOME…. Sheese. I can feel you. But, since SL allows content creators to upload suboptimal content, we’ll have low performance.

I run a 560GTX, Quad Core, Win7, 8gb of fast ram. In low poly areas I can hit 50-70 FPS. Pile in a dozen avatars and I’ll be at 3 to 5 FPS. You can use Render Muting to improve performance and prevent mesh griefer crash traps. See: http://blog.nalates.net/2014/11/17/second-life-performance-render-muting/ But, until we get some tools to help us see the render cost of things we buy and wear, I doubt things will get any better.

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There is kind of a way if you have activated your advanced and developer tools. In the advanced menue, go to performance tools and click "Show draw wieght from avatars"

Here are my settings. And the red text between the boxes shows the avatars render weight. Good is in the low thousands, normal is in the 20k-40kish (this are hard to find so i don't have an accurate number) and heavy is anything 40k+. Most avatars run between 60k-110k because lots of people use flexies and scripts.

avatarWeight.PNG

My problem though, is even in areas with NO avatars, i still see aweful frame rates.

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PyroSteel wrote:

Most avatars run between 60k-110k because lots of people use flexies and scripts.

 

Scripts have zero impact on local viewer rendering capability.  Scripts execute server side, with lower priority than pretty much everything else and If scripts are factored into draw weight then that's merely a bogus punishment value used to factor the load of the avatar on the region but not the viewer.

We've gone through various fake, fudge punishment factors over the years and they just continue.

I've given up trying to explain some of the FUD in SL, it's pointless.  I've had too many conversation such as "Really... no, putting the shops up in the sky will NOT reduce their impact on role players on the ground because they're further away!"

Or "Go away, your scripts are lagging me" (simplistic example and yes in the extreme could be true but...)

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PyroSteel wrote:

There is kind of a way if you have activated your advanced and developer tools. In the advanced menue, go to performance tools and click "Show draw wieght from avatars"

Here are my settings. And the red text between the boxes shows the avatars render weight. Good is in the low thousands, normal is in the 20k-40kish (this are hard to find so i don't have an accurate number) and heavy is anything 40k+. Most avatars run between 60k-110k because lots of people use flexies and scripts.

 

My problem though, is even in areas with NO avatars, i still see aweful frame rates.

Go to the "Develop" menu and select "Consoles - Fast Timers." You'll see a line of scrolling bars. Hit "Pause" and click on one of the bars until it breaks up into colored bands like an abstract representation of a DNA strand. Look for bands that are extremely long compared with the rest of them and then read the key.

Also, it may be a problem that you have your graphics set so LOW - some modern high-end graphics cards are actually faster running "advanced lighting" than with the older rendering scheme. See what your framerate is with "advanced lighting" on and shadows on "None."

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  • 2 weeks later...


PyroSteel wrote:

couple things going on here.

The user created stuff isn't the problem. In a dense population area my vert buff is only hitting 5-7k. <-- this is super low. On a modern game, the main character can be 12-25k verts, while the whole scene can go as high as 2-5 million verts.

You either hang out in empty sims or you misread something. Heavily built up sims are usualy pushing 700k-1m tris without shadows. The sim I'm standing in right now has 3.3m tris on ultra and that's with no avatars in view other than my own (draw weight of 14336).  Get your facts straight before you start pointing fingers.

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  • 2 months later...

As others have said, it's not your rig it's SL.  The engine is terrible and everything is unoptimized on top of the constant downloading of textures.

I have a fairly powerful rig and in some areas I'm lucky to get 10+ fps with both ALM and shadows off.  This is a big part of the reason why I've switched to Singularity because it runs well just about anywhere compared to Firestorm where I can barely move in some places.

Compare that to Arkham Knight where I rarely drop below 45 on high settings and Skyrim where I can comfortably sit at 50+ on max settings+a very pretty ENB with like 10 dragons on the screen.

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