Jump to content

Unoptimized engine ? GPU at 12% usage, CPU about 20% => very bad frame rate


M0rdresh
 Share

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 1689 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

  • 3 weeks later...

It doesn't matter anyway.  People don't stay not because of the graphics but because this is the most expensive "game" (whatever) to exist.  It's obnoxious cost are only matched by the complexity of how to do things.  Tell a noob that's its cost them money for pretty much everything except for low quality freebies.  Hey noob do you want a place you can build and call home. Well that's going to cost you $295/$195 a month (unless your renting a parcel but you don't get much for that) then you have learn how to build and then get charged for uploading it. The Millennial's have the attention span of a peanut, stick them in an environment like this and it's learning curve melts their brain and there off to play on Steam. BTW, a lot of their team is off building SL 2.0 with a fraction holding down the fort and plugging away to keep the base happy which is not easy. It will be the same case with SL 2.0 , the graphics will be top notch but it doesn't matter if the cost and complexity of the platform chases people away.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...

M0rdresh, i've noticed the same issue but I have no real souliton as to whats going on because like yourself when you ask a question like this people get up and arms and beat around the bush with hipster talk with stuff like "rah, rah, rah, its not a game~!" rhertoric. Which has nothing to do with the real technical question. Game or not its a 3D enviroment ran on hardware... and its laggy often when it shouldn't be...

With that said I found this fourm after upgrading to a modern GPU and checking the numbers. When I upgrade something I like to test it out and run it through all its paces and I noticed the same issue you've mentioned both on my old and new GPU neither were being utilized fully the way they should. 

With that said i've been an alpha/beta tester and moder for a very long time and have visited various Gam.....umm... "3D enviroments" and to me it feels like a lack of optimization and coding of the 3D engine itself. Than you've got the user created stuff that may or may not be good which doesnt help either... but yea... the "user created" content argument doesn't float with me.. Like you mentioned, if you've got a powerful enough system you can bull-dog through stuff... and thats the point.... for some reason the underlying code of SL isn't allowing you to bulldog through it... Capped at around 12% utilization....

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites


DrakiAzul wrote:

M0rdresh, i've noticed the same issue but I have no real souliton as to whats going on because like yourself when you ask a question like this people get up and arms and beat around the bush with hipster talk with stuff like "rah, rah, rah, its not a game~!" rhertoric. Which has nothing to do with the real technical question. Game or not its a 3D enviroment ran on hardware... and its laggy often when it shouldn't be..

 

I'm not sure you know what hipster means, since the word definitely doesn't work in the context you're using it.  You have, however, rejected the explaination because you didn't understand it.


DrakiAzul wrote:

 

With that said i've been an alpha/beta tester and moder for a very long time and have visited various Gam.....umm... "3D enviroments" and to me it feels like a lack of optimization and coding of the 3D engine itself.

 

The 3D engine itself is fine and handles well-designed content in extremely complex environments just fine, and there's plenty of places in SL (and especially OSgrid, which tends to attract a higher ratio of game developers on their free time).  However, most people in Second Life aren't designing things like every byte and every vertex counts like game developers do.  This is where you're seeing the performance difference.  You've got people with more polygons in their hair than exist in entire regions of Borderlands 2 roaming around.  It's also pretty common for game developers to keep the number of textures to a minimum and keep those textures as small as possible; it's pretty rare to see a game scene that has more than one or two dozen textures or textures larger than 20 or 30 kilobytes.  In Second Life, it's often rare to find a place that isn't trying to load several dozen textures stretching into megabyte territory.  You can't really code your way out of "your content is complex and hard to render".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

Baloo Uriza Wrote: "I'm not sure you know what hipster means, since the word definitely doesn't work in the context you're using it.  You have, however, rejected the explaination because you didn't understand it."

 

Suuuurrreee, neither of us understand what we're talking about, continue talking down to us condescendingly as the OP probably has more schooling and real-world experience than yourself Baloo; it also highlights and enforces the point I was making about the SL community in general when it comes to topics like this.

Anyhoo, the excuse of poor optimization only goes so far when the guys clearly got enough real world experience and hard-ware to bull-doze through it. So again the hippy rhetoric of 'blah blah user built' is rather bogus by this point because guess what, his Nvidia Titian and Intel i7 isn't user built. They're professional built and frankly if said hard-ware was being 100% utilized vs 12% they'd be able to bull-doze through it. ..... Bottom line, it doesn't matter how poorly someone designs a 3D model .... Hes got more than enough power to handle it..... even at 12% hes reported getting fair frame rates..... so all that 'user built environment' red herring (and yes I use red herring in the correct context here also!) is out the window because even with a poorly designed user built environment hes got more than enough hard-ware to handle it. He flat out asked and wants to know why his GPU is only being utilized by 12% vs 100% ..... -____-

 

Also the context of me using 'hipsters' of someone being smug and talking out their ass works perfectly in the way i'm using it.  Like in this clip from SouthPark:

^ Thats the real issue when trying to discuss technical stuff to people on SL.. most just have this weird smug mindset and it makes such technical discussions impossible.... its frustrating but that's how it is.

Anyway, my guess OP is the developers simply haven't (or cant because its so old) updated SL to utilize modern hard-ware to full potential. All the hooplah people will tell you about user built environments and SL not being a game etc are a half-truth and only go so far.... Even if its not a game its a 3D environment and everything you said is still relevant... despite people screaming "its not a game REEEEEEE" such comments only distract from the question and serve no real purpose except...to be smug..  Anyway, with your experience im sure you're already aware the hard-ware you're using would probably render everything fine in another environment. 

.

Im guessing Its similar to the netcode caps/limits in early access games (oh sorry, I mean 3D virtual worlds!) like StarCitizen and Space Engineers. StarCitizen for example was capped purposefully at 30FPS due to stability issues... RSI has updated their code and you can get over 30fps now but for the longest time it was capped... probably same deal with SL... either due to simply not being able to update to utilize modern hard-ware or for other reasons like stability... its clearly in their core-code. Again, with your background and experience i'm sure you've came to the same conclusions and that most of the people here running you around in circles are just smelling their own farts. Simply put, it seems SL doesn't take full advantage of modern hard-ware for whatever reasons. .... Who knows, maybe one-day they'll fix and address these issues .... as you said, VR in SL would be cool and you will need higher frames for that simply from a technical standpoint..  luckily despite its age SL and the Devs seem to still be active and working on things... be it slowly.. so maybe one day... SL has improved and changed a great deal over the years.. 

Edited by DrakiAzul
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 25.7.2017 at 5:54 AM, DrakiAzul said:

Suuuurrreee, neither of us understand what we're talking about, continue talking down to us condescendingly as the OP probably has more schooling and real-world experience than yourself Baloo; it also highlights and enforces the point I was making about the SL community in general when it comes to topics like this.

Don't you think it's a little bit late to reply to a post like this after almost two years?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 months later...

Hey OP.

I know this is an old thread but in case your still around, the best option may be to open a Jira for this reason, if Jira still exists, or to contact the programmer of the 3rd party Black Dragon viewer.

I'm in the exact same situation you are in. I have been building high performance PC's for over 20 years and I am still amazed at why Linden Lab does not see the benefit of retrofitting their software to utilize present day GPU's. If they've ever had incentive to do it, it's now, when they could ride the VR hardware hype wave. (Sansar is a total joke, it should be dropped and those resources should be put back into SL, everyone knows that.)

I understand the difficulty in making things not break but it's been so many years you would think by now they would have come up with a way to do it (hell, even offer a high performance viewer, anything). I've had hopes for the Dragon Viewer but it still suffers from most of the same limitations as the regular viewer. Every time I build my latest PC which I always purchase mainly for SL, I am always dis-appointed with the performance of the GPU. I have over 10 years of experience in SL but it's always the same when it comes to the GPU performance in the software.

If enough people complain loud enough about this issue, maybe some day it will be resolved, or who knows, maybe a hack is in order, like when Qarl Linden developed the mesh deformer. If someone could look at the graphics engine of SL in that light, maybe they could figure out the exact technical reason why it occurs, and repair it (or allow a tweak, .ini setting change, etc. to overcome the limitations).  I know exactly what it's like to have the top of the line GPU and not being able to utilize it when you should. Currently I am using a GTX 1080ti and just like your system, only about 10% goes to the GPU for Second Life.

Sometimes I'll be in a club with 10 users and the frame rate will drop to only 5 or 6 fps and the GPU sits at 10%. This is with a $700+ graphics card.

It's maddening and I think the main reason is just due to the un-professionalism of the code development process, or lack of dedicated staff at Linden Lab. But, if as a community, we could look at the technical reasons, perhaps a hack could be invented by the user base. The Dragon Viewer programmer has offered quite a few graphics updates that the lab has not. Perhaps some day another user or band of users could do something with the GPU code. (That would be great).

Perhaps the Black Dragon Viewer programmer knows the exact reason as well. We should also ask him. Has anyone asked him yet? He must know.

For everyone else, sorry for the rant but this has been built up in me for 10 years. LL, get with the program already!!

 

 

 

Edited by MaxCraxster
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

" Sometimes I'll be in a club with 10 users and the frame rate will drop to only 5 or 6 fps and the GPU sits at 10%. This is with a $700+ graphics card. "

I dont mean to laugh at someone elses expense but i find that hilarious tbh. Im playing SL on a 30$ Athlon 5350 with the integrated R3 graphics and im getting the same 5-6fps in crowded clubs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

47 minutes ago, cykarushb said:

I dont mean to laugh at someone elses expense but i find that hilarious tbh. Im playing SL on a 30$ Athlon 5350 with the integrated R3 graphics and im getting the same 5-6fps in crowded clubs.

The reason is because of the poor programming on LL's part.  I don't mind the laughing, I do the same thing every time I think about the GPU code in SL. I imagine 1 coder sitting in a little closet banging out the GPU code and then he gives up with his hands in the air and goes out for a smoke. When he comes back in, he goes to the cafeteria to get some pretzels and a beer.

But yeah, that's it. 1 coder. And I laugh at that thought. It's probably true.

I honestly sometimes think, that I could relearn C++ and do a better job at the code than what LL has done all these years. They just aren't working that GPU code correctly and I've heard all the debates on why it is, but I have yet to hear the exact reason the code suffers so badly as it relates to the GPU.

There are always ways to work around problems. If it calls for a workaround, then give us that tasty workaround. We want it.

I wonder if we could start a Kickstarter campaign for this. Anyone think this could work as a Kickstarter item?  

For those of us that actually care, how cool would it have been if, instead of Sansar, we got a high performance graphics viewer version of SL? That would have been killer. I've been waiting for that for over 10 years. I'll probably have to wait 10 more, just like Ace Ventura tells me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQAcBSO5jC8

wait11.gif?w=650

 

Edited by MaxCraxster
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

While I'm sure people with more programming experience can point out problems with SL's code which prevent it from making full use of one's hardware, as a graphics person I would add that the fact SL content is so unoptimized is a huge drain on performance. There are avatars, individual avatars, wearing a full gigabyte's worth of textures. That's insane. That means when they walk into your view, you need to download 1GB worth of textures (a culprit for SL's long rez times) which your videocard needs to hold in VRAM to render them fully. That's an extreme case, but avatars that use up half a gig of memory are not uncommon and SL environments are usually just as bad the avatars.

Getting good performance out of SL would require building your own environment using only optimized content and then only letting in avatars with optimized appearances. I run SL on a 6 year old computer with only 2GB of VRAM and I still manage between 30-60fps around my mainland home, with fairly high graphics settings. My SL home isn't too shabby in the visuals department, either. The attached screenshots are unedited and represent SL with my "everyday use" graphics settings.

26791528229_188d376559_b.thumb.jpg.3b08799018cdfb7780793c1df1c5c3f2.jpg28094026160_95fc2613ac_b.thumb.jpg.a7eb94204c3ebd36865b3caf74bc1a73.jpg

If Linden Lab ever makes a serious push to discourage unoptimized content and provide both casual users and content creators with the tools they need to optimize their avatars and environments, it could be possible for more people to run SL with higher framerates and at higher graphics settings. And LL could do this without compromising the freedom and creativity that drive SL. Optimizing content isn't difficult, people just need to be made aware of the problem and given the tools to properly manage resources. Really, the only obstacle to this since the beginning has been LL's own lack of expertise regarding graphics and asset creation. You can't avoid problems you're blind to and you can't provide proper tools if you don't even know how those tools will be used.

 It would take a while for the content creation market to catch up before we'd see real performance returns, but it's certainly doable and well worth the effort. It's not like LL plans to shut SL down as long as it remains their primary income generator.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Alwin Alcott said:

thats your own choice, you can adjust the rendering allowance.

That doesn't necessarily work. Draw Weight barely takes texture use into consideration. You can have a low draw weight and still be using an excessive amount of VRAM. Even if it did work, it's missing the point. You shouldn't have to derender anyone else's avatar to enjoy decent framerates in Second Life.

  • It is not difficult to optimize content.
  • Optimized content does not look worse than optimized content.
  • There is no reason whatsoever not to optimize content.
  • If creators were encouraged to optimize their content, it would be easy for anyone in SL to put together low impact avatars and environments without even thinking about it, meaning we would all enjoy higher framerates no matter where we went in SL.

And we wouldn't need to derender anyone else's avatar to achieve that experience.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Alwin Alcott said:

perhaps.. but it's 15 years too late.

Why? Is SL closing soon?

Look, I don't expect that even if LL began an immediate and competent approach to encouraging better optimized content in SL that it would result in improved frame rates for everyone over night, no change or new feature in the history of SL has ever had that kind of immediate impact. People still use sculpted prims and we've had mesh for years now! But over time we saw mesh become more and more common, and now the bulk of avatars and places in SL use mesh to a large degree and almost no one is bothering to create new sculpted prim content.

 Likewise, if LL started today it would take years before we saw better optimized content become more common. The thing is, we'll probably still be here in a few years, so why would we not want SL to be more enjoyable when we get there? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 1689 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...