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


M0rdresh
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Just installed this game today and could'nt believe my eyes on the level of performance my system gets.

I have a i7-4470k@4,8Ghz, 16GB Ram and a Geforce GTX Titan and Samsung 840 Pro SSD.

This rig runs about any game I can find it's sleep.

However in second life I get between 40fps and 80fps, depending what I'm looking at, etc.

Doesnt matter all that much if set it on mid or ultra.

Now that is very concerning on that level of hardware, plus when in full game looking around and walking my Nvidia GPU has a usage of 12% and my CPU usage goes between 12% and 20%. Clearly this game is not using my hardware.

Either I'm missing some game tweaking or this game has just about the worst optimised 3D engine I  encountered in ahwile.

What am I missing ?

(I dont want to be arrogant, but Im 21 years active as an IT engineer and system builder, don't bother with the usual 'drivers', etc issue, I go that covered)

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^^ That and welcome to sl :smileyhappy:

There`s been many posts speculating about why sl doesn`t use hardware to it`s max. I`ll leave it to cleverer people than me to give you some of the reasons and maybe a Linden developer will stop by and give us their view on things:smileywink:.

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Thanks for the responses, appreciated.

I'm not to focused on FPS, I play via an Oculus Rift and a smooth and locked 75fps is very desirable, of not mandatory due to 75hz and latency with headtracking.

Now even without the Rift or using the regular viewer version, it is really bad if it only uses like 12% of my graphics card capabilities and 20% cpu capability, there's just no excuse for that.

Having all that graphical and computing power, it feels really cheap for the viewer to only use a small portion of it and giving me 34 to 40 fps in some busy scenes. I was hoping I messed some genious ini tweaking or whatever for the game to actually use hardware properly.

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M0rdresh wrote:

Just installed this game today and could'nt believe my eyes on the level of performance my system gets.

I have a i7-4470k@4,8Ghz, 16GB Ram and a Geforce GTX Titan and Samsung 840 Pro SSD.

This rig runs about any game I can find it's sleep.

However in second life I get between 40fps and 80fps, depending what I'm looking at, etc.

Doesnt matter all that much if set it on mid or ultra.

Now that is very concerning on that level of hardware, plus when in full game looking around and walking my Nvidia GPU has a usage of 12% and my CPU usage goes between 12% and 20%. Clearly this game is not using my hardware.

Either I'm missing some game tweaking or this game has just about the worst optimised 3D engine I  encountered in ahwile.

What am I missing ?

(I dont want to be arrogant, but Im 21 years active as an IT engineer and system builder, don't bother with the usual 'drivers', etc issue, I go that covered)

It's the worst optimized 3D environment you've ever seen. SL was built by its residents - for every object in SL made by someone with a 3D game background, there are five made by artsy housewives, eighteen by teenagers with Asperger's syndrome and twenty-seven by middle-aged closet queens. All of these objects have to be crammed sideways through a 12-year old system architecture designed for a completely different world where some of the initial users accessed it by dial-up. No changes can be made to the rendering engine that might possibly break decade-old amateur-built environments that now look embarassing without a banshee-like wail coming from the users.

That's not an attack on SL - I like it fine. That's just the way it is. The openness and history are major reasons why it's survived - other "better" virtual worlds have died without a trace or gone to quiet retirements in Muncie, Indiana. But it's just not going to blow the doors off applications made by professionals.

Which may have their own issues:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?3822-UE-4-and-Oculus-Rift-Framerate-Optimization

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"Either I'm missing some game tweaking or this game has just about the worst optimised 3D engine I  encountered in awhile.

What am I missing ?"

You seem to be missing the whole point of SL, that's all.  It is not a plug-in game, with optimised 3D performance.It is an environment for messy, unoptimised, user created content. Not very good for shoot-em up action games (fps tends to be low), but it since the content is user created, always new, different, surprising.

And sorry.  No levels to achieve, and no points to accrue, and no way to tell if you "won".  Clearly not a game for everyone.

Oh, and the SL servers operate at a max of 40 fps.  Letting your graphics card run at 80 fps is just creating extra heat and contributing to global warming. I run my viewer with max fps set to 30, less heat  to dissipate, and no noticeable degradation in performance to my eye.

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Rhys Goode wrote:

Oh, and the SL servers operate at a max of 40 fps.  Letting your graphics card run at 80 fps is just creating extra heat and contributing to global warming. I run my viewer with max fps set to 30, less heat  to dissipate, and no noticeable degradation in performance to my eye.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, it's 45FPS and those are only server frames. The server doesn't pass rendered frames to clients, only calculated frames (physics, updates etc). Client-side effects such as avatar animations, particles, llTargetOmega will still run smoother at a client FPS of 80, than at a client FPS of 45. If it were limited to Server frames for rendering, Second Life would run for clients in the same way the SLGo works - all rendering done elsewhere and the finished product delivered down the tube.

Whether the difference is perceptable to the average human eye is debatable, but it can have value to those who suffer migranes and other neurological conditions, as well as bleeding-edge gamers.

I also disagree with the general premise - mentioned a few times in this thread - that relying on user generated content means having to settle for poor optimisation of the output and lower performance. That's just an excuse to save LL from difficult maths and conversations they don't want to have with the userbase (at this point, I think the SL economy is based entirely on denying there are limitations to inventory size and rendering complexity). It's more than possible to create an environment that runs quickly and doesn't punish observers for the mistakes of inept creators, SL just isn't that place.

The Avatar Draw Weight thread might help in explaining this further.

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Freya Mokusei wrote:


I also disagree with the general premise - mentioned a few times in this thread - that relying on user generated content means having to settle for poor optimisation of the output and lower performance. That's just an excuse to save LL from difficult maths and conversations they don't want to have with the userbase (at this point, I think the SL economy is based entirely on denying there are limitations to inventory size and rendering complexity). It's more than possible to create an environment that runs quickly and doesn't punish observers for the mistakes of inept creators,
SL just isn't that place.

 

Gee, maybe they should just make a new place.

Oh wait, they are...

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Oh wait, they are...


Yes, thanks for being first to mention. Not shocking that a 12-13 year-old platform (and engine) had holes designed into it from the beginning, and those holes appear larger as time passes. Also not shocking that new users still believe SL is an AAA product at the peak of its lifecycle.

File under O for obvious, next to all the feature requests for more bones and vertices in avatar models. And the corpse-accounts of those who never log in a second time.

Maybe the question should be what ill-thought-through dependencies will end up limiting Third Life's growth. :D

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Not sure if you guys are familiar with the Oculus Rift VR, but it requires a solid 75fps.

Anything less result in severe stutter which results in motion sickness. That's just how it works.

I find it very strange they go through such lenghts to offer Oculus Rift support but their game is hardly using hardware.

Especially such decent support, because they did some very nice work on the VR interface ans such.

 

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As far as I understand Oculus Rift is still Beta.

So yes, bugs to work out.

And they are in the process of updating how the Viewer handles resources.

I don't know if there is a specific section of the JIRA devoted to Oculus.

You could try contacting them at the email in this post.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tools-and-Technology/Second-Life-s-Oculus-Rift-Integration-is-Ready-for-Beta-Testers/ba-p/2544572

 

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My post is not about Rift bugs, going by my experience with a lot existing games that are adapting this technology they have done a very good job at GUI remoddeling (best I've seen) and whatnot, credit where credit is due for sure.

My post is about severe under par performance compared to the hardware capability, in short the 3D engine limits a Ferrari to maximum speed of 40km/uur while it capable of 100x that. That is what my thead is about, nothing to do with Rift bugs.

But very good to know they seem to be working on resource usage, thanks for that info. I'll give it a shot and email them with my story, maybe they can help me and I can help them with a little feedback.

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M0rdresh wrote:

I find it very strange they go through such lenghts to offer Oculus Rift support but their game is hardly using hardware.

 

They haven't gone to great lengths, there are too few Oculus Rift users to warrant it being even a blip on a radar.  Can you buy one retail yet?  Nope, only dev versions and frankly, it's probably a technology dead before it even gets released.

Other cheaper, methods which offer more will be along first I suspect.

Plus as several others have pointed out, SL isn't a game.  The dynamic world and user generated content means that LL doesn't have the ability to optimise like your other games.  As you said about the Rift... "that's just how it works", well this is "just how SL works" :)

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That's just how biased people think ? I cannot start to think how or why anyone would every defend using 12% of today's graphical cards or 20% of today's CPU's. And given your clear undertone in your post, I sense a mild offended mindset. Do you own an Oculus Rift ? No? Then don't assume. Do you have the experience with it to back your statement as to how much work they have done to support it? Well I have and I can tell you a lot of effort did go into that, given the result I see. Did I ever say it's their biggest or even big priority ? Nope, again this thread is about relative performance versus hardware and I have not read any tangible reason why it cannot be, why it should not be, on par. 

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No I don't own a rift, I tried one, thought the resolution was far too low to even bother with and I wouldn't buy into a development unfinished single use product like that when there are better options coming along.  I'd rather go with a Samsung Note 4 which is a hugely useful device and a Gear VR but that's just my personal opinion.  But then i'm not really interested in just a stereo viewer *shrugs*

You keep saying you haven't read any tangible reason why it can't be how you want it but it seems that you're trying to compare an optimised game with known content with something that is very different from what you're used to. 

(no offended mindset at all, you're just trying to treat SL like a game with optimised, known content.  Every day the content changes and it's far from optimised!)

The number of rift users is still less than a blip on the radar too so not much point putting in too much work, that's how i'd factor the business decision without even needing to know exactly how much work has been put in.  The ROI just isn't there in the SL platform to warrant it.

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M0rdresh wrote:

My post is not about Rift bugs, going by my experience with a lot existing games that are adapting this technology they have done a very good job at GUI remoddeling (best I've seen) and whatnot, credit where credit is due for sure.

My post is about severe under par performance compared to the hardware capability, in short the 3D engine limits a Ferrari to maximum speed of 40km/uur while it capable of 100x that. That is what my thead is about, nothing to do with Rift bugs.

But very good to know they seem to be working on resource usage, thanks for that info. I'll give it a shot and email them with my story, maybe they can help me and I can help them with a little feedback.

You seem to be under the impression that your "percentages" are simple linear things. Rendering a frame is a complex chain of operations done by many non-interchangeable processes and once any of those processes hits its limit any theoretical excess capacity in the rest of the chain is useless as teats on a boar hog for practical purposes. For instance, your Ferrari will blow the doors off of a Kenworth W900 when both are unloaded; however, when you connect a loaded trailer to both the Kenworth will embarass you because the Ferrari can't produce the necessary torque and never will whether or not its being run up to its RPM limit.

The total load on your CPU and video card are low but that doesn't mean that they aren't running as hard as they can at any one point in the chain.

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I'm not going to spoil anymore words on the notion whether the 3D engine of Second Life is optimized for today's (and even yesterdays) hardware or not, that seems clearly not the case to me and many others having read up on several forums. Furthermore I think my 21 years of professional experience in IT and development is sufficient to judge that, without some lesson on how a frame is rendered but thanks anyway.

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M0rdresh wrote:

I'm not going to spoil anymore words on the notion whether the 3D engine of Second Life is optimized for today's (and even yesterdays) hardware or not, that seems clearly not the case to me and many others having read up on several forums. Furthermore I think my 21 years of professional experience in IT and development is sufficient to judge that, without some lesson on how a frame is rendered but thanks anyway.

Nobody said it was.

And I'm no expert in computers, but in my years of using computers I've heard plenty of "experts" say things that are flat-out wrong because they think they know more than they really do.

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What you fail to see is that business decision like Virtual Reality support are not done on today's projections but those of tomorrow. You seem to think that product roadmaps in development are entirely based on today's facts. You're reasoning 'It's not on the market, therefore developers don’t need to put time into it' couldn’t be more flawed. That's a consumers perspective projected on how software development operates.

As part of development process a product management team does a market assess and drives the product roadmap, many analysts and investors highlight virtual reality as a big upcoming thing. Have you checked the level of investment multiple companies are doing on Virtual Reality ? Do you really think that any worthy software company is going to wait on that for the Oculus Rift (or alike) goes to market and only then start doing a development sprint throwing overboard the entire roadmap because hey tit has now launched?

It's like reading those many comments on gaming consoles were people seem to think game development on those only start as the product is shipped or very recently before that. It does not work this way. Finally, I do not think SL is not fit for Oculus Rift, on the contrary it's one of best possible appliances to the technology and thankfully they got that and were very early into working out its support and have done a good job so far, they tend to agree on its importance. Also its marketing department, looking that Oculus rift imagery takes up 33% of the main SL website. But I don't regard that as anything meaningful, just throwing it in here.

 

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It's quite arrogant to state that, I have respect for those that are in any business for that long and I think twice before lecturing them on very basic elements such as rendering frames. I don’t go by the notion you can properly asses my knowledge so no offense taken, I enjoy this debate and written words sound harsh and often lack the appropriate connotation.

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