2025.03 Viewer intense stutter on a nvidia windows laptop
tracked
observeur Resident
I've been testing the 2025.03 beta on different machines, and on this particular machine equipped with a Ryzen cpu, a 3080m gpu and 32gb of ram, i observed intense frame inconsistency, that gets worse the more i wander around. It seems worse when getting inside and outside of a pbr probe.
A side note: I also played with the max number of probes slider, i observed that if set to lower values, the rendering is completely messed up, looks a disco psychedelic show :) So i set this value back to 256.
Note 1 : After i observed this frametime inconsistency, i hard reset the laptop internal power settings, i reset the bios, i re-installed the nvidia driver (this time i used the studio driver ..) and the problem persists. This doesn't occur on latest FS beta, and didn't occur in the previous SLV version.
Note 2 : I also tested the viewer on an older windows laptop with a 1660ti gpu (Ryzen cpu, 16gb of ram), and on this one, the viewer does marvels. It's perfectly smooth and performance is impressive, as it's actually much better than the last time i tested it on the previous viewer.
So i'm not sure what's going on, but i thought i would share :)
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Atlas Linden
Hi observeur,
When you have a chance, would you be able to confirm if you still experience this stutter on the following build? https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/releases/tag/Second_Life_Release%236ac1d4f3-2025.03
observeur Resident
Atlas Linden I am about to test Atlas
So, overall it seems better indeed. I noticed stutter in the first minutes when landing in a sim, i would say more than it used to be before this march update (to be verified) .. then after several minutes it tends to recover and be smooth. So that's an improvement for sure.
In some sims and specific spots i like to test (so i remember what performance i have), performance is great (after a few minutes), faster than foreverfps (130 to 180 fps for instance), in some other sims, i have lower fps than foreverfps (130 to 90 fps). This update really has a variable and sometimes important impact, positively most of the time, negatively some other times.
note: I noticed some kdu related errors in the debug console, specially when landing in a sim.
Atlas Linden
Thanks for testing that!
Great to hear that there is an improvement from before.
Would you be willing to provide SLIRLS of where you find the FPS to be faster and slower? I'm curious as to what in those sims could be affecting this.
observeur Resident
Atlas Linden sure !
This place gives me better performance on my 2 Windows laptops (Ryzen 4800H + gtx 1660ti, and Ryzen 6800H + rtx 3080m) in this 2025.03 update, yet with initial stutter for a couple minutes.
(no fps gain on the mac, but less or no initial stutter vs windows).
I like to test by looking through the stone door / arch as a reference, but the whole area is worth testing, and admiring, it's very beautiful.
And this next place also serves me as a reference spot for some time:
(looking in the direction of the pathway gives the driver some difficulty cpu side, looking at the caban or the sea will use the gpu more fully, and thus showing better framerate).
Here i had lower performance (yet still acceptable) than previously on the rtx3080 laptop. I have still to test this latest 3025.03 build on the older laptop.
EDIT: I think .. maybe .. they added a few things in the sim that would explain the lower performance when looking in that direction. There is a submarine thing that i noticed yesterday and i am not sure it was there before. Also some more cushions in the tower. Anyway, that would make sense, and make the 2025.03 update a universally better or equally performer ;)
It's worth noting that those 2 places benefit a lot from threaded optimisations in the nvidia driver, as well as the "equivalent" on Apple machines (RenderAppleUseMultGL debug option in the viewer) -> which sadly causes some random crashes, and i think it would be worth seeing if we can do something about it. It's a 25% to 35% "easy" gain).
:
Atlas Linden
tracked
Thanks for the extra info, all!
I finally managed to reproduce this issue after spending some time at the given region on High+ and camming out from milo's bazar. Although the stutter and FPS eventually recover once the camera stills. This is unlike what observeur observes who reports they do not recover on their specific machine.
This issue is now being tracked for further investigation here: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/issues/3816
Atlas Linden
under review
Whirly Fizzle
I can reproduce the stuttering on Second Life Release 7.1.13.13906285233 (64bit) at Observeur's location http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunborne/111/118/28
The best repro for me at that location is to run along the path between http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunborne/95/99/28 & http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunborne/237/97/28
https://prnt.sc/DqWRbdRbXZHE - run along here
At certain points along the path (it seems to always be the same points), the viewer will stutter quite noticeably & sometimes the viewer weill freeze solid for a few seconds & a few times it has gone "not responding".
The stutter reproduces with Vsync enabled & disabled
Unlike Observeur though, I'm not seeing any freeze when leaving the shop through the door & exiting the large reflectionm probe in the shop.
I know fast timers are mostly useless these days but fast timers shows the stutter/freeze is in Update Objectlist
Second Life Release 7.1.13.13906285233 (64bit)
Release Notes
You are at 235.5, 98.2, 27.9 in Sunborne located at simhost-0b34a2476b48481d1.agni
(global coordinates 222,187.0, 305,506.0, 27.9)
Second Life Server 2025-03-03.13640255822
Release Notes
CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13700K (3417.6 MHz)
Memory: 65304 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 11 64-bit (Build 26100.3476)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Windows Graphics Driver Version: 32.0.15.6094
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 560.94
Window size: 3440x1369
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 256m
Bandwidth: 3000kbit/s
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: 6
Texture memory: 12282MB
Disk cache: Max size 1638.4 MB (8.7% used)
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.4
Audio Driver Version: OpenAL, version 1.1 ALSOFT 1.24.2 / OpenAL Community / OpenAL Soft: OpenAL Soft
Dullahan: 1.14.0.202408091639
CEF: 118.4.1+g3dd6078+chromium-118.0.5993.54
Chromium: 118.0.5993.54
LibVLC Version: 3.0.21
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.10.0000.32327.5fc3fe7c.5942f08
Packets Lost: 0/82,893 (0.0%)
March 26 2025 11:18:45
Whirly Fizzle
I cannot reproduce any stuttering or freezing at all on Second Life Release 7.1.11.12363455226 (64bit)
Also I get roughly an extra 20 FPS on this build then I do on the beta at this location with identical settings
observeur Resident
Whirly Fizzle Thank you for testing Whirly
Christina Riederer
I've been experiencing stuttering for quiet some time now, Ive tried just about every setting to stop it, nothing seems to work. Im usimg a ASUS Gaming Laptop, Nvida 4070 card, i9, 32Gig Ram.
observeur Resident
Christina Riederer You were having this with the previous builds too Christina, and official releases? I am asking because in the past i had some stuttery issues on the PC, but mostly with Firestorm, not much with SLV, and after cleaning the viewer settings, this was gone. Now this is different here because it still happens after a whole cleanup of settings, drivers etc.. And seems to trigger quicker with pbr items and reflection probe.
Christina Riederer
observeur Resident It's not been quiet as bad with this current main viewer release, FS still stutters alot, not as many issues on Alchemy either.
Atlas Linden
Hi observeur,
Would you happen to be using an external monitor? And do you have VSync enabled?
Also here is a later Beta build if you'd like to check to see if it reproduces here: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/releases/tag/Second_Life_Release%230ec9bfaa-2025.03
observeur Resident
Atlas Linden Hello Atlas, i am using the internal monitor, and vsync i tried on and off. I will try this build in a short moment, see how it goes.. :)
observeur Resident
Atlas Linden I tried this later build and the issue is still there on this machine. If you like to try yourself, you might go there : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunborne/111/118/28 walk inside the shop for 30 seconds or so, then go out, it should start stuttering already, and it's getting worse when you go back in. The shop has a unique big reflection probe that covers it all and lots of pbr items. The issue occurs everywhere, but it's specially noticeable here. And it only happens on this machine, so i'm not sure what causes the issue. Beside that i use this machine to play games and it runs very well for that purpose in general.