[DeltaFPS, ExtraFPS] Viewer slowdown coming back to focus
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Andred Darwin
While trying to understand why Featurettes compared to current releases felt like a more "smoother" experience, even after all the "improvements", I found the following:
- Performance goes down by a lot after the viewer comes back into focus, while switching between applications , even after waiting a minute or so until the textures are "resized/rendered", not only in FPS count, but stutters... really noticeable comparing to a after login experience, I never noticed that with older builds... and keeps getting worst overtime in long sessions... its not memory, since this machine has a 64gb DDR4 @3200 and videocard with 16gb VRAM.
- This only happens on a PBR scene (several PBR objects + PBR EEP + reflection probes ).
Steps to reproduce:
- Login with DeltaFPS, wait about a minute or so, cam around a bit... take a reading.
- Switch to another application (Youtube, Substance, etc), use it for a few minutes, while SL still logged in, in the background.
- Switch back to the viewer, wait for a minute or so until all textures are "full rez" again, or until FPS stabilizes.
- Cam around, take a reading, which should show a much decreased performance, also compare how it feels rotating the avatar, stutter, etc...
- This simply does not happen if you are on a "legacy" only scene (Legacy materials, Legacy EEP with Reflection Probe Ambiance set to zero )... performance is pretty much the same after switching and using different applications.
I'm attaching a few screenshots with such readings which I can reproduce easily, it gets worse overtime with longer sessions, with the lowest I've experienced going down to about 50fps, really "stuttery" rendering, those are just examples, while writing/editing this, and switching back to the viewer, ExtraFPS is at 60 fps...
On another note:
ExtraFPS is probably right there as one of the worst RC releases when it comes to its state, is more like a "preview" released for a specific small group to test:
- EEP controls (Editor, Personal Lighting), simply does not work correctly, its broken, no "realtime" effects to see results, does not position the sun (also visible on the snapshots below), etc, there is no way to know if something was saved or not.
- Due to the current implementation of a "new" tonemapper, colors are completely off, oversaturated in PBR scenes.
- Probably forgot to "tonemap" the EEP too.
- Full bright textures are now completely overblow, its really hard on the eyes to play for a while looking at that rendering.
- Is the "fix" for too dark, to be oversaturated? Seems like you are trying to fix bad EEP settings with a different tonemapper, mistake over another mistake.
- Colors on the color picker simply don't match, they are different (maybe forgot to "tonemap" the color picker too?).
- Why the default documentation and tutorials for authoring tools with recommend settings that dont match the new "default" tonemapper.
- What is the solution for whoever already created several PBR items to make it display as intended with this new "default tonemapper"? Change all over again? Tell customers, "switch your tonemapper"?
- Usually that kind of "stuff" is really implemented in third party viewers, which is great, specially if they serve a specific purpose (Black Dragon as an example for photographers, etc... ), not the "official viewer"... one of the great benefits was conformity between authoring objects and publish in-world (From Substance as an example, to display/sale in-world), easily reproducible steps, what you see there, is what you get here using default/recommended settings. Is that gone? Are we going back to mess?
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Andred Darwin
Atlas Linden
Dan Linden
Adding 3 more snapshots, this time showing the texture console output:
1) Slowdown during a somewhat long session (+- 1 hour) (3744 textures with 7177 mb??)
2) A few minutes after login, same location. (1697 images with 2642 mb)
3) A few minutes after login at an empty region. (812 images with 1619 mb.. I assume that is the minimum with my current avatar... )
I notice anything received that requires an image to be displayed (chats, group chats (profile pictures), specially the groups with lots of users "chatting"... ) or a long Friends list in People window, that image count/memory goes up, and a lot.... and seems to remain steady even after closing the chat window....
After a teleport, and after a few seconds (up to a minute), the viewer seems to free up some memory... is it an opportunity to discard those images used in chats after closing the window (FS Beta group as an example, Lelutka group, etc...)
Andred Darwin
Adding 4 more screenshots, with ForeverFPS, performance degradation, seems to happen even with classic scenes.
Andred Darwin
I wanted to add another comment, this "feedback" was created back in October, and a lot... (like really a lot) has changed since then. Somehow this feedback is being shared in some places and as usual, things are being taken out of context.
The current official release, ExtraFPS (also the latest builds of ForeverFPS), are in my opinion the best PBR viewer releases so far, (I wish these were the first ones!).
Even knowing of current known bugs and performance concerns specially with old potato computers, the improvements in a short period of time are really impressive, and as an user, I really appreciate it (and enjoy it).
Many of the issues described in the original feedback, are just non-existent in the latest version, not only fixed, but improved!
I'm still noticing performance degrading overtime (as described on my reply to Atlas).
Happens on my current computer 11700K/64gb Ram/NVidia 4060ti 16gb, and my old computer 6700K/32gb/1080ti.
Unfortunately, it's not simple to come up with steps to replicate, sometimes it takes just a few minutes to see "degradation", sometimes we just don't notice, seems to me, it's related to transparency handling along with the Reflection Probes pass, noticeable by visiting locations that use a lot of those by teleporting back and forth from them.
I know this is not much of a help, but at least an updated feedback!
Big thanks to the Dev team, credit is deserved comparing that RC release with current ones, please keep it up!
Frio Belmonte
I believe I started spotting this issue on Firestorm 7.1.11 now that's it's caught up to some Delta/ExtraFPS changes.
I haven't reliably found a trigger, but once it kicks in, framerate drops by 25-50% permanently until I restart the viewer, haven't so far found any way to make it "unhitch". It has happened solely from camming around my home to do some building zoomed in on a cube, then looking back to my av and realizing framerate has tanked. Another time it happened after visiting a very heavy build and returning home - the next time I went there, there were ~30 avatars on top of that heavy build, and the framerate did
not
tank. I left the viewer running on the background for an hour, unminimized to ensure it keeps rendering a PBR scene, and nothing happened... until I teleported to the sky to build and back home, after which fps collapsed. Very slippery to catch what's causing it exactly.Fast timers show nothing very noticeable outside the frame time being much longer, the "timers" timer taking a little bigger slice and the "bloom" timer hitting a measurable number 0.1 instead of 0.0 ms - something related to glow rendering?
Another person who's noticed the effect said their GPU capped out at 100% usage when it happened. I haven't had it happen since to check - I usually hit ~50% usage at home with framerate unlimited, so it would be easy to see if it's above normal.
Andred Darwin
Frio Belmonte I cannot match gpu usage with the lower fps behavior, I believe its "something" the viewer is not releasing "clogging" up the pipeline. One thing though... if you are using old viewer versions, and then logs in with ExtraFPS... FPS will be much lower and will stay lower until you "clear cache"....
Atlas Linden
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Atlas Linden
Hi Andred,
The issue regarding stuttering and decreased performance while camming around will be investigated here: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/issues/2941
Andred Darwin
Atlas Linden - The main issue is performance going down (and keeping going down ) when switching back and forth with other applications on the same computer... (the stuttering is a result of that.... )
I have no stuttering at all after login, while staying with the application in focus at the same location even after 15/20 minutes,... but after start switching applications or several tp's, things start downgrading... This machine I'm using now maintains 110 to 180 FPS @ 1440p at that location you visited today, after half hour or so ( switching between applications , tp out, etc... ) that goes down to 80, 75... the lowest I've seen was around 60 at that same scene, and max vram usage was 11gb on a 4060TI... ( login with 2.1 gb vram usage....goes up just a bit, to 2.5 after cam around and stays that way.... tp out to a PBR material store :))), things derail... 6gb, 8gb..., come back to the same location... even after 10 minutes, 4gb, 5 gb at best, but never down to what it used to be ).... for sure there are resources that are not being released by the viewer...
Pazako Karu
I noticed the Texture Console changes the texture cache bias to 4.0 when the screen is out of focus more than ~30 seconds. The slowdown you're getting is probably reloading the ~1.7GB of textures it down-scaled in the process that it had to reload.
I don't quite see how dropping textures on tabbing out is an FPS booster. If they want to implement a down-scaling algorithm, it might be better if it 'hibernates' some of the texture cache into ram or ssd if available, and loads it as a single file - rather than loading them from scratch again (by restoring discard level)
Andred Darwin
Pazako Karu Thanks for the input, but at some point the textures would "finish" reload (at least from what I can "see", its a few seconds at my computer... I waited a minute before reading anything)... and performance stays down, and keeps going down overtime, up to the point the only fix is to logout and back in... those pictures/readings are just an example, its much worse in some other places... look at the same console, or just watch gpu memory usage teleporting between scenes with pbr content (look for places selling "pbr materials"... there are a couple that really "downgrade" the viewer...
)
Beq Janus
Pazako Karu I agree that much of the stuttering is to do with the downscaling behaviour, this has been reported and escalated for LL. There is an initial fix in ForeverFPS but our initial thoughts are that it won't help so there'll be more investigation.
What I will say is that the downscaling when tabbing out has nothing to do with boosting fps, but is mostly driven by the requirements of many users that the viewer behave nicer towards other apps, releasing resources when it is not in focus.