Fetcher and vram management issues.
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Vanadis Constantine
All V7 have the same issue from 7.0 to 7.1.3. The texture fetcher never stays still and keeps loading in textures over and over again even when nothing happens and has to be loaded. Its easy to test and see at any place. Stare at a wall if you want (its better to visible if there are at least a few objects in the view) and look what the imagelist is doing. It keeps loading textures again and again. That with it is also spiking the cpu useage alot for nothing(at busy places 100% on a last gen Ryzen tested). Also the vram management is suboptimal. To compare, with a V6 i can be at any test place and will have always a much lower vram useage with a better result. Tested with SLV and others PBR viewers. An example was in a club at the same time and also a very quiet place randomly choosen. V6 at the club below 8gb vram used and all looked fine and fully loaded. V7 (SLV mainly tested) at the same place, same time and same view, filled over 16gb and still had blurry textures in the view. Also taller areas keep unloading and reloading all the time, for example bigger floor meshes/prims do that alot but also other things.
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Dan Linden
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Dan Linden
Closing this. I believe it is a duplicate of https://secondlife.canny.io/bug-reports/p/texture-memory-calculation-is-a-big-inconsistent-mess
Dan Linden
needs info
Dan Linden
Hi Vanadis Constantine,
Your report mentioned staring at a wall and textures load over and over. Can you provide a location or 2 where you see this happen?
This issue could be a duplicate of https://secondlife.canny.io/bug-reports/p/texture-memory-calculation-is-a-big-inconsistent-mess but I want to get a clear steps to reproduce the issue here.
Other issues mentioned in this thread:
* The flickering at Quantum City looks like z-fighting. It can be fixed by builders making sure not to stack two surfaces too near each other. If there is some flickering not related to the z-fighting, please provide a video.
* The 3 second stutter, 2 second smooth bug from observeur. I'd like to get more info about that - where can I go to see it? It may be a separate, Mac only bug, but I would like to test that out.
observeur Resident
hello Dan, i will send you the location. (it was specific to Mac, however, at the same spot, i noticed while using the amd igpu on pc, it was crashing the viewer badly, like .. i had to restart windows in debug mode and clean install amd drivers so windows can start, so there was something at this place that was causing an issue even on PC with amd graphics, but while the pc crashed, without the stutter, the mac didn't crash).
Dan Linden
observeur Resident:
I do see the slow down at that location on my MacBook Air. Would you like to file a separate Canny issue specifically for the performance issue? I don't think it's the same issue as the original report.
observeur Resident
Dan Linden yes certainly, i will file a separate Canny. I did: https://feedback.secondlife.com/bug-reports/p/mac-periodic-framerate-fluctuation-at-certain-places
observeur Resident
i've been trying to figure out an issue that is specially perceptible on Mac with Apple Silicon, but might be related to this as i indeed observe a periodical and never ending cycle of texture (but is it only texture?) reloading (even) when i don't modify the view at all (not spinning, not moving ..). The issue is a heavy stutter in certain sims (heavy to the point you can't really move where you want), easily and painfully perceived when moving or spinning around, but also when the view is perfectly fixed, there is a never ending cycle of stutter and smooth animations : about 3 seconds stutter, then 2 seconds smooth, then again the same cycle. i made a gyazo that shows one period of this cycle : https://gyazo.com/7a28ab7c88bf17c8e89bbec158e00272
It seems to match the texture console activity, that's why i mention this in this post (even though i can't say for sure this is the actual texture activity that causes the stutter).
you will notice the fps is going lower then higher even though the real fps is actually going much lower than what it shows as those aren't instant values that are displayed by the fps counter. So i suspect this is related to this post .. it's only a guess, and it happens in all (pbr) viewers i tested on Mac , no matter the graphics settings (SL Viewer, Megapahit (which is compiled for arm), Firestorm, Alchemy .. ). The stutter is way less perceptible on windows viewer, but i'm going to do the same test at the same place on windows, and comment if i see it's worth. Maybe if i had a weaker cpu on windows, i would notice it as well ? but i can't say for sure.
Whirly Fizzle
Andred Darwin
Also affects alpha/transparency textures and overall flickering of an scene with objects with faces close to each other... in fact the amount of "flickering/glitching" with the new viewer is at least double if not more compared to the old engine.
The new viewer/materials is awesome, but go in-world browse an event or regions... with PBR viewer stutters for nothing... even with a 3080ti.
Visit http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Quantum%20City/128/153/3501 as an example (its an adult rated region, be advised)... quite impressive... super flickering everywhere... move your camera around, with PBR flickering is way worst than it used to be.
Once scenes start getting fully populated with PBR objects, this will become really noticeable.
Whirly Fizzle
Andred Darwin:
At this location I do see some flickering in certain areas, however I also see the same flickering on the last LL pre-PBR Viewer too: 6.6.16.6566955269
Vids of the flickering from the Firestorm PBR Viewer:
The flickering is the same on LL default release, LL PBR maint 2 & pre-PBR.
Andred Darwin
Whirly Fizzle
Exactly... may be perception at different frame rates, but with the PBR viewer it seems to occur way more often... super distracting, and pretty much most events (which actually get real traffic... ) displays the same "effect", lol... thank you for the videos! (In my opinion, for this specific scenario... its ugly anyway... PBR is just making it a "shiny ugly"... heheheh)
The stuttering though... is clear just on PBR viewer... after checking with peers... its way less noticeable with high end graphics cards (on a 3080 TI, 3090, 4070, a few of my contacts dont feel any stuttering)...
@ Viewer Team:
This seems to be just another example of adding more and more features while leaving things behind... the snowball keeps growing ( user perception of course, I have no idea what could be done to fix it ).
In fact, I'm avoiding to look at Github, cause its quite disappointing... I now see "Lua Scripts", "Mirrors", and a bunch of other stuff being actively worked on, and a bunch of other stuff that could be called "critical" in some cases left behind (even with the understanding, there might be a reason behind it, for a user... the question remains, "Dont they actually see it?")
My plea to the viewer/dev team would be, please consider adding a bit more weight at the balance to the side of fixing stuff that people deal with day to day, if cant be fixed...dont allow it to happen! Things like this (there many others.... this is for sure not the end of world... thats not what I mean), make it too easy for your own product to be perceived as "bad", "ugly", "slow", "buggy"... even though is not even close to reality... SL is awesome (after a long time going around the quirks, 16 years in my case, and still going, how about a new user?) !
GLTF-maint2 as an example has not seen one commit in the past 2 weeks, and featurettes,... whatever... has a bunch commits of stuff that we cannot even use yet on the main grid, meanwhile a lot of people trying the PBR viewer are just shutting off with the idea... "there are too many bugs still"...., its a "released" feature...
From a user perspective, this seems to be dysfunctional (which is not really the case, but, again... I really believe seeing things from an user perspective brings much better results).
A "BUGATHON" week.... on top of the current PBR viewer could be a neat and fun way to increase usage and perception... (Runitai, Cosmic, Geenz ... can work miracles!)