Make PBR optional like the 3rd party viewer CoolVLViewer
under review
Darling Brody
PBR has knocked a lot of us out of SL due to unusable frame rates of 4-6fps or worse. The choice to do a cut-over to PBR with no backwards comparability option available for people with older computers was clearly a mistake. If Phillip Linden needed to personally email us all to test the new viewer version it means we lost a lot of Residents. By the way, the new viewer Phillip asked us to try is still giving the unplayable 6fps for me.
Secondlife is NOT Fortnite; Our residents are not hardcore Gamers with the latest hardware. Secondlife was the game that until recently was still playable on 20 year old graphics hardware, which helps greatly with player retention. Lets not lose that inclusiveness! The SL Viewer has always been able to turn off features that are overly taxing for people's computers and should retain that functionality going forward, even if it means we need to include two graphics engines for a few years while people upgrade.
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chanayane Resident
Just my 2 cents.
The issue is not PBR itself but its implementation could be better.
The issue is most likely GPU memory getting filled up, because of so many unnecessarily big textures. Then your system RAM takes over to avoid an out of memory crash. That is when it starts lagging.
PBR uses more textures than Blinn Phong. And, sometimes on a PBR object there is also Blinn Phong textures as fallback. So instead of 1-3 textures, you now have 5-8 for the same object.
People often wear attachments with dozens of big textures. Seriously I have seen rings and earrings with 1024x1024 textures, including the material ones! This is madness.
Add to this that 2048x2048 textures are a thing now (taking 4 times the space of 1024x1024 textures) and you have all the ingredients for a massive lag when you visit a crowded place.
Something I'd like to know is: do PBR objects still load fallback Blinn Phong textures into memory?
Darling Brody
chanayane Resident I don't think that is the problem because I made every single object and texture in my region over the last 18 years and have never made a PBR item, however when I switched to a PBR viewer and logged into my region I was on 3 frames per second instead of my normal 30fps. Nothing changed except the rendering engine in the viewer.
Nelson Jenkins
Darling Brody Yeah, because you were running on Intel integrated graphics. You admit you had no GPU at all. You're just not going to be able to play a lot of unoptimized 3D games. Sorry, but that's the reality of the situation. Nobody is going to optimize Second Life for computers designed to be Facebook machines.
primerib1 Resident
4-6 FPS? Heh, that's my frame rate even before PBR.
After PBR it's 3-5 FPS, practically the same.
Still, I soldier on.
Nelson Jenkins
I swear someone needs to actually benchmark as many viewers as possible in a controlled environment across multiple machines. The amount of hyperbolic nonsense I hear about different viewers from people terrified of PBR is insufferable at this point...
I still see YouTube videos of people exploring SL with glow disabled. If you're that far behind, sorry, it's time to upgrade that old AGP card, nobody wants to keep spending money on a 20-year-old rendering engine.
Rizzy Khaos
Nelson Jenkins but why cant I play with a 20 yr old machine just coz you got a new one /sarcasm.
Seriously, its cheaper to buy a new PC now than it was 5 yrs ago, you can get a decent gaming pc for around 1000USD or less.
Darling Brody
Nelson Jenkins Nobody is suggesting that we support 20 year old hardware from the Windows ME era, but it is not unreasonable to support windows 10 hardware because that does represent the majority of SL users.
I myself have Two Windows 10 Machines purchased 5 years apart, and neither of them could handle PBR despite both of them being able to run at 5Ghz!
I own two regions and pay my premium subscription a year in advance, so I was literally locked out of something I had paid for in advance. If I hadn't paid so much over the years for those regions I would have walked away from SL when it stopped working on my computers.
AND
this is the real problem - people will leave if their computer can't play the game and LL will loose money. In the end I had to buy an expensive graphics card to get PBR working, but LL can't expect everyone to be willing to do that. LL need to spend their money to support the hardware people have NOW, or they won't have a user-base anymore.
Nelson Jenkins
Darling Brody I have a 5 GHz AMD FX-8350 that ran SL terribly a decade ago. My laptop has no discrete GPU at all and happily scalds my lap rendering PBR just fine, and it doesn't even run Windows in the first place. Without knowing your entire build (other than "an expensive graphics card"), it's impossible to draw any real conclusions here.
I wasn't being hyperbolic about the 20-year-old engine. Blinn-Phong shading was obsolete with Direct3D 10 back in 2006. PBR is currently supported by every major game and rendering engine on the market. Sorry, but as a content creator, working around Blinn-Phong in 2024 is torture, and SL needs to stay on par with competitors or we will keep losing big spenders and talented creators to other platforms.
Beatrice Voxel
We could all go back to prim avatars made out of boxes, if framerate is the be-all, end-all criteria to performance.
Seriously, that's what I do when I hit an event with a ton of people, I take all the mesh attachments off, put on a full body alpha, and wear a big box with my profile pic on opposite sides. Doesn't do much for MY framerate, but at least I'm not making other people's systems lag...
OK, all snark aside. The argument to keep using outdated, likely-not-to-be-supported rendering code simply to retain users is shooting ourselves in the foot. We're trying to encourage MORE people to join Second Life, right? So given the choice between the new shiny Call of Duty or Age of Conan, and a 20-year-old amalgam of user-built structures and furnishings and old rendering methods, what do you think people will choose?
VRChat is attractive because it is a recent development, without all the cruft of decades. That's what we're competing with.
So what the Lindens need to do, is cut out all the old onion-skin 'stuff' that most people hardly ever use, but still makes up the basic building blocks in the SL toolkits. And yes, doing so will break anything USING those things. And people will complain when their flexies look wonky or their bling particles stop working. They'll complain when their resizer scripts lock them out of sims because of script memory. They'll complain when their sculpt complexity makes them look like shapeless mannequins to everyone else. Well? Update things so you aren't affected.
PBR is a big shift in rendering, one that will allow developers who work in the industry NOW to leverage their skills and create beautiful things, without having to reinvent an ancient wood-spoked wheel to do so. Don't like it because your computer can't handle it? Perhaps it's time to upgrade, then.
I'm a pragmatist, I have zero expectations that even a 10 year old system will continue to run any game or social platform that is updated to reflect modern capabilities. That's why when PBR was put into beta, I tried it, noticed it made my old Gen3 I5/1080ti get cranky, and cut funds loose to build a new 12th gen I7/4070ti based system. I saw where things were going, and arranged to be able to handle it.
Darling Brody
Beatrice Voxel A viewer called CoolVLViewer has PBR on a switch like advanced lighting used to be. You can turn it on/off as needed. If CoolVLViewer can put it on a switch, so can LL.
Zy Butcher
SL relies heavily on its visuals as it is in fact a metaverse. PBR is not a new technology and has existed for over 10 years. Although bumpy SL needs to update itself to keep being attractive to current and future users otherwise we would be stuck with premesh avatars.
The drop of FPS is not intentional and with the ExtraFPS update you will see a meaningful improvement but the update to newer hardware is something any software requires from time to time. Please, take it into account.
Darling Brody
Zy Butcher A viewer called CoolVLViewer has PBR on a switch like advanced lighting used to be. You can turn it on/off as needed. If CoolVLViewer can put it on a switch, so can LL.
Zy Butcher
Darling Brody PBR is supposed to run well con computers that are more than a decade old. If it doesn’t then it needs to be fixed, there is no reason to take a step back technologically speaking. The platform needs to evolve. What hardware do you have?
Gabriele Graves
I'd like to add my voice to those saying what a bad idea it would be to do this.
When Henri added this to Cool VL viewer he specifically stated it was a transitional step that he expected to remove.
Darling Brody
Gabriele Graves EXACTLY!!!! Where was the transitional step in SL?
They have Phillip Linden emailing people to come back to SL because they took a huge hit to the user-base by not transitioning!
Gabriele Graves
LL misjudged the performance issues for low end hardware, it's good they admit that. They are also doing the right thing by fixing what is wrong with the performance for low end hardware.
Some people will never go to PBR and would not accept any switch as transitional, ever. So it would end up being permanent as I suspect will Henri's if enough people use it.
Nobody has
had
to quit, they could be using Cool VL Viewer, FS v6 or any of the other non-PBR viewers until LL fixed the issues just as they were. Only a small percentage of people use the LL viewer and they are the only ones who have been forced to upgrade to a PBR viewer.At this point it's moot, if what has happened has happened then fulfilling this PBR request will not achieve anything positive in my opinion.
Zy Butcher
Darling Brody SL id taking a huge hit because new platforms have come up with better technology and cheaper land. Not improving tech is worse for the platform. I am not sure where you get this information about Philip emailing people to come back either.
Lucifera Morningstar
PBR wasn't the cause of the performance problems. It was other code that happened to be bundled with the PBR release (as per LL themselves). And as of the DeltaFPS viewer (and all 3rd-party viewers based on the LL code) the performance is already back to pre-PBR levels, and there's a third round of optimizations incoming ("ExtraFPS"). And to give an example of how potent these optimizations are: I have one of those mini-PCs with a celeron processor and an Intel-chipset graphics setup. It could NOT run Firestorm v6.x at ALL. Freeze/crash before the world even loaded. But Firestorm 7.1.11 - the version with the DeltaFPS code - runs with fully loaded textures and mesh. Not
fantsatically
...about 10-12 FPS. But 10-12FPS is better than zero followed by a freeze/crash. Barring edge cases with unique parameters, it seems more and more like anyone not updating to the latest viewers are inflicting this pain on themselvesVivienne Schell
Sorry, but no PBR viewer runs better than any Pre-PBR viewer. None. The loss of fps is significant, even on high end hardware.
Lucifera Morningstar
Vivienne Schell I can appreciate that you're having a different experience, but...it IS a different experience, from mine (see above-detailed test) or anyone else I've spoken to in person. Of the few who've mentioned it to me, I asked if they'd whitelisted the viewer in their antivirus program, and every response to date has been along the lines of "Oops, I forgot that part, brb" after which it was fine. Speaking of which...anyone having issues, might want to check that. You have to remove/re-add the exclusions after EVERY update/fresh install, else the AV software will still cause issues (and no, I don't think that makes sense either, but it happens anyway).
Melody OwO
Lucifera Morningstar The reasoning for that is the hash or in laymen's terms "fingerprint" of the files changes. Despite same name/location/numerous other things the same, the antivirus still sees that change and gets upset. Hopefully that makes it make more sense for you.
Lucifera Morningstar
Melody OwO This is extremely helpful to know, thank you! It does make sense now.
Darling Brody
Lucifera Morningstar Doesn't run for me on my Intel Graphics! I have tested every "fix" so far and had to spend big money on a graphics card instead. I'm pissed that LL didn't make PBR optional to give people the chance to move over to it.
Darling Brody
Lucifera Morningstar I'm so sick of the firestorm support going on about anti-virus and firewalls. I installed a fresh windows onto one of my computers without any anti-virus or firewall and it made no difference. When I got a new graphics card on the other computer PBR run fast without me needed to alter the anti-virus!
Anti-virus is not the god-fix for the issue. PBR was simply not ready to come out of beta, and needed to automatically turn off for machines that can't run it properly.
Melody OwO
Darling Brody A fresh install of windows still has defender and given the extra functionality/memory footprint it benefits greatly from exclusions being applied properly which their guide on the website holds your hand through. As to the other issues you bring up, you're expecting low end integrated graphics solutions to run an open world sandbox, something they were never designed or meant to do. Those budget computers are intended solely for school work, web browsing, watching some YouTube and some light gaming. People have wanted SL to get with the times and people were leaving for things like VR Chat, the userbase was declining/aging (quite literally dying off). They said for a year plus prior (especially when you're talking Firestorm) that this was coming and requirements were going to increase. There was plenty of heads up.
Mari Moonbeam
From a comment above :"a small group of users that can't. or won't, upgrade, always get left behind" not sure it is a "small group". Really think someone with a lower end machine is going to do all this Linux stuff when just working around a firewall for an update throws them? There is a basic question I have not heard answered - is a VIABLE financial future of SL going to be in glossy oooo lookie fancy skies world where people communicate out of world in voice or Discord etc or is it going to BE a world where people connect in text and voice when in smaller groups but don't need or want the best images. Looks or connections? Most long time residents are here for the community, the connections. Creators don't want to 'dumb' down their stuff - but will SL be viable if the tech lower end crowd is pushed out? If you only log in a few times a year why decorate a house or ever change your clothes? Folks who make a long term commitment to learning about SL are a small subset of the tech users in the world. Really want to turn off even more of them?
Darling Brody
Mari Moonbeam Very well said.
prissypaw Aldrin
coolvl should be the gold standard in how viewers should be developed it is the only viewer to properly support linux, it is the only viewer that runs great, it does not have features i would like to have, the point is though that the work that its developer puts into it actualy makes a difference, and creates a working viewer i have had to go from singularity to it because v3 viewers are lagy bloated pieces of trash, and singularity is no longer being updated, before you mention genesis it does not have linux support, and i know one of the devs on genesis they arent happy with pbr at the moment either, i have been enjoying seeing shadows and mirrors and afew things that have changed with PBR however it does not feel ready there are still major lag points, and i run Dell T7400
OS: Artix Linux x86_64
Host: Precision WorkStation T7400
Kernel: 6.11.3-artix1-1
Uptime: 2 days, 26 mins
Packages: 993 (pacman)
Shell: bash 5.2.37
Resolution: 1920x1080, 1920x1080, 10
WM: i3
Theme: odrTech-Purple [GTK2/3]
Icons: BlackoutIcons [GTK2/3]
Terminal: xterm
CPU x2: Intel Xeon X5450 (8) @ 3.000GHz
GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX 470/480/570/5
Memory: 6664MiB / 32095MiB
the gpu is actualy arn rx 580 OC 8Gb and i am lucky to get frames above 20fps on good days, i play vulkan compatible games, the only ones i cant do is avx2, as for those saying why not buy a new computer because some people can't afford one so easily as you who are priviledged enough to either have a job or be born into wealth, just because the news lies about there being low unimployment does nto make it true, the reality is alot of people are living either paycheck to paycheck or trying to find work in a job market that has to high of standards or is flooded with slave labor already.
LeillaLux Resident
prissypaw Aldrin also my friend recommended to me the new Kokua viewer for Linux and I like it too. Maybe that would be another option for you to try as backup for or a change if you ever need or want to try another option for Linux.
Tiffany Hultcrantz
I tend to agree here. My video graphics are apparently up to date. I am still having issues with the PBR. Although I occasionally do gaming combat, I mostly rp in SL. Visuals play a role but mostly for posting images in Deviantart. I would have liked an option. Also consider that many other rp'ers I play with in SL are actually elderly in rl. They are hesitant when it comes to the cost of upgrading their computers. I can afford but I am reluctant.
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