THE NEW INFORCED PBR= Dysfunctional.
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Evonne1968 Resident
The new PBR thats on fs 7.1 has totally ruined the performance, textures don't load, fps drops to below 10 from nearly 70. Avatars and surrounds look horrid. Movements are jerky if one can move at all.
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Signal Linden
needs info
Evonne1968 Resident, thanks for the report. It's been awhile since this issue was filed, and we've made a lot of changes to attempt to improve performance since June.
Have you tried newer versions of the viewer? How are they performing in comparison?
Makay Scribe
Wrong response spot
SL Feedback
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Yman Juran
How many GB Ram do you have ? 9, 16 or +. ) 9 is minimum, 16 good, + muct to prefer.
MaxNormandy Resident
When you say "since PBR introduction" do you mean Firestorm Release a few weeks earlier or official client update released back in November 2023? Because if it's former, then this place is the wrong one for such a feedback, you should write tickets to FS team, LL is not developing their viewer.
Also, you only see no visible difference because of two reasons: 1) creators mastered faking reflections and shadows, so a lot of stuff already looked nice, just fake, now new stuff can abandon such magic tricks and stuff will look better automatically 2) you see the same stuff with the same old materials, because PBR landed on official SL viewer in November 2023 and FS enabled its support about a week ago, so majority of creators postponed diving into the PBR realm until this moment, therefore you can barely see any fully PBR environments and that's why it all "looks the same".
Makay Scribe
It's firestorm not second life. Colors are fine on all other viewers. This is alchemy. Firestorm will catch up in 2025 as they are about 9 months behind the other builds.
Makay Scribe
Woolfyy Resident Ah well I run a few viewers so I do understand that thought but honestly SL will die if it doesn't move forward. There's not a game on the market that doesn't have bugs and the graphics changes they've done is a huge step forward helping everybody, old and new computers. Listen, FS has done some amazing stuff with the code provided twisting things and bridging features to introduce functions that normally wouldn't be available. But just like LL, years of this has created a giant mess of code in the background that seems to have made it hard to port over. I've been back and forth between viewers for years and firestorms colors have always been terrible. SL official, cool viewer, BD, alchemy, plus others all have great graphics even during v.6, yet for some reason FS colors have always been flat. The video I showed was a gyazo recording I did this week and is lower quality than what I even see on my screen, you can see my posts on Flickr go back over a year with similar quality and these "bugs" arent anything that has been an issue, I am on SL every single day. I really like what firestorm has done for SL, but they can't hold back everyone from moving forward. Even a 10-year-old computer can run any other viewer fine. FS will never get rid of their bugs unless they push it out, so it's going to be a month or two of hurdles which you can either embrace or use one of the other viewers in the meantime. There's lots of fixes You can do on client side to help yourself by tweaking your computer a little bit better and this can be accomplished by asking questions and not thinking it's the end of the world, I went through those thoughts as well but once you experience better graphics there's no going back. The immersion and magic of second life is only getting better for all of us. PDR is just the beginning of a long range of changes coming now which includes GLTF and other amazing things that helps every region run with less memory overhead. There's lots of help out there if you just ask. Maybe I'll make a tutorial on how to help your computer run better even if it is old, cuz honestly my 8yr old laptop can handle the other viewers fine and honestly, I can't say that there are a bugs that stand out. The only reason I changed over a couple years ago was because I couldn't stand seeing people's heads backwards or not rezzing at all. I have a near zero rez time for 50 people in a club now, anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds average. You can honestly build a computer for $400 now with a 2060 graphics card that runs SL perfect. I'm on a little bit better laptop most days only because I film and run a bunch of other stuff in the background at the same time. Eventually I'm sure you'll see the positive out of all this. Imagine someone complaining about the implementation of mesh or Bento because they still have a computer from the '90s. The best computer on the market can't run firestorm properly at the moment, and that's not LLs fault. All the other viewers prove that point. With your guys' help and feedback to FS, you'll get through this little hurdle in just a couple months or take a risk and give Alchemy a try for a couple weeks. Unless LL rebuilt second life from ground up eliminating all the work the builders and creators have put in, there's no easy way out. It's actually fascinating how an object or region from 20 years ago can still run perfectly throughout all these changes without a hiccup. Good luck and feel free to ask questions or message me privately if you need any help making things run better, I'll try to help anyway I can. I agree, mirrors should be off unless looking at a mirror and all the other settings can easily be turned down now and not affect the overall look.
edit
Also, Frame rate seems fine on other viewers peaking at absurd highs at times. https://i.gyazo.com/0233f47401a21e0e05e540807adc4edf.mp4. I only drop these videos as examples of what is capable. I'm not sure what a medium range computer is to you, but to me its an i5 with a 20xx card about 7 or 8 yrs old which I know runs SL perfectly at the moment, as a few people around me use and they see exactly what I see. If they don't its computer related not viewer and I've helped them fix their backend issues. Anything below the 20xx tier is past its expiry date like most of us old souls here.
Edit 2. I also recommend everyone donating a few dollars a month or subscribing to their local viewer to help the developers who work so hard. Nothing should be expected to come for free including the 3rd party viewers out there with all this criticism.
Makay Scribe
Woolfyy Resident Fair enough, its def not black and white and a ton of stuff going on that I don't know about, especially about ages and new users etc. I respect your knowledge and time in world. SL def needs passionate longtime users like yourself and others that keep track. I pulled that $400 price out of the air and def for something new of course not. But my lil old Asus g14 with a rtx3050 laptop has way less specs than say this, (dont hate me cause im pulling out used stuff), but ...
I was on my 2001 asus g14 last weekend at SLB21 with about 50 people at full graphics testing Firestorm against Alchemy and I was able to keep everything at high no problem on Alchemy but saw the issues FS was having of course, since it was just released. All my videos over the past year or so were done on that old laptop and I went through the entire PBR upgrade in Alchemy without a glitch, other than my own driver mistakes. Though i know how to tweak my Nvidia and computer settings to run OBS and the viewer at the same time which is sometimes quite the chore. Only recently this year did I upgrade to a lil better Laptop but my graphics stay at highest everything at all times in the busiest of places 50-80 etc because I do a lot of filming and quality is important for me. I only disable mirrors and distance when I jump into clubs filming (can look through my history of videos over the last year and a half to verify as i dont want to be self-posting here).
I hate comparing viewers though cause they all have their strengths and weaknesses and thankful to have many options. Thats why I have them all installed and try and keep myself in the loop. Anyhow, thanks for the knowledge on LL, interesting to know and def going to keep an eye on it further. SL has been a S*it storm for the last 15yrs that ive been around but thankfully I have some background like yourself keep the viewers running well or else I just jump back and forth as needed if there is a bug although it's been rare. Keep me in the loop.
Makay Scribe
Woolfyy Resident - What features you are looking for? Maybe we can ask the developers who are very close to the community on the discord if they can implement it. Just grabbed this quickly a moment ago to show there is an extensive debug that I was sure had most of everything, but curious now what it may be missing? I love features so Im asking only for the knowledge. https://i.gyazo.com/341f19cf20decd2acfa95d25afe926df.mp4
SL Feedback
Merged in a post from disisme Misfit:
Title: PBR a move backwards
Details: I have found since PBR introduction that SL has taken a significant move backwards. FPS on my grunter machine has taken an absolutely decimating drop, and the GPU fans now run like turbines, rather than 1 midly idling along. Texture rendering now looks at though the gamma is far too high with all the whites over driven to the point of glare. Theres no discernible improvement in graphical quality, but a massive degradation of performance, for not visible or otherwise detectable change, or even desirability of potential.
Vincent Nacon
This is the wrong place to report. LL doesn't handle Firestorm's issue.