Occlusion Culling

Does anyone know if your occlusion culling status can be seen anywhere? I looked in the prefs and the menu, I think I covered everything. I think it would be nice to see if you have it on instead of watching for framerates to go up or down indoors, which I haven't really had a chance to test. My system sucks, so I figure this will be an important feature for me...

Since Occlusion Culling uses a specific hardware feature, it may or may not be available for your graphics card. You can check in the Debug menu. If you don't see a debug menu, you can enable it by doing Ctrl+Alt+D.

I think it's somewhere in the Rendering submenu. Look for "object-object occlusion". If it's checked, then it's turned on. If it's greyed out/disabled, your hardware probably doesn't support it.

But if it is working, you can see it working by turning on Rendering-->Info Displays-->Octree. You'll see a lot of white/green grid lines. Red boxes on the screen means that spot is being culled. Keep in mind that turning on this info display may impact performance.

Another way to see it at work is to use a large invisiprim, and look through it at various angles.

Hey, thanks Delta. Can I ask though, when you say "invisiprim", what exactly do you mean? I thought the objects still rendered if you could see them, such as through windows and transparent textures. Do you not mean a transparent prim? Just wasn't sure if that meant something other than I understand.

I still think it would be nice to see it in a menu though, such as property lines, etc....

You may have seen invisiprims before. They're usually used to hide parts of an avatar. It works from a hack in the rendering engine, where invisiprims are marked as "solid" prims, except with an invisible surface. Thus, since the rendering engine thinks it's solid, it doesn't draw some things behind the invisiprim, such as avatars and the shininess on shiny objects.

Well, Occlusion Culling is checked for me despite ATI having no mention of it on their website. With the Debug info on the occluded items display as described. The problem? Without it turned on there is still a rendering into view issue:

If you got to Carnage Island:<10,10,39> you will be underneath a city. Essentially the island is set up to have an aboveground city and a desctroyed lower area (at least that's what my project manager claims). At Carnage Island:<10,10,81> you are on the upper area. If you start in the lower area and look up in Mouselook while moving across the sim you will see the above buildings render before the platform that constitutes the second floor covers them up, or occludes them. You will see building draw, the the roadway, and finally the "ceiling" which then properly occludes then through the octree output. If occlusion was properly working, should these building and roads even be rendered in the first place?

I am using an ATI Radeon X1600 Pro (512MB) and SL works great. I had been an NVIDIA guy for the last two years but NVIDIA drivers have problems with Windows Media Center Edition 2005 and had to switch (after being an ATI guy for years before the switch to NVIDIA). Many forum posters and in-world people have said Linden Labs is partial to NVIDIA and want to make sure the effect I'm seeing is the way occlusion is supposed to work or if it is a graphics card issue.

Yes, I am using the latest drivers, I have a high-end machine and SL runs great as long as there aren't a lot of Avatars around, even with all setting maxxed out.

Okay, I guess the debug menu IS part of the menu, so forget all of my ill-informed suggestions to show occlusion culling like property lines, etc., because it already does oops.

However, i can't find the occlusion culling, object-object occlusion, or whatever in my debug menu. It is not there and greyed out either, it's simply not there. Does that mean my hardware doesn't support it, then? I'm assuming this is the case.

(I did, however, use the octree view, and did see one large red box off in the distance. I was outside at the time though. I got caught up in my new "debug menu" discovery and wanted to try out the hi rez snapshots. lol.)

Jsut saw this /255/45/108903/1.html on the announcements. Tittle refers to Mac users, but I think the occlusion problem relates to everyone.

If I'm wrong, just ignore this post and pretend I'm on the other side of the prim. This isn't the girl you're looking for *waves hand*

~Jessy

Are you looking in the Rendering submenu for "Object-object occlusion"? I thought it would just appear grayed out if it wasn't hardware-supported (at least... that's what happens on an Intel integrated graphics laptop I have).

But anyways... if Occlusion Culling is working, you should see several semitransparent red boxes if say a building is in the way of something. If not, it's probably disabled.

Ah, it was grayed out. I didn't see it because just the letters are grey and they're dark grey, so it looked like a blank space in the menu. Had to get closer to the screen. Anyway, thanks Delta.