A well renderd dragon-tale?

Since I hate making bug reports, and they are always so boring and whatever. Here, a stupid story to make you chuckle. (and thats its intent, despite the language)



Once upon a time, there was a red dragon. who had a fixation with 3dgraphics and games. He was happy with his little geforce2 card, fully loaded. because his 3dstudio work was low-poly, and he was not above a little wait for eye-popping renders when it was time to crank out a production or two.

Quake 3 worked fine, unreal wasn't so bad. life was good. Heck, even second life was bearable. He was a happy dragon.

Then came along a new drug on the street called 'doom 3', and it was a hungry beast, demanding millions of pixel shades and surfs a second. The little geforce 2 had to be put out to pasture.

Fearlessly, the dragon boldly stormed into best buy, his shiny leather clothes and his trench coat frightening little people as he made a b-line for the hardware department.

A new BFG GT, a NV based 6800 fully loaded would be his new prize. Cold hard cash in hand, he got through checkout in such a rush, he almost forgot to look scary so they would service him faster.

Upon returning to his lair, the dragon got right to work. Screwdriver in hand, flashlight in teeth and rubber gloves on. the procedure was without any question a full blown masterpiece. One reboot, two. a tweak here, a tweak there, and his favorite games and programs were happier than ever.

Life was better than ever.

That is, until said dragon saw that it was time to run into SL and check out how great his performance was! no more would be be slave to less than blazing performance. 4 megabit broadband, 21 inch display, it would be quite a sight!

Would be! Could be, even should be! Unfortunately, it would not be. Perplexed, the dragon poked, prodded, tinkered, tweaked, hammered, smashed, growled. bit his keyboard, and even ran around in circles yanking on his horns, screaming

"How in gods name does turning OFF AGP make the program faster! this defies all logic! 'Mixing AGP and non-AGP pools,slow!'? I know that, why doesn't it stop doing it!" meanwhile others questioned his sanity at such a statement, it was so absurd and obvious.

More ram, must need more ram! he thought to himself, grabbing a whole two gigs from a file server and throwing it in, he put his machine to the limit it could hold.

"that will do it!" he cried, clutching his mouse as he revived his favorite toy.

The howling that followed was obvious testament to the opposite. The little people ran and hid, meanwhile the dragon chewed through forums, read web sites, and laggingly asked other residents if they had any problems like him!

"this doesn't make sense!" he raved "It's just not right!" he ranted, pacing back and forth as he scratched his head "Is it possible this program defies all laws? could it somehow not understand?" he mused. "It's remarkably faster without AGP! how in hell is beyond even me! ten to twenty percent increase in performance? What the crap is that, some sort of perverse non-conformance?!"

"I'll test!" he snapped, jumping in his chair, finding an empty sim which had nothing there! "I'll figure it out, the answer is out there!"

Try and test, experiment and tinker. Fast sim, nothing around for as far as even his eyes could see. but a rendering FPS of only a meager ten is all there would be! "turn this off, turn that down, turn these off and that thing around! how is this possible, this thing could render that stupid harry potter hellhound!"

Hours later, and no fix in sight, he muttered:

"Back to 3dstudio with me, where the tools that can round numbers properly. Call me when they fix that crap, i'm telling you its a goddamn FPS trap."

The end.

Ahem. ^_^



Oh, and here.



CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+ (1662 Mhz)
Memory: 512 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (Build 2195)
OpenGL Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL Renderer: GeForce 6800 GT/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 1.5.1
Packets Lost: 9/237140 (0.0%) <-- love that broadband, baby!

I had it up to a gig and half of ram, no change. I even swapped over to another, faster proc for a while,still no change. This thing hovers around 15 FPS and really refuses to go any higher than maybe 17 if i'm looking off world at the void and zoom in on it. Then I put it into AGP mode, it gets /really/ bad, and chops like crazy (like i was still on my geforce2). alt-4 complains about 'WARNING: mixing AGP and non-AGP pools, slow!' constantly (several times a second), and it did this on the geforce2 also, but only when AGP mode is turned on. the FPS chart is freaking out all over the place, usualy widely between 15 and 2. and...well. it sucks. yep.

I mean seriously, its a brand new, top of the line card being run on a empty sim with a naked AV and nothing within view range to render. /something/ is wrong here, it's acting like my old g2. :-/

So..i'm open to suggestions. Or not if nobody has any. But there is the beef, enjoy the story. it was fun to write, even if it sucks. (hey, its 6 AM, i'm allowed to suck at 6 AM)

Once you have a fairly modern (<2 year) video card, and sufficient memory (768+MB), the biggest bottleneck will be how fast your CPU is. SL requires a lot more CPU power than most 3d applications in order to get performance out of it.

I notice you said you tried a faster CPU, but I'm curious if it was significantly faster?

You may want to send an email to [email]support@lindenlab.com[/email] and see if they have any suggestions for your setup. There hopefully may just be some odd bottleneck slowing you down that only requires a single setting change somewhere and all will be good.

Good luck =)

PS: Another tip is to keep your cache size small. Most people set it to 1000MB, but SL's hashing algorithm isn't all that fast, so a smaller cache will be faster as long as you have good broadband or generally visit the same places in world. This is why most people think a new version of SL makes such an improvment in speed -- it's not usually that much faster, it's just that the cache gets cleared during an update. I usually leave mine at 200MB.

I am not sure what this post is implying, but it sounds like a rant from someone jilted by lousy hardware. First of all, you only have an xp2000+ with an unnamed motherboard, I am guessing 266fsb, which is not exactly the best performance test for a new graphics card. I will admit that the requirements described on the site are a bit misleading, because SL is a hungry beast, however I would not describe this as a "typical experience."

It requires some understanding of how the vertex and texture data gets to the card. Quake and ilk are higly optimized portal engines. SL is not by any means highly optimized . By it's very dynamic nature, SL is constantly flushing the buffers and uploading texture by the gigabyte. Modern cards tend to be optimised to hold vertex and texture data on the card and do not respond well to constant flushing. That IMO is why SL is slow. Another reason is that also IMO is SL is still not very well optimized, I notice that it will sometimes download textures that are /behind/ me before it downloads the ones in front that i am actually looking at !!!

But frankly, it doesnt matter how fast your machine is no current card that I know of will respond well to the realtime vertex/texture streaming methods that SL requires. You simply are not going to see the same response you get with highly optimized portal games that keep all their vertex/texture data permanently on the card.

Kex: *GASP*
Somebody can RTFP!

What weird crossover world are you from? And can you send more?

I'll check it again, maybe I forgot to up the buss or the clock when i dropped in the CPU. It was a little on the late side. Hmm.

Worth investigating again... But no, no real increase in preformance really. Sure, general stuff 'ran faster' but the rendering was still overall ass in the FPS department in SL. AGP turned on is a nightmare period on either CPU.

I'll do some more tinkering tonight when i have time.

Dirty McLean:


I'm sorry, you don't have the time/ability to read/comprehend the entire post? I don't have the time/desire to finish reading a dorkus reply,thanks you!

Laukosargas Svarog:
*grunt*

Yes yes, i understand the idea of optimized game code, thank you. I'm not a complete dollt,but thanks for implying it. Nice of you to even bother reading four lines into the post.



*edits out an actual reply on the topic here here*

Why am I re-telling this? Read a little closer, or don't bother to reply. Really, you don't /have/ to reply, I don't mind if you don't.

I know its a 'weird' post, but seriously. If you can't be botherd to *read it*at all, why are you people trying to 'help'? (heck, some of this isnt even help.)

Thats like running into an E.R with a guy and not even bothering to ask WTF is wrong with the guy, and cutting into him, drugging him up, and then shipping him off without even checking if hes alive anymore.

You people are scary. I don't know exactly why, either because you managed to somehow get past the reading comprehension tests, or maybe because I have this mental image of you people working in an E.R.


Kelly:

*GASP*


HmMmMmmmm...

Now thats an idea I hadn't thought of yet. Worth a shot too, I might add. *jots that on the list*, thats one thing i didnt try yet!

And be careful, one might even think you READ THE POST too. (or at least made an effort to glance the important bits out of it before posting)

Don't worry, I won't tell anyone you RTFP!

(See people? Its not that hard. Kelly and kex read, comprehended the important peices of information, made simple posts suggesting some peice of information that wasn't there. And pow! I'm helped! Or at least given a good sugestion or two of action that /might/ help.)

Heh. I can't wait till this guy's in world.

I'm already in world, i'v been in world for a couple months now. Thanks for thinking my post count has anything to do with my world time.

Kelly:
That nailed it! Framrate is behaving MUCH better now, it nolonger hangs at 15 FPS and refuses to go any higher no matter what. i'm even back on my usual hardware and commonly hitting 40 FPS or more depending on how many textures are buffering at the time or if its mostly idle. And even when its buffering textures like crazy - its still pretty snappy, and the FPS adjust acordingly without hitching so horribly that i hang all over the place.

Talk about a fixall, yesh, why didn't I think of that?

Thanks kelly! (and kex too.

If I remember right, one of the reasons sl take so much processing power is that the sl engine continuously changes the resolution of each textures. So it's uploading the same texture over and over again. I always wondered what would happen, if the user could disable this feature. I know people with small video card would have problems. But some cards can have 256mb of video ram , and soon there will be 512 mb video card on the consumers market.

I've also been wondering if sl engine sends it's textures as pre compressed textures, and store those textures compressed in the video cards.