Should we do it just because we can? A question of considerate settings.

RenderFarclip in debug

Oh, one other thing, if atmospheric shaders are on, I think that setting may be locked. It's probably handled under the World > Environment Editor > Advanced Sky options now.

Dual AMD FX74 chips 3.0GHz and dual 8600GT cards running SLI Forced AFR2. (^_^)

I'm not quite sure why your poll has no "I don't do it" choice, but if it did that is what I would vote. I keep my draw distance at 64.

Clicked so you'd feel less alone at the pie stand, Argent; but it looks like 9 others have done so, as well.

Pie eating contest!

What does RenderTreeLOD do to your framerate? At The Refuge & Expansion, looking from the gas station to the locomotive, going from 1 to 8 kills my PC. It goes from about 40fps to about 13fps.

The effect of tree LOD on frame rate varies enormously with version. In the first Windlight release, I had to turn the tree LOD down all the way or my framerate on Tigger went from around 40 to less than 1. Now it's back up to the "normal max" with no problem.

While on the topic of mouse pie and draw distance ......

I've noticed from time to time that I can sometimes see terrain 3 sims away, with a draw distance of 128.
I just checked it again.

I start on the hill in the SE corner of Eldfell.
I TP south to the East side of Nebo.
I look to the North.
I see the Eldfell hill in the distance. It has a distinctive shape.
It fades away within a minute.

Between the two points lie two and a half empty Linden water sims.

Sometimes if I TP from Nebo to Eldfell, I can look South and see Kinrara island. That's 3 complete water sims separation.

I suppose that the details are recorded in cache in global coordinates, so as to be able to render terrain and prims from adjoining sims.
When I look back over completely empty sims at where I come from, there's nothing but water to render and the viewer renders something way beyond my draw distance. I just see terrain as the LOD at that range wouldn't try to render prims.

Quirky.

Not much. There are so many more nearby plants in my main hangout that the tree FPS hit is already taken care of. In a welcome area or such with a field of scattered grasses, probably about 2fps. (^_^)

A scene like this will deliver about 15 to 20 FPS


A scene like this will peak at 25 to 28 FPS


I personally consider 15FPS "normal" since I came from Anime instead of games. I've never ever had a problem walking. (^_^)y

my current setup, maxed settings all EXCEPT draw distance of 256 (hey arget how'd you get 4096? the slider pegs at 512, neat trick, debug setting?) because I want to prioritize near texture loading, and that wasn't happening as much with the increased 512 setting.

the biggest difference is going to be bandwidth and sustained traffic to get it all in view. I have a nice fat pipe, that I limit to 1.5M per client, and can still run about 4 clients if I wanted.

but the bandwidth on LL's end could obviously be saturated with several clients doing that and I expect if nothing else, It's limited to that cap.

does LL prioritize the low end bandwidth requirements or a baseline percentage for all clients on that subnet/machine? I'd hope so, and if they do, even at saturation you aren't impacting other clients. I also assume neighboring sims are picking up some slack and therefore that traffic is also divided.

just from the look of things as they rez, it seems they prioritize the local zone to some extent (including anything focus on, so inspect and scroll through an item to speed it up) and after a certain local distance, it's the forward view that get prioritized (as can be seen in swinging around at long draw distances)

many settings are basically local to your computer, local lights, shiny, flexi detail... they exist as a parameter whether you turn them on or not and don't affect bandwidth.

my old machine, 64m most settings turned down or off, but what do you expect of an old 700mhz with a low end vid card? =)

I run mine as high as I can, if it were an issue they can start cutting the bot cancer from the grid first before limiting actual spending users. I'm not the one running 100's of bots to cheat traffic counts or bouncing other bots teleporting through a hundred sims and hour to scan their contents.

but remember, most bots run zero graphics (cough), and low bandwidth... so untill the number in an area get high (I can't guess the break even point) they run a LOT slimmer than a regular client.

end result: ousting the bots may not improve performance much. unless you count rendering cost in YOUR viewer on seeing them.

I also run as high as I can.

If my settings do impact the grid then LL should manage our expectations a little by ramping down what's apparently available (bad PR and ultimately bad for business) or invest more in the infrastructure (software and hardware).

SL isn't the real world in that we have a responsibility to the earth and future generations to manage a finite resource. LL can add resources if it wants to give us the best possible experience.

Maybe if we grind the grid to a very public halt simply by using our dearly bought computers to their full potential, we'll prod LL into treating existing residents as more than a nice fat herd of cash cows.

Interesting that last comment. . .But SL HAS shown us, that they WILL change the rules on us at the drop of a hat when they feel it's in their interest.

Those resources, in the form of higher grade servers and/or beefed up network infrastructure and outside Internet connectors cost money.
Just like the real world, the resources that we want to consume are not unlimited.

We do actually have a responsibility towards others within the environment of SL as we find it.
We "we" as a whole do not restrain ourselves in our consumption of resources, then LL has to step in an impose rules - e.g on Excessive use of sim resources, Traffic Bots, Ad-Farms, Script memory, etc.

That does not mean that we should not agitate for a greater pool of resources, but those resources will never be unlimited.



Cue a rolling restart to implement server code that imposes a fixed draw distance by refusing to serve up prim data beyonf an arbitrary distance from the avatar camera.

Yeah but at what point do we say it's hogging resources for one user to crank their view distance up, but not another to have a few hundred trafficbots?
And what of all the searchbots, spybots and landbots that hammer the servers by teleporting as fast as possible around the grid 24/7. LL deliberately slowed teleports down in 2007 because bots were draining so much resources bouncing from sim to sim, of course some bot runners just ran more bots to negate that.

I understand what you're saying Sling and agree to a point.

In my view though, if smooth running and an equitable experience is dependant on a self imposed setting of parameters, then there is actually no difference between that and LL restricting them.

Except of course that LL can currently market SL as having a much better user experience than they could if they restricted it to what the system can reliably support.

It'd be a little like (in my view anyway), a government setting the national speed limit at 120 mph but never maintaining the road network so that it deteriorates to the point only tractors travelling at 15mph can ever use it reliably.

(Actually I'm not saying that isn't quite a creative idea for road safety!)..

Either way, I guess what I was saying is that ultimately if a vendor sells you something based on a published (or even inferred) set of terms and conditions, the fact that living up to those T&Cs is financially prohibitive isn't really a fair defense.

Is there any evidence that running your computer at higher graphics settings has a perceptible impact on other users' SL experience?

I run on ultra because I can. But....I adjust my draw distance in terms of where I am. Busy places......low draw distance. If I'm wanting to take a snapshot with a lot of background substance....I increase the draw. Otherwise my settings are at the max.....well except for particle count.....I don't need a bazillion particles in my viewer....a few gets the point across usually.

Bandwidthe I do keep high.....but I also don't tend to hang out in places that are highly popolated.....like RP areas or freebie shops or camping spots......I prefer to wander and explore more unique/artsy stuff. If I do need to lower it....I will....but thus far I haven't had any problems.

And....my computer isn't exactly the latest & greatest......it does have a LOT of memory and a great graphics card. In fact.....it runs SL so well that I'll be a little afraid if/when the day comes that I have to get a new puter.

I don't think anyone's done a test, but it should be possible to compare sim loading and texture loading times with a number of avatars at 512 and at 64... but I suspect that the impact would be smaller than normal variations in the impact of other sims on the same server.

If anyone has done repeatable tests that show consistent effects I would be surprised, but it's certainly possible.

On the other hand, imperceptible results do add up.

On the gripping hand, I doubt there's enough people who have enough CPU and GPU and network to run at 512 all the time for it to matter.

I max my bandwidth and my cache size. Am I being discourteous to others, Qie? Should I reduce my bandwidth? What to?

As I mentioned above, Lindal, whenever you're in a populous area and notice significant lag, you would be polite to reduce your draw distance.

I'm not convinced that lowering your bandwidth matters much, as long as you're generally staying in the same area. Over a period of time, the total amount of info sent remains the same, and therefore in a laggy popular area, the load should balance out naturally. It shouldn't matter much to everyone else whether you get 10MB in one minute or 5 (and everyone else as well).

On the other hand, if you're zipping around a lot with a high bandwidth limit, you're hogging server download time. Doing this for a short time while shopping isn't a big issue; it would only matter much if you're doing it a lot. And in any case, the server is free to ignore your bandwidth setting and be fairer. It doesn't have that same choice for draw distance.

I wouldn't sweat the download bandwidth much.

BTW, I don't see the bandwidth setting affecting my actual bandwidth much, even when I'm on a very high bandwidth connection -- I mean, extremely high -- at work. SL never gets over a smallish fraction of what I get for a big file download. I don't generally watch that, though, so maybe it's improved lately (yeah, right).