Concerned about Windlight

If Windlights max setting was targetting a GeForce 6800, something would be fairly wrong there... Surely by definition, Max should be for (say) an 8800 and up.

Thanks Qie!

WindLight may help to improve SL's performance in the long term.

I'll explain!:

If we all had super fast computers but still the old crappy skies, water and terrain then we would all tend to use more prims to make our areas look cool. But now that we have WindLight there may be a tendency to reduce the content on our land and enjoy the natural scenery of SL more.

A reduced amount of content in our sims means less strain on the asset servers and less lag overall.

Every WindLight cloud has a silver lining.

PLEASE NOTE: A Pre-rendered environment like WoW is COMPLETELY and TOTALLY different to what SL needs to do.

In WoW most of the work is done for your computer, buildings or sections of buildings are pre-rendered with textures baked on, maybe some computation required for color variance. Plants and Trees and cridders are all done in Blizzards shop so your computer has to do the least possible work.

In SL Everything, or damn near everything is created by the residents in infinate variance, practically every plant, tree, building and artical of clothing is created by residents, nothing can be prerendered in the box, every collection of prims has to be rendered, have textures baked on, have computations for lighting... Everything.

Is SL more computer reliant then a game? Hell yes! But that is the price we pay for our freedom to create. Windlight is actually easier to run on most systems than the older graphics engine.

Lag is silver?

The 1.19.1 RC series of viewers was my first taste of windlight and right up front it stank. I was seriously concerned that if this was the future of SL, then it'd be a future I wasn't in.

"Just turn off windlight" is not an option. To me, "turn off windlight" implies that you will settle for stuff looking like it does in the current production viewer. That's not possible with the new "windlight" RC viewers. Yes you can turn off the funky sliders and shaders but that's not the pre-windlight rendering. My single biggest complaint there is water. In 'windlight' but with the shaders and sliders off, water becomes a faint blue fog. It looks like absolute $#!+ and when you spend 95% of your time on a tropical island, that is not acceptable - you see the faint blue fog $#!+ every where you look.

So, my options were SL with 2 FPS, SL without water, quit SL, or simply not give up till the damn thing was fixed.

Your Mileage May Vary, but I found a KB article about the new 'custom' graphics controls in the RC viewer and read all the stuff it had to say, then just started messing around. I found two things that have made me go from worried about having to quit SL, to All's Well. Not saying this will work for everyone, but it did for me.

My system is a 6 month old 20" iMac (aluminum, 2.4GHz Core2Duo, 2GB Ram, 256MB graphics ram, ATI HD2600, OS X 10.4.11). The only 'special' thing I have going on is I run it with dual displays.

1st improvment (big): I found the hardware RAM setting. It was defaulted to 256MB which is the memory of my card. Except I have dual monitors, so each only gets 128MB. I switched this from 256MB to 128MB and POW my performance was back, 90% or 95% of where it had been. (Instead of 10%.) FPS back into the happy usable speeds.

2nd improvement (small): I played with the sliders till I got them to a point where things look nice - in most cases nicer than the normal production viewer. I don't have everything maxed out on Ultra, most things are in the middle actually. But I have my draw distance maxed out to 512m because when I'm at home on the islands, I like to see what's around me.

3rd improvement (kinda big): When they went from RC2 to RC3 my performance pooped again. I think this is when they reset all the graphics settings too, so I had to start from scratch - all I could remember was the hardware memory thing. This time I set the hardware memory just below 128MB and that seems to have made things slightly faster. I also disabled VBO and that helped speed things slightly too.

Now I'm happy, things run as fast as they did before windlight, and are prettier too.

I guess the point of all my rambling is, before you give up, take the 10, 20, 30 minutes, whatever it takes, and mess with everything till you find something that works for you.

-Atashi

Only on Nvidia cards

I've noticed framerate improvements on both my new computer and my 4 year old one. All it takes is about a minute of tweaking settings. On my new computer I can max out most of the settings and still get great framerates.

Maybe the problem is a specific hardware configuration- if so, add it to a JIRA entry.

The technical aspect isn't the point, it's not remotely the point and it never will be the point. If people are having trouble with the viewer then that means the economy takes a hit.

well thats for sure

If people enjoy playing less they wont buy as much.

Cheers for the tips, I don't mind having the views I have now and missing out on the funkier features but when I have to turn my settings down so grass looks like a blur instead of what I have now, that's when I think it's a pile of rubbish.

No game targets average hardware to get the best looks. The fact is you can turn down the features, as in any game, to increase performance at the expense of eye candy. If you want to run at "full detail" then it will take a strong machine. This is a given in the gaming industry. Now we know this is not only a game, but when it comes to the graphics side it still needs to go after current technology to look the best.

Not necessarily. Some people may leave SL because of WindLight while some people may join because of it. and the ones joining with fast computers will probably have more money to spend.

QFT. This is why I've been doin stuff in the JIRA an attending those Windlight team office hours.

I have a decent iMac, and it runs windlight beautifully. It's a little slower on my older Mac laptop, but it seems to handle it okay.

Mari

Out of curiosity Kathy, what are your system components and specs?

Turning off The Windlights doesn't give the same rendering as the Pre Windlight Viewer for me, the skies and water are awful, not worth the logging on for. The graphics I have now are fine for me, I'll use the Viewer I have for as long as I can, maybe Nicholaz will get back into it and come up with something. If not, no big deal. I'm not against SL moving forward, it is a business after all. It'll be fine withot me.

That's what I'm seeing and as both viewers happily work I'm hoping I'll be able to use the older viewer for a bit longer yet.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (1891 MHz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600 GT/PCI/SSE2
2 80gb SATA Disk drives
1 SATA High speed DVD RW


FYI: I purchased the hardware components and assembled it myself. Roughly $1200 USD including the XP license.

No preinstalled MS bloatware or preinstalled vendor ad/spyware/whatever ware stealing cpu cycles before I even get started.

The Windlight viewer never worked for me. Always crashes after 20 secs. The 'normal' viewer works but only if I speed up my fans to 3000 rpm. When Windlight becomes the main viewer, I can't work anymore

I am working on an iMac Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 mags ram, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT. Not the best but should be okay.

Now, to be able to do some work in SL I am forced to buy a PC I think it will be the Dell XPS 720 H2c, maxed out. Emagine falling back to a PC just for SL.... Shame!

Cheers Guys,

Amiryu Hosoi,

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* Never Argue With An idiot. They'll Lower You To Their Level And Then Beat You With Experience!

My machine is 1.5 years old, cost $1,000 (monitor separate) and runs Windlight beautifully with all the settings - and I mean ALL - cranked.

AMD Athlon 64
2 gig DDR2 Memory
EVGA NVida 7600GT graphics card 256 memory
485w power supply
XP Pro SP2
*bunch of other stuff not relevant*

This is not a "high end" computer.

Thanx Atashi,

I also have an iMac. I went back to the KB which I hadn't done in a while. I'd been having issues lately and they coincided with the last two RC updates, so of course I thought they were the cause. Your 'rambling' as you put it, inspired me to mess with stuff a bit. Most importantly, I deleted my cache folder. I know, I know, should of done that first thing when the weirdness started.

Aah, everything is back to normal, (except for painfully slow log offs). I'm so very happy

I totally agree with that, but that isn't what I was saying. Code paths are what programmers add to support older hardware. It has nothing to do with what the max settings are targetted for. Right around the first mandatory voice release (1.18.2-1), LL added a code path to support older ATI Radeon Mobility laptop chips (was like 9100 thru 95xx I think)... people cheered. LL blogged about it, and my old laptop with its built in Radeon 9200 could finally (suprise, suprise) run SL without graphics problems or crashing.
The issue lots of us have with the newer viewers isn't that we don't have enough horsepower to run them. IMO They run like shit because the viewers are SO new that LL hasn't yet optimized the routine for our older cards so they handle the new rendering properly... so the cards struggle with it and brainfart often. It's an issue if they do a mandatory update before they fix that.

The comparision is WoW is it is the biggest online community around, one of the reasons for this is nearly anything with a modem can run it, and it's resolution isn't that good really but the way they what they have is brilliant.
If we want to be global and up there in the big game for attracting and retaining users, we need to make changes because what we have doesn't cut it. Heck why bother having 3D graphics if you can't move a car 200m without it crashing uncontrollably off world.
WoW has real customer service and very thorough testing of new content and upgrades.
Yes it already has all the textures on your hard drive, my question is how many red brick wall textures in the asset server is enough?
We need to trim back the repeatative downloading of content to a reasonable level, to get things to flow. Then we will get users who aren't on unlimited download plans.

What Chosen Few said.

Besides that, my machine was built during Spring 2005. AMD Athlon64 3800+ (single core), 2GB RAM and an ATI Radeon X800XL graphics card with 256MB RAM.

I always used Windlight when it was "First Look" and now I've been using the RC clients since Windlight was merged in there.

I am pretty happy with SL.

Or more of their parents money to spend anyhow.

A lot of adults aren't "gamers" and don't see the reason to replace computers that work for everything else they need them for at the rate that "gaming technology" seems to demand.