Somewhat dissapointed with my new video card, local lighting

I just replaced my nearly 3 year old ti4200 with a Leadtek 6600 gt. Otherwise my computer is the same - AMD 2600+ with a gig of ram and a 1500 down/900 up internet connection. Water is much prettier with the ripple effect.

If I turn on local lighting though it is still death to my connection. Tonight I seem to get 10 fps most places with local lighting off which seems a little slow. But if I turn on local lighting I'm getting about 1 fps which won't do. Sigh.

Local lighting, from what I know is 100% software, your CPU is doing all the work to do it, the video is not doing much

We got shading for water now, so H/W (from the video card) lighting should not be too far away

I'm really hoping that lighting gets more GPU-bound. Arghhh as it is, Local Lighting is even more brutally slow in 1.7-1.8 than it was in 1.6 and earlier for me. I'm also disappointed with how it doesn't work properly. I often set out cubes, set them to Light, and they turn bright but don't light up the area around them. Sometimes I have to rerez them, sometimes I need to relog, it's just VERY disappointing and inconsistent.

I had some wacky problem yesterday where I turned on Local Lighting in a place in Chief, and then framerate dropped to a CRAWL. I checked FAST TIMERS in DEBUG (the fancy-schmancy colored bars) and saw that attachments (for some reason) were doing like 1000ms. Ugh, BRUTAL. I turned off Local Lighting and it was much faster. There were a fair number of light sources in the area, but I remember flying around malls in 1.7 and it wasn't that bad.

I used to use Local Lighting a lot for pretty pictures. Not really any more, because of how utterly slow and really useless it has become.

Light and shadow makes such a difference, and gosh, I hope that since you're benefited by ripple water on your new 6600GT, Essence, that the same will be said for lighting not too far from now, as Michael mentions.

I have the identicle system AMD 2600+, 1 gig ram and 6600GT and right now I am doing about 30 fps without LL on but with ripple water. With LL on I drop to about 14 fps. This is in a notoriously laggy sim Furnation Alpha at my dive shack (30,30,23). There is a bazillion things that could be slowing you down but the biggies are old drivers such as motherboard, network, sound etc. My 6600 GT is overclocked but it isn't that big an influence. You should be getting at least 10 fps with LL on stock speeds. When everything is right you should be able to turn up AA and AF filtering up and get a beautiful 20- 30 fps without LL on. If it isin't doing that then there is a bottleneck somewhere. Clean off Second Life and your old drivers and reload them fresh. You can also try the optimized NGO drivers, they may indeed help with performance as well.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1279

Thats pretty much a weird bug i noticed in 1.7 but was also present in 1.6, apparently a new local lit object wont light a scene for the first time until its moved, Its quite crazy but i dont use local light much only during testing as its just too laggy on my cpu 3500.

Im hoping there will be a move to hardware lighting, that could also mean hardware shadows too although when is anyones guess.

HW T&L would be awsome if we could get it. SoftT&L really kinda sucks. Personally I think using ver 1.5 Pixel Shaders instead of 2.0 like we have now for water ripples would have been a better move wich would have ensured greater compatability and performance for those with the current generation of budget cards.

Honestly I don't think it would too be hard to add options like Pixel Shaders [1.0, 1.5, 2.0] and/or T&L[Software, Hardware] in the advanced graphics section. I mean hell, if they can add Pixel Shaders for ripple water within a 2 week period for 1.8pre I'm pretty sure they could add all this in like a month or two for the next big update.

No wonder I thought Local Lighting didn't do anything!

I've been rezzing stuff directly into place. Any movement would have to be undone... I suppose ctrl-z will still work (or will that "undo" the lighting as well).

I've not tried undo i suspect it wont get undone, but you dont have to move it much just a little shift on the drag bars etc, i assume its just telling the sim "hey im local light" etc so it can pass that onto the client.

I did bug report what i thought was abnormal behaviour but im guessing it may get a makeover with the new renderer although thats strictly hypothetical.

For me, it's very much location dependent. In my garden in Jodis I have local lighting on and everything works great. I can't express how nice a night-time garden is when you turn night-time brightness way down and light it with a couple of lampposts and have some fireflies, etc. I really wish I could leave it on all the time, but most of the more developed sims are just too laggy with local lighting on.

I thought that the new prioritization of script time-slices was going to benefit visual things in sims with a lot of scripts, but it doesn't seem to be helping much. And we really need to get objects that are unnecessarily Light material edited to be some other material + fullbright instead. My builds in Jodis only use Light for lights and it really makes a big difference (if you have local lighting on).

Just created a proposal that might be worth looking at:/13/ba/77920/1.html

The video card really doesn't make much of a difference with local lighting, I have a 7800GTX which runs about 3X as fast as a 6600GT and get about 10FPS, and in a crowded room maybe 2 or so FPS. Ever since 1.7 Local Lighting has been a big issue. I also tried overclocking my AMD 64 3500+ to beyond 3800+ speeds (2.45GHZ), never noticed a speed difference either, not sure what they did but its gonna be a while until its fixed.

Thanks for this info. I was considering upgrading my my motherboard/cpu to a dual core 64 bit system mostly for the purpose of increasing the FPS in SL. I have an AMD 2500+ 32 bit with a 6800 GT OC and I get simular frame rate. I don't use ll but I do have "Far Clipping" and Fog disable. (When Furnation was having their tail sale and there were 100 agents there, I still managed to get 4 fps. In a solid room of 10 ppl I get 12-16 fps. (BTW I'm running 1600x1280, running at 800x600 doesn't change my fps.)

Actually Ripply Water was being worked on prior to 1.7 but wasn't ready in time for the release, hence its inclusion in 1.8...

Good job too, otherwise it would have doubtless been blamed for some of 1.7's appalling sloth!

I have a duel core 4400+ and I was at the tail sale too and I was doing about 12 fps which was way faster than the sim was running. I was fully able to move and fly while most others were stuck in place. The duel core won't help much for SL but the other benefits are well worth it. I have had 5 instances of SL open at the same time on the same computer (each at about 5 fps but it worked). I can run two instances with no obvious slowdowns. I can also run SL and Photoshop and it has no effect on SL where my single core 2600+ will take a severe framerate penalty. The duel core is definitly the way to go if you want to do more with your computer, a single core FX-55 is there if blazing framerate is your ulimate goal(although I wouldn't expect SL to benefit much more over my 4400+).

What ever happened to the rise-and-fall wave action I used to see with a GeForce4 Ti4600? It appears to be totally unavailable any more with any Radeon / GeForce card in my large collection.

Sailing alone at night with the waves used to be my favorite Second Life activity. The placid ripply effect is no substitute, a step backwards IMHO.

The latest update changed the ripples to make them more efficient, but it also makes them less dramatic. Runitai says it's going to go back to the old scheme.