Dodgy gamecode..

I'm going to have to back track on some of what I said earlier. I just doubled the turion's cpu speed and found a 33% boost in frame rates, with nothing else changed.

What I saw were low frame rates in SL on a high end AMD system, and low frame rates in SL on an underclocked laptop cpu, and combined with what I saw in boost from video card, assumed it was solely based on video card performance.

Just tested on a 3500+ desktop. Up in the sky (less rendering work) I saw 60 fps at 2.2ghz. Dropped cpu speed to 1ghz, and got 40 fps.

Hmmm... fascinating. Thanx for doing that, Pantheon!

I was just throwing out system specs. I wouldn't want to waste a good 4-way opteron box by running windows on it

In my office, I have two Sun boxes, they're both 4-way opteron 950, 16 gig ram, 10tb disk space (fiber array). I would love to try SL on it for a few minutes Damn Verizon's firewall!

I was just throwing out system specs. I wouldn't want to waste a good 4-way opteron box by running windows on it

In my office, I have two Sun boxes, they're both 4-way opteron 850, 16 gig ram, 10tb disk space (fiber array). I would love to try SL on it for a few minutes Damn Verizon's firewall!

Cpu0 : 19.0% us, 4.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 77.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu1 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 100.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu2 : 18.0% us, 4.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 78.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu3 : 43.0% us, 16.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 37.0% id, 4.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 15966396k total, 15838632k used, 127764k free, 721560k buffers
Swap: 2097144k total, 56380k used, 2040764k free, 12324568k cached

I've been running on a similar system (P4 2.5, 1GB RDRAM, 9700pro, striped IDE RAID) and getting framerates that match. It's even possible to run around with FSAA on with a reasonable framerate.

I'm not doing really REALLY well, but my system is kind of "mid range gamer" - cost me about $1200 or so from Digital Storm, I can hunt down the specs - and the only time SL even thinks about running in the single digits is places like townhalls or the welcome area, and other similarly super-laggy places.

All of my settings are more or less default, save fog (I don't need SL to look like London) and things like shiny and ripple water (which doesn't crash me).

I'm talking about the rate of time it takes to build a 3D object, not the flawed texture caching in SL. In SL you're computer builds everything around you while streaming the textures to you or copying them from your cache. The texturing is slow, but it doesn't really affect your framerate performance. Example:

You have a cube.

Without postprocessing your computer builds every side of the cube whether you see all those sides or not.

With prostprocessing your computer only builds the sides that you're looking at.

Wich one will your computer be able to process faster? Since its one cube you really can't do it by eye, but it can be messured by the rendering software in seconds.

For a visual messurement, lets render a room... FULL of cubes. Wich will load faster? With or without post processing?

This is what I am talking about and this is what really hits your framerate, not texture loading. In the case of our map builder friend here, he is working with pre-postprocessed objects to construct his maps for other games. What he doesn't seem to grasp about what I'm talking about is that unlike SL, he isn't playing AND building his map at the same time. He's constructing it first with premade objects, post processing anything original, and saving the finished map before he can run tests through it or play it. With Second Life we don't have this luxury. We don't have external building tools with premade objects and a postprocessor to reduce prim usuage like his map editors do. If we had a way to import stuff from external 3D rendering programs those 500 prim avatars can be reduced to around 100 or so prims and those 100 - 200 prim houses could get reduced to something like around 10 - 20. This would greatly increase overall system performance and honestly won't hurt LL's revenue because alot of people are intimidated by software like 3D Stuidio Max and Maya3D. I've seen quite a few want some kind of way to import objects from external software like we do with sound files and pics.

I think the Linden Labs programmers are proud of what they've managed to do with this inherently flawed rendering system, and don't want to admit that departing from every existing 3D game standard was the wrong thing to do. Besides, with all the resident-created objects inworld, it's too late to change.

Not at all. There's no reason a method of importing 3D models couldn't be introduced alongside the current one. A mesh prim could be introduced, for example. The problems come when you try to find a good way to stream mesh data.

Agreed.

If everything currently in SL were replaced with meshes - the load on your machine (and the required specs) would drop significantly BUT the bandwidth requirements would climb to the extent that I doubt anyone outside the US would be able to play.

It's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to upgrade and tune your machine, once - than it is to increase your bandwith over remote and international links, paid for every single month.

Also, as Ron mentioned, content is created by residents (and most of us are ameteur modellers at best), not by LL. The meshes in games are created by ppl who know how do so so efficiently. If every resident was given the ability to import meshes of arb complexity - then you really see FPS plummet.

I'm also of the opinion that importing mesh models would be counterproductive, unless there was a submit-and-approve process which would kill most creativity in SL. But I think there could be some ways to optimize geometry, most of which have already been discussed over the years.

For example, buildings and nonmoving objects could be optimized as a last step or as a maintenance process running in the sim. Optimizing would mean taking the primitives as a whole and converting to a mesh, deleting internal faces and intersecting regions. Streaming mesh data will, of course, increase the bandwidth devoted to geometry...but I can't imagine the compressed data would approach the bandwidth required to stream all the textures. One disadvantage is the Level of Detail for curved surfaces, meaning that currently a sphere will increase in mesh detail as the camera gets closer. There would be some decisions to make on mesh complexity vs. adequate detail.

Or, perhaps this process can be offloaded to the local machine. The question now becomes: which is more CPU intensive? Texturing, rendering, and lighting hundreds (thousands!) of prims and unseen faces, or calculating meshes for those same prims and then rendering the simplified mesh? I don't think anyone can answer the question because it depends on programmer skill and allotted time, and you would have to implement the whole system in order to test it.

What makes it wrong? To who is it wrong? To you? To me? I personally love the fact I can build anything I want as easily as just putting together some legos.

Let me tell you something. I used to play THERE. THERE is similar to WOW and other games because most of the objects in the world are premade and stored in you drive. Things are much smoother (and yes... vehicle performance and pets are much cooler), mainly because of this.

They allow for developers to import models created and textured in other 3D shaping programs. BUT, the developers must FIRST have a keen knowledge of 3D Modelling. SECONDLY, they must submit their creations to THERE, where a team reviews the model and performs the post processing and creates the download batches that load in the mornings (THERE isn't a 24 hour service. they go down a few hours at dawn to allow for this kind of content updating, amongst other reasons). This submission-evaluation process can take some time (2 weeks or so). It was also costly - but of course, you've got to pay the team, don't you?

2 Weeks? I don't want to wait two weeks to be able to see my creations come to life inworld. On the other hand - lots of people do. Many like that style and are fond of it. I don't. So I left. Here I am. I was aware at point blank of the performance difference. But it was the creative possibilities that anchored me here.

Sure, we are always yanking on their (LL's) sleeves for them to better the performance of the system, and I can truely say they are working round the clock on improving it. It's not that our standards are slipping - it's more like we've traded off (life is just full of trade offs) performance for creativity and ease of use. That's the market thats clinging to SL.

We are happy with SL the way it is. Not saying we are happy with the bugs, nor do we believe it is a finished product. But we are comfortable with the way it works and the pros and cons it has. We don't need anyone telling us it's BS or how much better it would have been if it would have been built like others are.

So. If anyone understands that this "game" (by the way, it isn't a game) suffers major performance issues and is unworthy of being played, there are then so many more out in market. With lush graphics. Superb handling and performance.

If that is what they need, then there are places they can be satisfied.