Turn off prim heavy avatars.

Well not turn them off, but we should be able to force those 500 prim wearing avatars that do not care who they lag, to appear as default AVs on our own clients should we choose. I think this is a great idea since avatars tend to be a big killer of frame rate. What do others think about this?

This will be much less of a problem once the WindLight viewer becomes mainstream. If you keep the avatar rendering slider down, anyone more than a few meters away will be rendered as Super Mario.

Brilliant idea - no - genius! Perhaps they could appear as an "imposter" 2D cartoon avatar?

yeah i know about the imposter setting on windlight which at best only gives me a 3fps boost and looks terrible. I usually have to turn it off it looks so bad especially with the jerky movements.

The amount of prims doesn't really mean anything when it comes to client-side lag.

Sculpties are heralded as prim-savers but in most cases they're actually big polygon wasters, and add that each sculpty is likely to have its own unique baked texure taking up a disproportionate amount of texture memory compared to the 'regular' version of the attachment.

Even with regular prims a box is far less "laggy" than a twisted torus, etc.

If you want to cap, it needs to be done based on the total poly count, the amount of textures and the amount of generated object updates by scripts (as well as amount of scripts overall for sim performance).

I have a friend with 250 flexi primmed hair that always cuts my frame rate in half. It was my understanding the more prims your computer must draw the lower the framerate.

Oh, yes, flexi things can load down local graphcs. Ctrl-Alt-F9 (or Client>Rendering>Features>Flexible Objects) can help if you run into someone with killer hair. Flexi prims won't disappear with this, they'll simply stop flexing.

I'd like to be the first to suggest that it could well be other factors hitting your framerate...

Yes I admit to having made a couple of prim-heavy hairdos in my time, but in turn, I have to tint and clone them into their respective colors... and that means rezzing multiple duplicates inworld...

My six and a half year old Nvidia GeForce 2 loses 67% of its framerate (from 12-4fps @ 1280x76 when it's displaying close to 2500 flexis at once (as I often tint to the limits of the island primcount, and there are 3200 prims over at the moment...)

That said, I get the same level of lag when someone walks into my shop wearing three or more pieces of bling...

And thanks for the tip... will try that next time I'm cloning...

If I'm not mistaken, flexi-prims aren't a graphics-card effect, they're calculated by your CPU and the result is passed on to the graphics card, so to your GPU it's just like rendering any other prim. The main killer comes in that segmenting them can result in more polygons, but not actually that many more (since most prims are divided up into smaller polygons for lighting anyway).

As for high-prim avatars, a way of having LOD effect heavier objects more could be nice. So someone with loads of prims will go to LOD level 1 right, while a minimalist avatar will remain at a good detail level.
If you just go switching their prims off then you'll end up with lots of lanky skeleton avs which will look a lot worse than avatar impostors.

Perhaps if impostors had more variable settings in the advanced tab? For example, you could specify greater detail for impostors, but a much slower update speed. Animations will thus be a lot more jerky, but the impostor image will be generated a lot less frequently, resulting in better performance. As it is, in many cases avatar impostors don't improve frame-rate because the cost of re-creating the impostor all the time reaches the same complexity as rendering an avatar normally, where really it should start reducing update speed so you at least know where an avatar is and what they look like, but they don't kill you.

I used to date someone whose hair was a lag event

I literally lost 4 fps when i turned to look at her. We tested it.

Avatar Lag? Never noticed!

Ok.... once.... on an old video card (agp), older CPU (single core), 1 Gig RAM. The person I remember wore lots N lots N Lots of spikes on just about everything.

Anymore? BRING IT ON!!!