Generally lower fps and slow textures

I don't really see where the 'to improve the Second Life experience' bit is coming into the new version.

I'm seeing reduced fps (compared to the Main grid version of the sim) in any sim with a reasonable number of objects/textures, indeed some textures just don't load - ever! The only way you realise this is when you walk into an apparently invisible object.

Oh sure, you can get mad fps in an empty sim, or when your FOV is mainly void - but most of us on the main grid inhabit areas well populated with objects/textures.

IMO this is still not an upgrade - I see no improvement, the reverse in fact!

With the latest release, my experience has been just the opposite... I have a fairly older system, and walking around in any of the main sims in the preview grid that are on the main grid, usually grinds me down to about 12-13 fps. With draw distance turned down to 64, details turned low, the works. On the preview grid, I'm getting up to 20fps now depending on the location in those sims. The occlusion culling, as evidenced by turning on octree rendering, is VERY aggressive now, and is culling an absolute ton of stuff that's not needed. This is only on my computer, however, and is only my experience.

Athlon 2400+
Radeon 9600 128MB
1.5 GB DDR 2700

edit: I should note, I do usually have shiny and ripple water ON, and I do have 'local lights' on in the preview. As well as vertex shaders ON.

Whats your computer setup? because it sounds to me like you have an aging video card that can't handel the new features.

Doc seems to have all sorts of graphics problems despite having the same GPU as me: a GeForce 6600GT (tho I have a BFG 128MB vs his XFX 256MB). However, he tends to use beta/test/unofficial video drivers then wonders why his performance is so crappy...

Doc, have you been sure to verify that all your prefs are the same? Whenever I move from Main to Preview, preview disables AGP, doubles my draw distance, etc. I have to go back and 'fix' all my prefs.

I have the same Graphics card and cant activate bump mapping and wavy clothing in preview, plus ripple water.I have downoloaded the lateset release of forceware from Nvidia (not beta,test, or unofficial) and still have the same problems. so its not only Doc here.

Try ForceWare 84.21 (not sure if it's still the current version but it's the one I use and I don't have any problems with it). The only other thing I can suggest is trying older drivers until it works. Seems like that particular video card isn't that good...

84.21 is the latest one on nVidia's site Eep. And actually if you look at his post here you'll see Doc's using an nVidia 7900 GTX 512MB, not a 6600GT.

A note about drivers, there ARE variations in each graphics card from manufacturer to manufacturer. The "latest" driver on nVidia's homepage may not work as good as the previous driver or one of the newer beta/leaked drivers with your card. This is where trial and error come into play, giving different versions a try. Also 3rd party drivers may also work better for your card. So far after testing about 5 different versions (OEM, NGO, and XTreme-G) I've found the XG 84.56v3 drivers works best for me and is bug free. All because they're beta or leaked doesn't necissarally mean they'll be full of bugs and glitches that prevent you from playing the simplest game.

Demitrious Doctorow, I'm on a XFX 6600GT 128. Give the XG 84.56v3 drivers a try at tweaksrus.com.

OK, so it's YOU with the 6600 (GT?) then..."Ron", "Doc"--eh.

Right, but then you can't bitch and moan about SL not working well with them...

That was with the OEM 87.25 drivers, I did a little checking and they were older then the 84.56 drivers so I downgraded back to 84.56. And 84.56 is an OFFICAL beta, meaning they warrent the possiblity of being a mainstream release and can be found on nVidia's alternate website.

OK, Ron, do you have a problem with standard drivers or something? What part of NON-BETA, NORMAL, RELEASED don't you understand? Something is beta for a reason and usually has SOME kind of compatibility issue. Hell, even the RELEASED (non-beta) drivers have issues, but they usually have LESS issues than beta versions. DO NOT USE BETA/UNOFFOCIAL DRIVERS AND THEN BITCH AND MOAN WHEN AN APP DOESN'T WORK RIGHT WITH THEM!

Yeah, right.

AMD 64 4000+ San Diego
nVidia 7900 GTX 512
2Mb fast low latency RAM

AND all the latest drivers

I just came back from Grignano, walking about at 9-12 fps! The only way I can even approach 20fps is by reducing draw to 128m - on the main grid it's 200 with no drop draw and 20+fps everyehere. So, 1.10 is NOT a step forward at all.

Go to a sandbox and it's 60fps+, but the current setup CAN'T handle a sim with lots of objects and textures (no AVs around either!) to save it's life. And if it doesn't work with my hardware then we are looking at 1.7 all over again - because that's exactly how 1.7 worked.
People with low spec machines were made up with it, and people who had high spec machines were crippled.

Frankly I think OC is the root of all this. If you have fps issues in certain areas on the main grid you can always set a 'drop draw' and a relatively high draw distance and get the best performance wherever you are.

With OC the ONLY advantage seems to be when you are inside a building - and you don't generally need high fps inside a building. Outside buildings your fps is negatively impacted - JUST where you DO need all the fps you can get!

So, let's replace a proven system which WORKS with a new SHINY™ system that DOESN'T...

I'm really fed up with LL doing this sort of thing. So fed up in fact that I'm getting out. Currently all my land is up for sale and I'm looking for a buyer for ONE.

You have an attention problem Eep?

I have stated frequently that I DO NOT USE BETA OR THIRD PARTY GRAPHICS DRIVERS!

Sheesh - get a grip please...

Yup, it's a bummer, but it has to be done.

I must say I find that having AGP acelleration turned OFF by default, but selectable, on a non-AGP motherboard (DFI LanParty nF4 SLI DR Expert) really, really stupid.

Especially when selecting it is worth a 25% boost in fps!

On a PCIe graphics card? *sigh* Go figure...

Odd...on my Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz), BFG GeForce 6600GT 128MB (ForceWare 84.21), 2GB PC4200 (533GHz) DDR2 RAM system my framerate is fine (at 64m draw distance with full graphics options anyway). I was walking about in the cyberpunk-esque sim next to Morris in the preview grid the other day testing the more aggressive occlusion culling (which works MUCH better than before).

Check your hard drive fragmentation since that can really bring SL to a halt as it caches everything out to the draw distance (and, obviously, a higher distance will cause more at-once caching). Before SL 1.7 I used to have it draw distance at 128m but ever since then it's been at 64m and I don't see any difference with 1.9.1+. If anything, I should be able to increase draw distance since occlusion culling will help with framerate (well, one aspect of it) but I still don't like how SL's caching works and freezes SL so I'll probably just stick to 64m still.

Agreed, I've been noticing slightly better performance from OC. However, it's still a bit dodgy in this release (if you check an occlussion culling box, you can see objects being culled and not culled rapidly, resulting in flickering and not too great FPS). Once it's stabilised it will be awesome again. The default settings also seem to be fairly clever, I get highest details for most things and the draw distance is reasonable.

That logic is flawed and you know it. Every time someone complains about problems with their ATI card and they're using Catalyst (the Offical ATI drivers) they're told to use Omega instead even by LL.

And beta nVidia drivers ARE offical and supported otherwise they wouldn't be released on nzone.com, nvidia.com's sister site geared 100% twoards gaming. And no, I don't have anything against what you call "official" I just find I get better performance and stability out of beta/3rd party drivers. Also keep in mind many video card manufacturers support and offer beta/release canidate drivers on their websites as well.

The 87.25 was a leaked alpha and thats why it gave me problems so I removed it. Now maybe I should ask you what you have against 3rd party/beta drivers, though I'll probly end up getting the same answer I gave so its pointless to really ask since experiences with drivers vary.

EDIT: Also keep in mind that 1.10 is also an open beta wich is to test the dynamic environment of user end system configurations wich includes both hardware and software. If everyone was using the same thing there wouldn't be a need for open betas like this. So yes, I have a right to complain when something isn't working right because its in the better interest for the developers and users alike to know when something isn't working properly so it can be diagnosed and treated appropriately. If there is a problem with a certain version driver its good to know so the developers can find a fix and if a fix cannot be found to make a list of drivers that are incompatable and have a list of working drivers to recomend.

This is absolutely trivial to test; no need to guess. Toggle OC with ctrl-shift-O or the debug menu and I'm sure LL (and us) would be interested to hear whether it's really OC killing your performance in high-prim places.

Correct!

In fact it's worrying that changes to settings, including disabling OC while outside, doesn't seem to make a lot of difference. For instance, Sun and moon only, shiny and bump off have very little effect.
Even slashing draw to 128 (as the auto settings does) makes surprisingly little difference (4-5 fps).
OC works inside a building, easily tested by enable/disable, and it produces a marked increase in fps when enabled - though I can't see any real point in it... Outside I can't detect it doing very much, on or off.

One option that no longer exists, because of OC I believe, is 'disable far clip' - it's always enabled when I return to the main grid though. Disabling it has a very noticable effect on my fps, even with a 200 draw and 0 Drop Draw.

My suspicion is that Preview is permanantly stuck in 'Disable Far Clip' whether OC is on or off - the result is that OUTSIDE a building my client is failing to clip anything, pretty much regardless of draw distance...

In fact I was getting pretty good performance with ALL the goodies on in the versions of Preview before most of the fancy lighting and vertex shading was disabled. My problems started with the semi-crippled version... go figure.

Anyway, for me it's all a bit irrelevant now.

The best way to test occlusion culling is to turn on the octree view from debug > rendering > info displays > octree

Any red cubes you see are areas that are being occluded, not only does non alpha buildings or objects occlude but so does terrain, so if you stand behind a hill the other side will be occluded

If any of you are finding that your having strange driver issues you might want to try Driver Cleaner app. It will clear out all old driver files and settings and the stuff that gets left behind when you install new drivers overtop of old ones

Im using a 6800 and I have about the same framerate in both versions.

Good point about driver cleaner. However this was a brand new freshly built machine a few days before the 'crippled' version of preview appeared. It's had one graphics driver on it - the latest straight from nVidia's site.

I also tried Milo's 'Octree' thingie. What a laugh. If I could be bothered I'd post a snapshot, but it's just too much trouble in these forums.
Suffice it to say Grignano is RED!
One wall and a couple of trees normal, and everything else bright red. What does it mean?
You'd think it means my client is drawing practically nothing and thus running at hundreds of fps - rather than the reverse.

There's a clue in the logfile though. The client is a little unhappy - thus:

2006-05-23T10:19:46Z WARNING: OCTREE IS HUGE!!! 4096
2006-05-23T10:19:53Z WARNING: OCTREE IS HUGE!!! 8192
2006-05-23T10:20:03Z WARNING: OCTREE IS HUGE!!! 16384
2006-05-23T10:20:16Z WARNING: OCTREE IS HUGE!!! 32768
2006-05-23T10:20:35Z WARNING: OCTREE IS HUGE!!! 65536

As I said - OC is the problem, not the cure... And a high draw and sensible drop draw figure WORK and don't produce these problems.

Being right - a crap job, but someone has to do it.

Red means things are culled in that node. I just pumped my draw distance to 512m which, before SL 1.9.1 (or at least when occlusion culling got aggressive in SL 1.10) would grind SL to a halt for minutes as it tried to render everything. Now I can get 5-10fps in Morris looking around which is pretty damn good--and that's with FULL graphics detail, 1024x768 windowed mode, anistropic filtering, AGP graphics on, and 128MB vid RAM on a BFG GeForce 6600 GT, Pentium D 820, 2GB RAM system. Kick...freakin'...ass. If your system can't at least get this, something is seriously wrong with it considering you have a better system than me...

Granted, no other avs were around so who knows what my framerate will be with some bling-/primslut, but at least with just objects and terrain SL allows MUCH better framerates with even FULL draw distance and MAX graphics options!

Oh and my log file doesn't have ANY "WARNING: OCTREE IS HUGE!!!" lines (but it DOES have lots of "WARNING: LLAudioChannelFMOD::XXXXXXXXXXX error: An invalid parameter was passed to this function" errors (where "XXXXXXXXXX" is "updateBuffer", "update3DPosition", or "cleanup". Most of the other WARNINGs are for channels, source IDs, "LLWorld::addRegion for a simulator that already exists!", "Out of order packet in transfer <key>", etc.

Haven't tried 512 draw in Morris Eep - just tried my normal main grid draw, 200. I found Morris very variable, depending on the junk laying about, and my FOV, anything from 12-35 fps.

I can get over 70fps in one of the sandboxes, over 100 looking towards void - but what does THAT prove?

That's not the point though is it? I've been testing in Grignano, which is representative of a prim/texture rich sim. It's flat, so you don't get fps spikes from looking over the top of things.

Results there are poor for me. As soon as I move near an edge where there are less objects/textures things improve, but in central Grignano things are awful - comparing it to main grid Grigano. I think any reasonable comparison should be on a sim for sim basis - and a sim that's nearly identical on both grids at that, which Morris isn't.

The problem isn't with my system Eep - it's my system, specifically my graphics card I think, faced with Preview graphics systems.
On the main grid I get what I expect with my setup. 25 fps and more most places with all the goodies except Local lighting and Disable far clip and a 200 draw with no drop draw.
Before my latest upgrade I was about 5fps lower and ran a drop draw of 15 for the odd laggy place.

As far as the 7900GTX 512 is concerned Preview doesn't work well - and it's looking very much like my initial suspicion, that OC was responsible, was correct. Something about OC isn't working properly with that card. Which is a shame, as it's one of nVidia's highest spec 'consumer' cards, one which in time will be adopted by an increasing number of people, much like the 6800 series was.

You'll note thus far no other 7900GTX 512 user has come forward claiming good results? In fact about the only users claiming good results are 6600 users... Is SL going to turn into a product that not only requires a particular make of graphics card to work properly (nVidia) but a specific model (the 6600)?

That would be a particularly dangerous road for LL to go down in my opinion.