new 1.9.1.16 rendering observations

* The relative speed improvement with Occlusion Culling enabled seems rather more pronounced than with 1.9.1.14. This is almost certainly a good thing.

* I don't get any bumpiness without Vertex Shaders enabled. I sad.

* Enabling Vertex Shaders and then disabling them again (other options the same) gives VS-disabled-mode a ~20% speed hit that it doesn't recover from until a SL restart. (Maybe some extraneous GL state is being left enabled or something?)

* The interaction between all the new shader detail options is complicated to understand. The different options do make a speed difference, but nothing particularly radical here, and nothing really makes the shader performance very close to competitive with non-shader on the FX5200.

* It can take a silly three preference 'apply's to turn 'all local lights+shadows' on! 1) enable VS, 2) detail to >=medium, 3) finally the all+shadows option is ungreyed and can be clicked.

* When running with all+shadows, tiles of quite good-looking shadows seem to rez-in in random places but then rez-out again pretty soon.

OpenGL renderer string: GeForce FX 5200/AGP/3DNOW!
OpenGL version string: 2.0.2 NVIDIA 87.56
384MB RAM.

Damn, and my FX5600 won't let me do shaders at all. Well, I can turn them on, but the display is corrupted (everything is red and black except for flexiprims and avatars) and changing any settings turns them off again.

Thanks for the comments and observations.

I have an nVidia FX5500 and I would agree with your comments. I think the Vertex shaders look great bu the resulting framerate is too low in most areas. Overall I am happy with the performance in preview - especially the most recent version. At least now I can use my mediocre hardware to get SOME bells-and-whistles like Lighting.

And the Culling does seem to be working now - actually improving framerate instead of lowering it.


(2 Ghz AMD processor, 1 GIG ram)

I have an FX5200, too, and I can't properly use shaders. Everything turns red and black, and all the rendering detail options are grayed out for me. Well, avatar detail wasn't at first, but then I tried to set it to high, and now it's gone, too.

With vertex shaders on, I noticed that the grey loading texture is no more. It seems that anything without a texture loaded is either completley black, or is a mirror of what the viewer itself is rendering. It's really weird. For example, when flying around, I see bushes that don't have the texture loaded, but they arent big ol grey rectangles, nope.. Instead they are copies of what the entire sl window is rendering. Its funky and probably not very healthy for framerates. Sometimes the temporary rezzing texture is just distorted garbage.

Then theres octee. Yes, it seems more aggressive than it was in previous versions, but perhaps too much so. I'm seeing large chunks of geometry vanishing in plain view, such as portions of the floor and ceiling in the room I'm walking in.

Then theres rendercolor on things attached to the hud. It doesn't work with vertex shaders on. My previously black and grey menu is now blindingly white!

Also, I can't set Avatar Render Detail to Low. It instantly crashes..? Can anyone else?

Then theres the most annoying render bug of them all. My av constantly flickers completley invisible, at a fairly rapid rate, when I move around. Sometimes just the attachments vanish, sometimes everything goes poof. It is really annoying, and it seems flexi objects flicker in the exact same way. On occasion my av, or attachments, vanish for rather long time, until I pan the camera around. Attachmentless furry = Not pretty. ;p

Radeon 9800pro 128mb. Latest Omegadrivers release(based off catalyst 6.3). Forced AGP(these bugs happen regardless of that setting, and I get better framerates with agp)

And damnit, I'm still naked! LL broke my pants!

That's exactly what I get.

I admit I have a shader bug with the FX5200 but I was keeping quiet about it 'cos it seems mild and work-around-able compared to some of the problems people on mightier hardware are seeing, and academic considering how unusable the FX5200 SL shader performance is anyway.

Basically most stuff is pitch black until I launch about four local-lights from my light orb gun. Then suddenly the whole scene lights up and stays good (even if the local-lights derez and I wander/teleport around) until I disable VS again. I wonder if that work-around will help other people...