LL Blog: Avatar Rendering Cost

465 here which isn't too bad.

People are making this out like it's a new problem - it's not. Most of us have known that prim heavy hair, bling, scripted attachments and suchlike have been a large factor in lag for a long long time. The only difference now is that we have the tool to prove it.

Remember when 'occlusion culling' came in, meaning you couldn't see the 1000 prim furry avatars from 200 metres in full detail, and all the crap bouncing about about "it will be overturned in a court of law" because it was impeding 'expression'? That died a quick death, and I expect the protests over this will too.

I was feeling smug at a low green 409 so I decided to celebrate with a pint of my favorite scrumpy.Lo and behold I shot up to 496.My wife is always telling me to cut down the booze in RL and now it seems it's bad for me here as well.Give me a break!!!!

Wonder what the rating is on this one?

http://cl1p.net/scuba-dog/

What, running around naked again?

Yeah, mine was 4400ish at first. I discvered my favorite hair was about 3500.

So I went and bought a new one that gave me a total ARC of about 900. I feel so... refreshed!

P2

/me shudders at the thought of updating to the viewer that will allow me to see what everyone is seeing.

/me finds rock - hides.

I'm just not going to worry much about it. I will continue to buy and wear the things that I find to be pleasing. And, if any establishment tells me tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I am just not going to worry about it.

I will continue to buy and wear what I find pleasing. And, if some establishment tells me to leave because my "cost" is too high, I will just add them to my "Never go there again" list.

Let's see... Most of the time I'm in the high 600's...

I'm wearing 60+ prim flexi hair, 200+ prim spiked boots, an 80+ prim shiny spiked/riveted collar, a 6 prim shiny arm claw with MP3 player, 7 prim round curved lens glasses (huge dimpled/hollow spheres), one prim eye, Hello Multitool, my own pusher script, low rise jeans, some sort of tank top, and no panti..... (^_^)

With my hair and glasses, I end up in the four digits -- but I can't see without the glasses, an I dun look good bald.

Hey now that's an idea;

Everyone take off your underwear!

If you love your neighbors then say NO to bras and panties!

In SL, I never wear a bra.

Mari

It won't, since the ARC algorithm makes the assumption that prim geometry renders at no cost. You can be a non-human wearing 2,500 on 10 different attachment points and your ARC will be 101. It's only when you set specific prim properties or prim face properties that the cost skyrockets, but that applies to human avies the same way it does to non-human avies.

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Some non-sensical optimizations:

* you created an attachment that uses 7 256x256 textures which are applied using default texture mapping and texture repeat set at 1.0. You can lower its "cost" by 30 by consolidating the 5 textures into one 1024x1024 and adjusting the offset and repeats. Instead of 7 256x256 textures, you now have the equivalent of 16 256x256 textures, yet it's "cheaper". Forget about texturing effeciently, it's "cheaper" not to.

* if you need to use one 2m x 2m x 1m (cost = 5) prim that doesn't have any cost otherwise (none of the listed prim/face properties) it'll be "cheaper" to create a block of 32 0.5x0.5x0.5 prims since their cost will be 0

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Practically, try to remove as many alpha faces as you can if something looks like it's rather costly.

The prim skirt I picked out to wear today had an opaque texture on the outside but full alpha texture on the other 5 faces. Applying the outside texture to all faces reduced its cost from 404 to 106 and it's still the exact same skirt.

I've seen plenty of events advertised that ask (or demand) the attendees to not wear attachments. I have no doubt that with this metric available there will be an increase in that sort of thing. And I have no doubt that people with unusually high scores (and maybe even scores somewhere in the middle) will get some negative comments--similar to the comments that blingtards and people with 5 face lights receive.

However, all this new feature does is make this information available, it does not set policy based upon it. We the users are the ones that now have the ability to make informed decisions based upon the metric, and if this information is used to exclude people, it will be because a user has chosen to do so.

In the blog comments, many people suggested that LL was using this to blame us for the performance problems in the viewer. I saw nothing of the sort. What I saw was that LL was simply saying that what you wear has an impact on performance and now you have the ability to be aware of what that level of impact is.

It doesn't matter how fast your CPU and video card are, and it doesn't matter how efficient the viewer is, the number of polygons and the various features (flexi, particles, alpha for example) will affect frame rate.

I also saw comments suggesting that rather than getting faster servers they are making us get faster computers. True, faster servers would reduce some types of lag, however, the vast majority of the kind of lag addressed here is caused not by slow servers or an inefficient viewer, but rather by the demands placed on the video card by user created content. The ability to create our own content comes with the cost that what we create affects performance. All this new feature does is give us a useful benchmark for understanding how much of an effect our content has. What we do with that information is up to us.

Based upon the description of the tool, I think it has several shortcomings. Two of the biggest is that it treats all prims as equal. In truth, the number of polygons varies widely between prim types and things like twist and shear. Also, the size of textures has a big influence as well. Still, it is a good tool for getting at least an idea of the impact.

LL is blamed for most lag and performance problems (well, by some people everything, actually). And some problems are their fault. However, I suspect they are very aware of what they are responsible for. And they are also aware of what is beyond their control. Much...most of the performance problems (at least at the graphics rendering level) are caused by the users and content creators. It would be nice if more people were aware of that impact. It would be nice if more people would at least have the honesty to acknowledge their own responsibility instead of blaming the problems they cause on someone else.

I propose a new term for the people that constantly blame everything on LL and refuse to accept any responsibility and for the ones that gripe whenever LL fixes a bug that they are wasting their time because it isn't a bug that is important to them, and for the willfully ignorant that complain how the web developers aren't fixing viewer 3D issues or that the graphics experts aren't fixing the database problems. Blogtards.

"Avatar rendering cost" is its friendly outside name, inside the code it's called "shame" which is hardly neutral .

Just wait another 9 years... (=_=)y

I think it's a great diagnostic tool also. Nice to have a way to see what's really going on.
For myself taking off my long flowing locks dropped me over 3000 points down to the 250 range. Guess I'll be out hair shopping this weekend!

My avatar's cost is 1646, but I think that's okay for an avatar that by necessity for the look/features I have needs to be full-prim. Strangely the heaviest sections for my avatar is the chest which is about 400 on its own, it has less prims than the hips (which has invisible ones) but the hips are only 200. So I'm guessing the weighting really doesn't like flexi-prims, which don't seem a big deal on my av, because LOD reduces their detail really quickly (on the chest that is).

Here's a pic:

Me either, unless i'm not wearing any other top.

Seriously, although I'm in mourning about my hair, i think this is a good tool. I complain about lag at some venues, and, of course, i knew my hair was causing some of it. Now it's quantifiable. So I'll choose to wear different hair to crowded venues, and save my high cost hair for the times I'm in less crowded areas.

Well having downloaded the RC and played with the numbers and outfits last night, I can honestly say that I love this feature. It doesn't mean that I'll always try to stay one step away from Ruth; I was a 1253 last night which was about the middle of the pack, which is fine with me. I do like knowing the "cost" of the parts that I wear. It's also going to change the way I do some of my flexi stuff.

Kudos to LL for a cool feature.

Oh, and FWIW, it's not discrimination to tell people to take off costly items on your land. Everything that we wear in SL is by choice; it can therefore be removed by choice. FFS, doesn't anyone remember the Police concerts, where you had to wear a blond wig just to get in the door? Same thing, people. Discrimination is action against someone based on something he or she can't change, like skin color, sex, age, etc.

/Chipley Chippewa has no clothes
/Chipley Chippewa needs no clothes

I never wear panties and no bra unless it's my top. If somone comments on it, I tell them to stop zooming.

My normal Avatar Rendering Cost runs about 270. Effective now, I'm monetizing my low impact by selling ARC Offsets. Since the average AV seems to run in the 1200s, I'm offering 1000 ARC points of offsets for only 100L$ per day. Contact me in world to make arrangements. If you really make it worth my while, I may be willing to take off my prim shoes and pocketwatch.

Show you care about the SL environment--invest in ARC offsets today!

GENIOUS!!!! \(^_^)/

My favorite way to respond is "Thank you... I like you too. (^_^)y"

(=_=)

Seriously, I have a technical question about this.

Wearing underwear under clothes shouldn't affect avatar rendering cost, should it?

It's my understanding that the skin and clothing textures are "baked" into three textures which are actually used to display on the avatar body. Thus, extra layers of clothes should not make a difference, since all the layers are baked into one before rendering.

Is this an accurate understanding?