Atmospheric Shaders on => PING LEAPS to more than 2 seconds

To see the windlight sky you need to turn "Atmospheric Shaders" on. Either manually by ticking the "custom" box then turning them on specifically, or automatically by selecting either of the two higher quality settings.

When I do this everything grinds to a halt, freezes, crashes etc. If I'm lucky I can turn it off again, and everything goes back to normal. So no pretty sky for me.

I thought it just wouldn't run on my machine, then I noticed something odd.

I happened to watch the PING in the statistics window.

I was amazed to see it leap when I switched the Atmospheric Shaders on. And drop straight back down to normal when I switched them off.

BY A WHOLE 2000mS (=2secs)

With shaders off, ping=200mS approx.
With atm shaders on, ping=2300mS approx.

This kills performance dead of course - can't move, can't do anything. Frame rate about 0.4fps.

Totally explains why I can't use windlight.

Anyone else with Windlight problems, why not have a look at the ping. Is the same thing happening to you ? Please post here if so.

And you might like to add your weight to my Jira bug report VWR-3303, at
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3303

Maybe this huge ping is causing the problem for lots of us. But why should the time it takes to communicate with the server change? Odd, huh ?

I have that EXACT problem...and it is really pissing me off...It didn't do it yesterday AT ALL. So it's obviously a LL issue...Then again, when isn't it...

And another thing is the lag meter... You ever notice that it is NEVER EVER the server that is the problem? I find that VERY hard to believe...

What are your system specs? Turning on more graphics options than your machine can handle will kill your network stats, increasing ping and packet loss. This is because network stuff and rendering all seem to be done in the same thread, meaning if rendering gets too heavy then it kills everything else.

Really ? In the client ? Why on earth do that ?
Surely not in the operating system ?

I still have a fair bit of % CPU left when this happens - why can't my client use it to keep up on communication with SL ?

If this interlinking is true, and is not inevitable, it should surely be changed ?

So for now, I'll let my Jira report stand.

I don't really know why rendering doesn't have it's own dedicated thread. I've just always noticed that if I'm in a high-detail area that my packet-loss would shoot up, never checked my ping so I can't comment, but it's the same area really.

Even if I was in a sim that's performing just fine, if I go into a room with a load more prims or high-detail textures than my client can realistically cope with then I used to get hit with huge packet-loss, was very annoying.

Can you try putting detail down on other areas? For example, minimum object details, avatar detail etc. Basically turn off or turn down anything that you think is a graphical feature, leaving only Atmosphere Shaders (and Basic Shaders since they're required). This is to see if it drops the ping down by much. If it does then SL is simply doing too much work rendering and can't do network operations as quickly. If it does not then it at least isolates it as a bug with Atmosphere Shaders for your system.

AHA

Only happens when I am running in a window (this is on a G4 Mac).
Go to fullscreen and the ping is totally unaffected - I have the pretty skies after all.

All water is jetblack, but hey - you can't have everything, can you ?