First Look Viewer: Improvement for you?

I keep reading mixed reviews in the blog entry and hearing a few disparaging remarks online. There are some who claim to get vast frame rate increases (10 fps up to 25-30 fps) with ultra high speed texture rendering. Then there are others who crash every 2-20 minutes. And somewhere inbetween there's people like me who don't seem to get any speed increase at all.

I'm curious, how is the viewer performing for you, and what kind of rig do you have? Include video card, RAM, OS, and cache size setting. And of course, don't forget to try turning on VBO mode in preferences before claiming it does nothing. ^.~
Perhaps if we all report what rigs we have with working viewers, and those with not working viewers, we'll find a common denominator.

Video Card:        Radeon 9700 Pro AGP
RAM:               512 MB DDR
Operating System:  Win XP
Cache Size:        5000 MB (5 gigs)

Results:
No decernable speed increase.  Texture load times taking upwards
of 10 minutes in some cases.

Here is my take on this issue..............

1.) 2 hours and no fps increase improvments in very high population sims

2.) Missing textures still occuring.

3.) nightmarish rending of avie skins and object ( at times solid black )

4.) Blending of background textures on AVIE skins ( rebaking takes care of this problem ) but its occuring more offen!

5.) Overloading of cashe resulting in stressing system resources resulting computer failure.
( could be a router issue with LLABS ) or ( or just bad graphic coding that dependent on newer codes is putting replacing without support users drivers ).

All the same, share your specs. While I haven't heard many people tell what their cards are, the one instance of an ATI card was unfavourable, and the two instances of an nVidia card were very favourable. I want to see if it was just a coincidence, or if the new rendering engine is biased in some way. Maybe it's a newer video card thing, maybe a certain generation of card isn't working right. We'll only know as more people share.

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ (2486 Mhz)

Memory: 2048 MB

OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600) ( Japanese )

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Graphics Card: GeForce 7900 GTX/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW! (512)

OpenGL Version: 2.0.3

ATI GC are at times very very picky, but then again i heard those that run them are very happy.

ATI cards have recently been the best cards for DirectX. nVidia on the other hand have been tops for OpenGL (what with them aquiring 3dfx) while ATI's OpenGL drivers have been somewhat lacking. Since SL uses OpenGL, it's a thought that crappy OpenGL support for the cards is to blame. Maybe I should be asking for the drivers people are using too, in case they aren't using standard ones....

At any rate, I've been pretty happy with my old Radeon for all the games I play.

well I would saythats a basis anwer, then again I always here that from ATI owners.

Infact geforce has less problems then ati these days. I hearing ATI owner having more problems then before...
Running a 6600gt for a very long time i had no problems. Again its the viewer and not the GC problem. Bad coding always is the isssue with LLABs..................

Nice call but your off

Reminds of when a Linden on live help told me my OGL drivers were out of date and linked me to the SL downloads page.

Where there was a complete lack of OGL drivers.

Seeing vast improvements in frame rates, texture loading, memory usage (perceived) and cache usage.

Caveats regarding UI issues (buy non-functional, control codes sneaking into chat etc), and some issues with particle rendering at distance especially.

On balance I am more than happy with this client, and I am using it in preference to the regular client - as I said elsewhere it makes SL much cheaper ...

Specs:

CPU: AMD Barton 2.8

Memory: 1500 MB DDR 333

OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (very barebones, all unnecessary services, window decorations, 'useful' taskbar programs, etc killed very dead indeed)

Graphics Card Vendor: ATI

Graphics Card: X1600 Pro 512meg AGP

Driver Build : NGO ATI Optimized Driver 8.321 (OpenGL set to quality Texture and Mipmap, application preferred ansio and AA)

Connection : 2 meg cable hard wired to router (Ping too home sim 150-200 each way ish on a good day with the wind across the atlantic)

I run SL with all detail sliders 2 notchs down from max, draw distance is currently at 128 (from 64), all the fancy options are on including ansio and cloth, and VBO is enabled in First Look natch

Hope that erm helps !

System: Pentium D 805, 2GB RAM, NVidia 7600GS with 512MB RAM, XP Pro with SP2. I'm using a 500MB disk cache and a 400Kbps maximum network speed setting. (I have a 768K DSL line, and that setting seems to be about optimum for it.) Graphics sliders are all at the default (middle) position, draw distance is 128m, and the avatar vertex program, VBO, and all the eye candy features are turned on.

The new feature viewer is stable here; it doesn't seem to crash any more often or have any more rez problems than the standard one. The frame rate seems to vary by area; some places see a 50% improvement, others none at all. I haven't noticed any areas that seem worse with the new viewer.

As for the ATI situation, my understanding is that new ATI cards (certainly the X1000 series, and perhaps the original X series as well) have much better OpenGL support than older ones did. It's probably because the FireGL workstation cards (which have to have strong OpenGL support to be useful in that market) and the Radeon cards have had their designs combined now; a FireGL has essentially the same chipset as a Radeon, but different firmware and drivers. (The same is true of the NVidia Quadro and GForce lines, and has been for a long time.)

System : Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB RAM, Nvidia 6600GT.

Overall I'd say things feel "snappier", but it's hard to quantify. It feels like it's easier to move earlier after first TP'ing somewhere, which is a great thing. However there does seem to be some issues with some textures not appearing at all. I'm seeing a lot more "missing texture" than with the usual client.

I particularly noticed this as I was doing a fashion photo shoot. Some of the clothes failed to rez completely, beyond the blurry stage, no matter how long I waited. If I TP'ed to another sim and came back, the blurry texture may have reverted to "missing image". After a while I tried relogging, the viewer crashed on exit (crash dump subbed).

I then tried restarting the normal release viewer, and it won't start. It crashes after logging in and loading, just as I should appear in world (crash dump subbed). This happens whenever I try to use the standard viewer now. I have tried clearing cache, and rebooting. Luckily the First Look viewer still works, although I might have to put my photo shoots on hold for a while!

I use 2 AVs on the same platform - one seems to work a treat, quick start up, fast display of textures. The other every hiccup you can imagine - fuzzy images, very slow to clear.

The situation is not improved with 25,000+ online users (yesterday) - I think that distorts the picture (sorry about the pun) considerably.

But (dare I say it) looks promising.

Diag re the old viewer crashing post First Look - if you havent all ready disable VBO in the First Look client before going back to SL Firster Look

Tangletwigs, thank you so much. I can now login with the standard viewer.

CPU: AMD Sempron 3200+ (1.8 GHz)
RAM: 1 GB PC2-5300
Video: nVidia GeForce 6300 GS 512 MB etc, etc..
Storage: 7200 RPM SATA 120 GB.
Network: Belkin Wireless G PCI card with +5 dbi signal booster antenna.

It ran SL pretty well for a while. Until the last public client release. Now I crash every 45 minutes to a few hours in. Sometimes I crash 2 minutes in too. And sometimes it takes 30 mintues to log in/load.

But, when it does work.. it works well.

However, that is few and far between.

Interesting....

Tested same sim, it shifted server tho but this is packetloss i had below, couple of hours diffrence tho.

old client ;5.4% packetloss ( sim2014.agni.lindenlab.com ) 3 avatars | Online Now: no idea
this client ; 1.8% packetloss ( sim2686.agni.lindenlab.com ) 52 avatars | Online Now: 24,808

512 view distance, 52 avatars , 12.6fps, maxed everything

x2-4200
2gig ram
7900gt 256mb
12/2mbit cable

now lets see how long it take to crash it

Windows XP SP2
P4 960 3.4 Gig
Nvidia 8800

I saw an almost consistant across the board increase of frame rate. It was more pronounced the more crowded areas.

Frame rate increase with no avs but in well primmed sim location from 31 to 57
Frame rate increase in crowded areas (24 avs) from 9.5 to 20

However I also am getting the particle slowdowns. They seem to be related to both distance from emiter and angle of view. Now on my rig 0 particles or 8192 particles made no difference to frame rate. So if this was something that was supposed to help frame rate, in my case I doubt it did much and the effect is less than desireable.

Crashing is somewhat rare, once every couple of days Iguess, same as old client.

Occasionally, not always, peoples name tags are not clickable.

sticky alt key an annoying problem, posted in seperate thread about it.

Farallon

I am in the painful position of being on dial-up speed temporarily, and to feed my addiction I still log into SL. the First look viewer is a thousand times better than the normal viewer, much lower packet loss and actually functions rather than sitting there with a grey screen. Also it crashes much less often.
I know this is an unusual test of it, but I would have to say much, much more stable and less bandwidth hungry than the current viewer.

High fps rate which sim your located and how your camera is positioned.

9.5 to 20 population FPS is not that much of a improvment based on a 8800 GC. Infact its about the same for many.

I think this improves the viewer is not that good viewer for hight end sysems. It might be ( even numbers really ).

Still bugs, some crashing due to downloading of cashe loading up etc.........and missing textures are occuring.


And I still Call a Computer its not a truck

Bah, the caching in this First Look client isn't much of any improvement at all over the regular SL client.

Supposedly the cache is capable of "nearly unlimited" storage.

So I set the cache size to 40,000 megabytes (client capped out at 10,000 megabytes), went to my friend's home area, waited for it to fully rez up, and proceeded to fly all over SL for 30 minutes letting those zones also fully rez up as I move around.

Then I logged out, and quit the client. Started it up again and went to my friend's home area first thing on world re-entry. Result?

- Textures not loading
- Blurry textures all over the place not updating
- Lots of solid-gray objects

Ctrl-Shift-1 shows texture downloading of 0-20kbps, and overall bandwidth of about 250kbps while standing around there, with a 1000kbps net limit on a 3.0 mbps network connection.


Bah, I say. What good is a 10 gig cache if it cannot store and then instantly reload textures for when you re-enter the world? NEEDS WORK, LL.

This system:
- Intel P4 3.2 ghz
- 1 gig RAM
- 80 gig SATA (48.2 gig free)
- ATI Radeon X550 256meg

SL Cache size after wandering for 30 min on >1000 kbit connection:
- C:\Documents and settings\user\Application Data\Second Life\cache
- 1.05 GB (1,137,597,105 bytes)

-Scalar

I would liek to know what the deal with the cache is. Does it only cache per session? Because even being at a single SIM and logging out then back in the next day or even an hour alter ususally requires a compelte reload of all textures. Why?

Seems like you could save on a CRAPLOAD of server bandwidth if the caching actually worked between sessions like it seems it should.

It doesn't seem to really work much on the old client and it doesn't work on this first look either.

From my understanding you should do periods of dumping yourself. I loadup to 700,000 at times.

After poking at it a bit more, I have discovered that it actually doesn't load textures out of the cache fully rezzed, even if the textures are fully in there.

I watched the client login, with texture downloading at zero kbps, and an object was first blurry........ then about 30 seconds later it got sharper..... then sharper yet...

All with texture downloading at zero kilobits. Weird, is all I can say.


A couple of times while flying around the world testing the texture downloading and caching, the texture loading rate dwindled right down to about 5-10 kilobits, all while I'm standing in a sea of gray objects on a nearly idle 3 megabit Internet connection.

By quitting out to the desktop and then immediately restarting SL, the texture downloading for that same spot now suddenly zoomed up to 500-700 kilobits downloading.


It may be that the client was getting overloaded and couldn't keep up with the texturing thread. On restart all is fresh and new, so the loading on that thread is likely lower.

In Linden Answers I believe Kelly Linden said the viewer runs as maximum framerate all the time. If so, then the rendering pipeline may be excessively rendering to the exclusion of all else, including the texture loading processes. A frame limiter might actually improve the cache usage. (Do I really need 60+ fps? I'll settle for 30fps or even 20fps if that means the cache can be more responsive.)

.

My computer stats are in my signature.

I noticed a small increase of about 5fps overall which is nice, texture loading is okay, but it seems that some textures simply won't load unless I focus on them. I then have the intermittent sunrise/sunset lighting as mentioned in another thread, where the red-hue it generates is flickering on and off every few seconds.

I noticed a DROP in frame rate when I tried the first look viewer on my laptop:
1.6 GHz (Intel Pentium M)
512 MB RAM
Radeon Mobility Radeon 9000 (32 MB)

Grid at the time:
36 agents in the sim
23,000 people logged in
draw distance was still at minimum, I did not change those settings (I did turn VBO on and off for no change)

Regular client: 10-15 FPS
First lool client: 8-10 FPS

This was all after I waited for everything to rez and the bandwith used to stabilize at 20-30kbs (didn't time it, 10-15 minutes either case).

nametags (including my own) have never been clickable in the new client.


For the stats people:

Frame rate increase from 9-11 to 17 FPS with all graphics options pegged.

Frame rate increase from 11-12 to 24-25 FPS with FSAA 2x instead of 4x.

Frame rate increase from 15-17 to 30+ FPS with FSAA off and ATI 3d overrides set to "max performance".

Macbook Pro 17".