First Look Viewer: Improvement for you?

I should note also I saw another improvement in FPS when I eventually switched "Use VBO" on, no idea what it does but switching it on made the FPS go up right away

VBO (Vertex Buffer Objects) are where the real performance increase comes from. It wasn't any better for me until I switched that on.

Mac G5 OSX 10.4.8
GeForce FX 5200:
Chipset Model:
GeForce FX 5200
Type: Display
Bus: AGP
Slot: SLOT-1
VRAM (Total): 64 MB
Vendor: nVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0321
Revision ID: 0x00a2

Anyone having strange yellow screen color when editing a object your wearing ?????

I get that when editing just about anything... like the hilights on the prim borders are suddenly infinitely thick. But not consistently or reliably.

After having great success with the current First Look client on my desktop system (NVidia 7600GS -- 50% or more frame rate increase), I decided to try out the Linux version of it (1.13.2.5727 on my laptop (with its wimpy integrated Radeon XPress 200M). The First Look client gets a frame rate at least 20% LOWER than the standard one (1.13.2.15). Turning VBO on and off makes no noticeable difference.

Settings: draw distance 64m, bumpmapping and shiny on (trivial performance hit for these), local lighting OFF (it's a frame rate killer on this machine; makes the already pitiful performance drop by 50%), avatar rendering normal (other choices are grayed out), detail sliders at defaults, anisotropic filtering OFF (another frame rate killer on this system), VBO tried both ways.

Yes, I understand that integrated graphics are not officially supported for SL, not even ones from ATI or NVidia. Still, I thought that somebody might want to know that the new rendering code isn't ALWAYS better.

I crash every 2-5 minutes, however for the short period of time that the program lets me use it, I get great results. My fps went from 15fps on the normal viewer to 110fps....yes 110, on the First Look viewer (same location, same camera angle, back to back testing)

Windows XP sp2
CPU: Core Duo T2600 @2.16GHz
RAM: 2 gigs
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512mb
VBO: On
Resolution: 1680 x 1050
All graphics options maxed except draw distance (128m)

The First Look is smooth like butter....except it crashes constantly. However once those bugs are worked out, it will be the best update since hardware lighting.

If it improved FPS on all of the *SUPPORTED* cards than it IS better. What you said above amounts to: "I know I only have a standard def. TV, but looking at my TV, HD programming isn't any better than regular programming."

this is what I was thinking all the people who notice little difference seem to have higher end systems. I think this viewer is being put together to help the lower end people not doing much for me and my system is higher end. I notice a slight difference but not what some people are raving about. Oh and the crashes make me crazy

System Specs
CPU:             AMD64 3500+
GFX Card:        Nvidia GeForce 6800GT OC (PCI-E) Driver version 93.71
RAM:             2GB DDR400 (Dual Channel)
HDD:             74GB 10,000RPM SATA Raptor
OS:              WinXP (SP2)
ISP:             DSL 1500kbps/384kbps
                 (capped off at 1300kbps in client settings)

Client settings
Disk Cache:      1024MB
Screen Res:      1600 x 1200
Draw Distance:   128 meters
Shaders:         All checked
Avatar Render:   Bump Mapped (No cloth - FPS drops by 10-20 w/ it on)
Light Detail:    Nearby local lights
Terr. Detail:    High
Mesh Details:    All sliders at middle
VBO:             On
GFX Memory:      256MB
Max Particles:   1024
All other settings set to default

First Look Results
42-70 fps on class5 sim w/ 5 avatars in view (8 total on Waitangi mainland
sim) and average amount of land development.
18-40 fps on class3 sim w/ 2 avatars in view (38 total on Muslin mainland
sim) and very large amount of land development (2 packed casinos, 1 of them
simultaneously sitting on 3 sims).

Compared to the original client, I'm getting 10-30 fps more w/ the First
Look client in light to medium dense sims (Waitangi) and 10-20 fps increase
in heavily dense sims (Muslin/Spinach).

I'm not sure if my system can be considered high end (about 2 years ago it was) but I'm getting a significant boost in performance. On top of that, the First Look viewer is running stable. The only 2 times it crashed was when I was logging out.

Oh, I really need to plug this, my WD Raptor 10,000RPM SATA hard drive cuts down seek and load times by 5 fold. It takes at most 10 seconds to load up the SL client during peak hours and 6 seconds when it's not, both in the original and First Look clients. Textures load up from memory as soon as the prim shows up on screen.

Performance in 57679 is worse than 57575 and I'm seeing more LoD cutoffs. Worse, particles are basically gone. And when the reflections (now hidden in Debug Settings) are on, the horrible jaggedness from the Windows client has shown up.

I don't see any improvement on any of my computers.

Computer 1 Specs:
AMD athlon XP 3200 (2.23 ghz)
Geforce 6200GT 256MB
1.5GB Ram
600w PSU

Computer 2 Specs:
AMD athlon XP 1800 (1.33 ghz)
Geforce FX5200 128MB
1GB Ram
500w PSU

Both act about the same no matter which client i use.

My computer
AMD|A64 3800+ 2.4G
1GB ram PC 3200 (512x2)
7600GT 256M
320GB HD
Windows XP Pro SP3
MB ASUS A8N5X NF4 939
450W PSU
Lite-on DVD RW
ViewSonic 19in LCD
7 case fans
DSL 8 Mbps

Non first look
all setting on 128DD
23 to 25 FPS

first look
all setting on 128DD VBO on
60+ FPS
runs very good at this time.

Very cool.
Will do more testing.

Frame rate is back up again for the 57837 client, at least it's baout 50% better than the base client... though not near as high as it was a few versions back.

I am using the 57876 client and am having terrible problems with textures not downloading. I can move around a sim and have the majority of it grey/un-rezzed after more than half an hour. This appears to be the same for busy sims with frequent low time dilation and relatively deserted sims. Bandwidth usage is very low considering the need for texture files (0 to 200kbps and averaging around 50kbps). I have a system which is just above the recommended minimums:

AthlonXP 2100+, 512MB ram, ATI 9700 pro graphics under Win XP SP2 and a 1.5Mbps connection.

It is my opinion that if this were to become the primary viewer / client LL will have to increase its server capacity significantly.

My framerates are higher, but I suspect it is only because I don't even have a fraction of the textures that I an supposed to be rendering.

This is importatant. And what Labs has wanted from the Mono scripting/or platform. Less lag more population. We are gewtting the results slowly with the "First Look Client" ( I don`t you "FL" for short. Because it looks like the STATE and not the meaning of a techical meaning for the client .confusing ).

Anyways we are reaching higher population, and in some good design islands the abilty to move with good FPS. But before we can have higher number LLabs need to stop letting some badly design island creators use old scripts, and or badly designed settings. Just take a look at a few of the top population locations and tell me if this is true. Its just UNREAL the crappy islands fps we are getting in less then 80 population and above. ( and people ecpect over 60 fps with a 8800 gtx extreme! Give me a break! )Then again look at the nightmarish island designs. Totally outdated unusable for the ave user and a total pile of just texture and scripts that eiterh don`t work or can`t because of badly dieting active scripts the sim creator FAILED to Heel to the users and not their Creator/designer egos in design.

Usagi

It's a major disappointment for me. I can't load anything but a basic solid color texture. Most clothing just looks like solid black, though I did manage to get a pair of jeans to look solid light blue, and a green polo shirt to look like a green blob. Vendor signs were a blur.

At first I thought it was that the client had mis-detected my video card settings. It thought I had 32M or some such; in fact I have an ATI XTX1900X with 512M of RAM. So I reset video RAM to 512 and restarted the client. No change.

I can't really comment on FPS. It was so annoying to deal with horrid textures that I gave up on it.

My specs: Athlon 4800+, 4G RAM, XTX1900X 512M, big ol hard disk with plenty o space, DSL connection that is normally pretty fast.

Ricky, I heard this occuring to many people. are you using the current first look client ?
Try unchecking the "VBO" Under the advance gpahics settings



CPU: AMD (2497 Mhz)
Memory: 2048 MB+1024
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 memory
OpenGL Version: 2.0.3

im like ricky, i cant get anything other than plain textures. When they do start to load, its extremely slow and and they dont load to full detail. Ive got the current version of first look. im sure LL will sort it out soon.

Yes, I'm using the current First Look client. And yes, I've tried turning off VBO. No help. I get ugly single-texture colors, and my face looks like a hollowed-out mannequin. I hope this thing isn't going live soon.

I'm using a pretty high-end ATI card. Are there known issues with ATI drivers?

I went and grabbed the latest FIrst Look client viewer while LL was doing a database reset (unscheduled) last night.

VBO on or off doesn't seem to affect it. Runs considerably and consistently faster than the original Secondlife viewer. Where I get max FPS in the original client to peak out in the mid 60's, even on loaded sims, First Look smacks the needles over to 98-120 FPS max. Tends to slow to 60 FPS in fully loaded sims with the majority of the avatars surrounding you. The slowest I ever got with the original viewer was around 30 FPS. This is at maximum desktop resolution (1600x1200x32 BPP) with nVidia's control panel settings pushed to override application settings, maximum quality, aniso, Filtering, etc. This is also with SL's knobs and controls set at maximum stun, draw distance 128M. (I like flying my pink pearl-coat chopper of dewmgiving) So really, no huge improvement, but then this machine pours like liquid fire over anything I throw at it, FPS being limited by synching refresh rate in most cases for smooth images. Unhook the sync and she pegs the meters...but the screen "tears" a might when you spin around quickly in mouseview. Odd that the original second life viewer benefits greatly by locking SecondLife.exe to one core - Firstlook doesn't seem to care. There is no noticable boost by locking First look's affinity to one CPU core. At least, not under AMD AM2 cores.

AM2 Dual Core 5400+ overclocked to 3.2 Ghz "Real world" speed on stock coolers
Corsair EPP/SLI RAM, 4 GB (4-4-4-12 timings)
Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe nForce 590 Mobo
BFGTech nVidia 8800 GTX-OC (640 Mhz Main domain clock)
Antech Cool 'n' Quiet ATX-2 v3 500 watt PSU (Love those dual pigtails for SLI cards!)
WD SATA@ 3Gb/sec 500GB capacity (Main system drive, boot, SL cache goes here)
WD PATA 220 GB drive on Ultra-ATA 100 interface (installed applications drive, system pagefile goes here)
Lite-On 16x DVD+-RW, Dual Layer (SOHO16.something or other)
Windows XP SP-2 32-bit

Video Card: nVidia Geforce 5500
RAM: 768 MB DDR
CPU : AMD Sempron 2800+ 1.6Ghz
Operating System: Linux Ubuntu 6.10
Cache Size: 1000 MB (5 gigs)

Results:
Crashes maybe more often sometimes (due to the bugs not yet fixed) but definitely faster than the normal viewer. I'm really satisfied of it

there is one problem with this not everyone can go out and spend 4000.00 or more for a system to play on sl......
The coders need to go back and start dealing with higher low and lower end systems for playableity


I don`t mean to be forward but i believe the Linden Labs coders knows that 4000.00 or more can run on sl under any condidtion. But you can`t run not matter what if the sim is getting less then 20 in a stable way.. I get 90 or so in a badly designed sim. But then again how many of the users in that same crashed out and are trying to log out.....FPS will speed up in the basic..

I built it for $1700. ;> Less than any "off the shelf" retailer of prebuilt systems to these specifcations can build. I ripped off Sun Microsystem's construction of their Ultra-40 workstations and did a few turns better. They are asking for over $9,000 for a system than can almost touch this one is sheer power. *shrug*

Want power? Build it and save some dough.



EDIT: For great schpeilling, er, spelling.

Just downloaded it, one question though: Will it replace the original viewer or will I have the choice to switch?

Mandy C