Culling bug?

I just noticed something rather odd with the last WindLight: the less there is to render, the lower my FPS gets.

Normally I get about 10-15fps, right now with WL (basic shaders on, atmospheric shaders off) I get 6-7fps, dropping to 3-4fps when tp'ing to a sparse skybox (literally a box: walls, floor, ceiling and nothing else) and looking at the sky with no prims around gets 3fps.

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I don't know anything about the frame console, but a wild guess would be that it's a procentual representation of what the viewer spent its time doing the last frame?

The regular viewer seems to spend 50-75% of its time rendering (gray - RenderGeom + RenderUI) with UpdateCull (red) at about 10%. Spinning the camera around causes a spike in UpdateCull which drops back to normal over time (would make sense if I interpreted it right).

On WindLight however, 50-60% of its time is seemingly spent on UpdateCull with 20-30% on rendering (which would explain why my standard FPS is halved).

UpdateCull is associated with a form of raytracing, in that the client has to consider the advances in lighting and 'shaders' available. Taking each facet of every prim, it calculates which side, and or effect the current sun position has, strength and even focus, plus light tint, this has on every prim within view.

In more predictable platforms, those without open content, the scenes are predictably lit and fixed light maps are produced, this is fed very much like prims are, dependent on draw distance, to the client to render each scene.. the advantage is that you can create some awesome raytracing effects for a small overhead... however, the downside, you cannot change the content of the scenes without having to raytrace the whole scene over again. Until we have super computers that can raytrace on the fly, with the open content of SL, we will always have the next best thing... no shadows, no reflections from glass, refractions etc..

Not that long ago, my first experience with VR platforms, was with Adobe Atmosphere, whereby you can create and host your own version of a SL Sim, reachable via the internet through a pluggin from your internet browser. Once created, you would then raytrace the whole Sim. A 5,500 prim 'Sim' would take around 5-10 hours to raytrace. Change anything at all.. and you had to re-render the whole thing again. Even with powerful computer systems at our call, this still takes numerous hours. We are no where near being able to raytrace on the fly to any real degree with current systems available to the general public's pocket, in an open content platform.