Ok What Have They Done To The Graphics?

Yesterday, I loaded up Second Life using the beta viewer, which is not at all unusual. However there was a required update, which downloaded and installed. When the client started again, up popped a message along the lines of; improvements to the graphics subsystem have introduced a change to your graphics preferences.

Hmmm thought I, what’s this all about? So I took a look at my preferences and found that my graphics preferences have been changed from hight to ultra … wait a minute? What’s this all about? I don’t want to overwork my graphics card, so I went back to the standard release of the viewer, fired it up and found my graphics were set to high, which is what I expected. Pressing reset in my graphics preferences, which sets your settings back to the reccomended position depending upon your detected hardware, kept my settings at high.

So now I’m confused, I uninstall the beta viewer completely, download it again and hit install. This time I just get a message informing me that if I’m new, I need to create an account. I continue and start, no message about changing my graphics preferences, which it seems was due to it being a new install and therefore not being required to inform me of a change in my preferences, as there were no old preferences to change in the beta viewer. However my graphics preferences were ultra, I pressed reset, my graphics preferences remained ultra.

Now I’m confused, the main reason being I don’t know what the bloody hell has changed for my suggested graphics settings to be ultra. I checked the release notes for the beta viewer, there might be a clue here:

HTTP-based Communications

A new scheme for performing HTTP operations is introduced with this release. It is intended to reduce crashes and stalls while performing HTTP operations and generally enable performance and reliability improvements in the future. In this release, it is being used by the viewer’s texture retrieval code. Our expectation is that it will provide consistent and predictable downloading of textures. As well as the usual problem reporting, we’re also interested in confirmation of improvements where this release improves your experience.

Is this the improvement they’re talking about? Is this why my graphics preferences have changed? Well there are a couple of potential issues with textures in there:

SH-3533 – smoke test the merge of 3.4.2-beta1 + drano HTTP viewer with a focus on textures.

DRTVWR-209 – Phase 1 of new HTTP library with texture fetch integration.

Aha, more information to investigate what’s going on? Alas not:

Jira No Entry

Honestly! These bloody Jira changes. So the next question, does anything feel better? The answer seems to be yes, textures do seem to be loading faster, but there again I get the feeling that maybe it just seems like that because I’m hoping my graphics card will work nicely in ultra mode, you know, like when you’re a kid and get a new pair of trainers and go outside to see if you can run faster in them.

The thing here is, at the back of my mind, I’m still thinking that I don’t want to overwork my graphics card. However, I’ll most definitely welcome an improvement to graphics and texture loading speeds, it would just be a tad better if I could readily find information to inform me that what I’m seeing in terms of system messages, is along the lines of what I’d expect to be seeing.

The beta viewer can be download from the main Second Life downloads page, you’ll find it just below the current release viewer.


8 Replies to “Ok What Have They Done To The Graphics?”

  1. OK… two things…

    The account creation thing is part of the Steam hook-up (I believe). If, on install, the viewer fails to find any associated Avatar / User settings files on your computer, the prompt is displayed, as the assumption is you have just downloaded the viewer.

    I reference this to the Steam link-up, simply becasue comingvia the more usual routes into SL, one has already created an account, whereas via Steam, there is no reason to have done so prior to downloading the viewer.

    Re: HTTP texture fetch. This has been an ongoing project for a while now I’ve been covering it in my SL project reports for the last several months. Info on it doesn’t appear in every report, but scan down the titles and you should find info.

    As to the graphics settings, I’ve not encountered your experience as yet, but I *gather* that recent changes to the rendering pipe outside of HTTP (Runitai has been hard at work banging on the pipe), mean that there’s now little difference between running in high or ultra, and the line has become increasingly blurred between the two. An example of this is that on my old Ge9800GT, I’m finding it easier and easier to run in high with deferred active and shadows on *and* ambient occlusion running, which used to completely max-out my GPU and leave me with single digit frame rates.

    Whether default to ultra rather than high is a good thing is questionable, however – as your own confusion illustrates.

    I’m now going to have to run around, kill my SL viewer settings and see what happens when I fire-up the beta viewer again :).

    1. The account creation pop up is a very good idea. I didn’t think of the steam link, but yes, some good forethought there.

      I do wish the viewer guys were as informative as the server guys in posting information in the forums. When I saw that message I expected to see my default graphics settings had gone down, seeing they had gone up was a surprise, indeed my first thought was that this was a bug. There’s so little widely available information.

      Textures did seem to load faster and hey if high and ultra are blurring to be the same, then that’s good, but an indication of this would be handy. The process isn’t logical, this is really something they should be shouting about.

      1. The issue with the viewer is that there do now appear to be “viewer guys” per se in the same way as there are “server guys”. Rather, a lot of the work is carried out on a project basis, which may be viewer-side, server-side or both.

        Baker Linden’s work on Group Services is a case in point, as is Nyx Linden’s work on Avatar Baking. Both of these span the server and the viewer, with those involved moving back and forth between the two as the code is developed and tested. Since the release of the Group Services HTTP updates, Baker has moved on to work which is server-focused (object rezzing speeds), and Nyx, while working on Avatar Baking, is also juggling other work as well.

        The only “front man” for the viewer, seems to be Oz, and he’s more focused on the open source side of things, and for pushing the button on merges builds – but he is often reliant upon others within LL for actual information and update on what is going on as anyone else.

        This really comes back to my original point (and oft-harped) point about communications. LL *need* someone internally who can take time out during their working week and find out what is going on vis-a-vis projects and updates which are going to be clearly visible to the user community, and then blogging about the work on a regular basis – even if it is only once a fortnight.

        This is pretty much something I now try to do (mainly in frustration at not being able to find things out more directly), as does Nalates Urriah. Other do as well. But there are three major issues with leaving such communications in the hands of people like Nalates and myself.

        1. We can only act upon what we hear; and often what we hear in meetings is, “I’ll have to ask XX about that,” which tends to leave things hanging at time or open to interpretation.

        2. Our view is subjective. We can misinterpret things (Nalates’ “tsunami” post on pathfidning being a case in point, and I’ve gotten things wrong more than once). And as we know, within the SL community, it is very easy for a misunderstanding to become an established “fact”, particularly if the misunderstanding paints LL in a poor light.

        3. Even when technically accurate, subjective viewpoints always run the risk of suffering a personal bias, and this can leave some unwilling to accept what has been written, even when it is accurate and to the point, simply because it in not “official”. An example of this came up at a recent content creation meeting, where someone was questioning Geenz Spad’s own blog as a source of information on Materials Processing – despite Geenz effectively being the external project lead for that work…

        4. We’re not exactly widely read when compared to the SL community as a whole. Although this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that neither is the official blog, the fact remains that the blog potentially reaches more user’s screens than Nalates (and others) combined.

        Ergo, it makes far more sense for LL to start actually using their blog pro-actively, rather than lamely saying, “Well no-one reads out blogs”. If the blogs are seen to be being updated, rather than sitting there with news from 18 months ago, people will start reading.

        But then, this is a drum you’ve been beating yourself, and you’re as aware as I am that the LL audience is tone deaf on the matter…

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