Yesterday I blogged about mysterious improvements to the graphics subsytem which had caused my settings to change from high to ultra and had also seemed to produce a performance increase. I mentioned how the lack of information about these changes were puzzling. I have asked some questions, read other blogs and received comments.
This blog post is therefore coming to you in association with Inara Pey, Honor McMillan, Coby Foden, Hitomi Tiponi, leliel Mirihi and Theresa Tennyson for their contributions in a thread on the official forum.
So what’s the skinny on the lowdown? Well first things first, it appears that if your graphics settings are changing from high to ultra, your graphics settings might not actually be changing, confused? Well it seems that the new rendering subsystem means the bar has been lowered. Honor McMillan makes observations in her blog post on the subject:
When I logged on my settings did show the move to Ultra – BUT, when I looked at them in detail there really hadn’t been much change. Just the $*(@&^%$ physics of course.
The choices I had been using seemed to have remained, so I think one can assume there will be no frying of graphics cards. At least not because the viewer says you’ve been moved up to the next level.
Honor’s observations are backed up by Theresa Tennyson in the Second Life forum thread:
The new “Ultra” setting isn’t the equvalent of the old “Ultra” setting, which was basically “everything turned up as far as it will go.” I had been running my computer with my settings on “High” with the addition of turing “Lighting and Shadows” on but setting the “Shadows” setting to “None.”. The new beta moves the slider to “Ultra” for me but the individual settings are exactly the same as I had them before.
So there should be no need to panic about your graphics card being fried, but if you’re carrying out a new install, you might want to check the advanced settings to aid performance.
In that thread leliel Mirihi observes:
It looks like LL finally adopted my suggestion of using a finer grained class system, trying to fit 12 years worth of graphics cards into 4 classes just wasn’t working anymore.
Looks like they’re also now doing some kind of automated performance analysis to rank GPUs, this should be a good thing in the long run but will probably have some bumps along the way.
On the down side it looks like they removed some of the fancy regex I put in to work around the horribly mangled (or just varied) strings some drivers returned.
Coby Foden confirms that an FPS test does suggest the new viewer is working better, Honor McMillan in her blog post also observes that perfomance seems to be improved.
Hitomi Tiponi offers up some clarification:
To clarify – there are now three new levels that your computer may be set to in addition to the old “Low”, “Medium”, or “High” graphics. These are:
Ultra – the same as “High” but with “Lighting and Shadows” turned on. (Note: on many systems with poor graphics rendering this is a big performance hit)
Ultra plus – “Ambient Occlusion Enabled” (providing better shadows – more details here)
Ultra plus – “Ambient Occlusion Enabled” plus shadows set to “Sun/Moon + Projectors” – this is the maxxed out settings and if your gpu is up to it really makes SL look stunning.
Hopefully this will improve many users enjoyment of SL – but please be aware of the performance costs that may occur.
The link provided by Hitomi provides some useful information about shadows.
Inara Pey, in her week 47 project notes includes information about the viewer changes:
The Lab rolled out the first of the 3.4.3 beta releases – 3.4.3267135 – on November 20th. The major change to this is the inclusion of the first phase of Monty Linden’s new HTTP-based texture fetch capability, designed to significantly improve texture rezzing within the viewer. As the release notes state:
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.
So by joining up all the dots, the consensus seems to be, the changes are for the good, don’t panic too much, but you might want to check your advanced settings in graphics preferences if your performance seems to be taking a hit.
So now the only thing left to ponder is, why haven’t Linden Lab announced this? A blog post, with a linked forum thread asking for feedback would be good, I mean this looks good, it feels better to me and others have said the same.
If you want to see if you too can join the goodness of the new graphics subsytem, download the beta viewer, it’s available from the main downloads page, beneath the main viewer download. Hopefully this will improve everyone’s Second Life experience, unfortunately, we’re a bit stumped as to where to provide Linden Lab with feedback, as exemplified by a forum thread started by Mac Shoreman in which Mac asks, where can one provide feedback!
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