Why Optimization Matters: Even One Bracelet Can Drastically Hurt Frame Rate

Via New World Notes' Discord newsfeed and commentary channel (join here!), "Nadeja" recently posted this fascinating illustration from Second Life for why graphics optimization matters:

"Complexity, textures, triangles comparison." (Click to embiggenate.) "The first one has a Complexity of 17,000 and a huge texture usage: it remains gray for longer, but once it's loaded it has a negligible impact on the frame-rate. The second one has a complexity of 4000, a lower but still quite high texture usage, however it has a large amount of triangles (178,000!)" 

By comparison, whole entire avatars in AAA console games tend to have a total triangle count well under 100,000.

"When I wore it," reports Nadeja, "my frame-rate dropped from 45-46 to 41 frames per second. And this was a tiny element in the scene, I can imagine that multiplied by 20 avatars."

Part of the problem seems to be many virtual world users equate more triangles with better quality, even though that's not the case:

"I have to say I find the mentality puzzling, to say the least," as virtual world developer D.J. Perano puts it in the Discord chat. "I’d understand it if triangles had any direct relationship to content quality, but past a certain threshold they don’t. At that point the 'best' content has the same visual quality but uses no more triangles & texture memory than necessary - load is load, even if you’ve got the best PC in SL."

It may be impossible to fully remove all the load heavy jewelry and such from Second Life, but at least there's optimization guides to not making the problem any worse -- here's a good place to start.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

The maximum triangle count for an avatar in VRChat is 70,000. For the whole avatar. (The recommended 32,000 or under). This is not even remotely seen as a creative restriction by normal 2D creators. It's an entirely fair "sanity check".

That bracelet, just the bracelet, is 178,000 triangles.

Let that sink in.

[Adeon Writer from Osgrid]

In opensim we really have no limits on what we can do to our avatars.

[Han Held]

Why Optimization Matters: Even One Bracelet Can Drastically Hurt Frame Rate

Lemme flip this around:

So you spend $X time optimizing your textures, go out to an event and everyone's wearing the latest maitreya and event clothing, making your optimizations moot.

When it comes to SL and SL based worlds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons increasingly is the primary paradigm you have to consider. IE "if idiots can fuck something up, idiots will fuck it up"

I humbly suggest that your time...that all of our time...can be better spent doing something else.

[Madeline Blackbart]

@adeon Opensim definitely does have limits on what you can do but not in the same sense SL does. The limits is in what the server it's on can handle. The server can only handle having some many connections and people downloading from it at the same time. Hugely un-optimized stuff like this creates large files to download. That's not ideal for the hosting server.
On top of that Framerate issues is an issue that starts when the users computer struggles to process all of this render intensive stuff. 10 people wearing stuff like this is going to cause poor framerates in SL or Opensim doesn't matter.