How to Optimize PBR Era Firestorm: Notes & Tips from the Lead Dev

As noted yesterday, quite a few SLers are having a poor experience with the new PBR upgrade to Firestorm, by far the most popular viewer for Second Life. Fortunately, as Firestorm project lead Beq recently detailed for me, there are a number of fixes and perspective shifts available. The starting point is understanding how the new viewer works with some WindLight/EEP modes, and (as Beq puts it),  first "[getting] past the denial and screaming stage."

Heavy technical details ahead -- in fact, if you're not highly familiar with the terms mentioned, I'd highly recommend reading them with a friend who does before tinkering with your viewer/worlds settings:

Getting through to people that 'OMG it is too light' and 'OMG it is too dark' is not a fault in the viewer, it is a fundamental change in the lighting model. Many people live their lives with a flat toned WindLight/EEP, something like CalWL.

CalWL lives right on the edge in the old model, it is deliberately intended to flatten contrast and leave things featureless. Needless to say something that dependent on the prevailing light algorithm is going to look different in a new algorithm.

Sadly people are throwing up their hands in despair and running back to the previous version without trying to fix it. For now that works, in the long term it won't.

That said, having reached a wider audience it opens the marketplace for people to start to create new EEPs that can become the new CalWL. However, as these are assets there is no way that anyone can wave a magic wand and say your CalWL preset is not PBR ready, you (user) need a new one, you have to change it.

As these are part of the library we can all take a copy and modify them, but many will balk at that idea, and I get it. I do hope to have time soon to give some guidance on how those that are willing to learn can do it for themselves. But we need to get past the denial and screaming stage first.

I put a number of tips into my release blog, covering how we can deal with certain performance issues. Firestorm has (of course) some settings that the default viewer does not; most useful for the low RAM people is probably the ability to restrict max texture size to 512 or 1024.

People who were previously running without ALM are now having to load more textures even for regular assets that have legacy materials. This will push up the demands on RAM and VRAM and sacrificing quality (resolution) may be the best short term option.

More tips here on the Firestorm blog, including:

1. Limit FPS – The viewer can limit the frames per second. Some people want to see the highest number possible in the FPS counter, but in practical terms, the benefit is limited, and your machine is working hard for no real benefit. Use the limit-FPS function to set the maximum number of frames per second. This is far better the the similar “VSync” option that many suggest, because it can be set to any arbitrary number and does not have to correlate with your monitor refresh rate.
2. Override VRAM – By default the viewer will try to make the best/most use of the resources of your PC. This includes the “VRAM”, the memory on your graphics card. Letting the viewer use all of this is fine while you are using the viewer, but is not so useful if you are watching Netflix or YouTube in the background. By using the VRAM override capability, you can tell the viewer to use only a part of the VRAM. This option is likely to change considerably in future updates to give you more control, for now this coarse control is a starting point. There are a number of problems that this setting can help address, but we’ll cover those in future blogs or support pages.
3. Max Texture Size – This viewer introduces a new large texture size. Moreover, PBR is generally more texture intensive. You can now select the maximum size of textures that you wish to see, alleviating additional memory pressure, especially on those of our users with smaller amounts of RAM and VRAM, at the cost of texture details.

And by all please, please share further notes / tips in Comments!

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Comments

[sharon classito]

Pft. this is not as helpful as the headline implies.
It turns out it does help to revert back to a version as long as we let the developers know it was an update we do not like and they can stop pushing forward against the public's wishes.
But, it sounds like another way to blame the users for their opinions.
I guess you need to find smarter users. Or better developers.

[Luther Weymann]

I just went back to the prior version. I've been using Firestorm since Emerald, and the new version, for the first time ever using Firestorm, does not remember my logins, and the fix does not work. And repeatedly, even after doing a clean install and backing up my settings, the new version, when I log in, reverts to not only default settings but different settings. I've never had these problems with any version of Firestorm. I'll stay on the prior version until they blacklist it or fix these issues that should not exist in the first place.

[Patchouli Woollahra nee Camilia Fidelis]

PBR releases on SL are basically bringing SL within 10 years of state of the art, which has always been the sweet spot for the virtual world in terms of what hardware it supports in terms of minimum requirements at minimum loads.

A GPU at that age would be basically a GT900-class GPU on the NVidia side, which already was released along with the first PBR-rendering shader demos, plus it's also a GPU which remains in third-party manufacture under a surprising number of budget manufacturers even as NVidia has long washed its hands of ongoing active support for it.

Prices have crashed insanely such that a GT970, new or used, can easily be had for anything between $50 to just under $400, making it one of the lowest-committment upgrades you can get for a PC used for SL if you were using an older graphics card and don't want to splurge on an entire new PC.

at that level, expect to run SL in 1080p at relatively low detail settings. But when a new PC costs way more, I think you'll be content with that.

I'm not going to lie, you're going to be merely delaying the inevitable for a few more years - but the floor for a brand new bottom-grade GPU has been slowly creeping up along the scale as it always has, as well as for many other bits of a computer. At some point, you WILL be having a computer with an RTX board, even if it takes another decade.

[Tiara]

Lowering the graphics is not optimizing

[Patchouli Woollahra nee Camilia Fidelis]

Yes it is. You're saying you have this much money to spend on what you use to access SL, and if you can't bring enough oomph to the table to floor the pedal, get used to cutting down until you can.

[jackson redstar]

I think some of the problem is this was launched without much documentation, so nobody really knows what to do, Another big problem I think is that most people don't tweak or modify the WL/EEP, they might just compare the new PBR to the lighting on their sim or home, or visit their favorite sims that are likely still running legacy EEP. I know for my self i have over a couple hundred EEP files for weddings Ive done, and each I will need to open in PBR and try to get it as close as I can get it on legacy, which leads to another issue, some EEPs just do no translate over to PBR, Nothing seems to make them look acceptable. Others yeah it is no problem. I sure in a year or so much of the griping will be over people will get used to it, well no choice really. On the bright side- graphic cards are at a good price now

[Estelle Pienaar]

It's the "boohoo mesh is bad and I wanna keep my prims" debate all over again. Some people left SL because of that. Some people will leave SL now. But who wants prims now?

[nevvyn]

basically what im hearing is "suck it up get. get over it. we dont care about what you liked and have no intentions to help. you have to like our lights and reflection and that it will have a bigger impact on your performance."

steamrolling over any dissenting voices.