Cool VL Viewer forum

Hello Henri,

under which circumstandes is this new optimized rendering from NACLs viewer faster? I don't know the code, so I don't see what got optimized.

I tried with all shadows on and with DoF off, and I see no difference in the frame rate (~17 fps for LL and NACL).

Looks like this (resolution: 3840x2039 windowed)



So this is nice, no rigged gives me shadows without any big fps loss compared to plain deferred rendering without shadows

The 20-30% gain applies to the the time it takes to render the rigged mesh shadows (see the fast timers console, Render -> Shadow -> Avatar), but once the gain is compared to the total frame time, it's much smaller (5-10% at best, i.e. it only accounts for a few FPS, and might not be practically sensible at low FPS rates). Also, you won't notice a difference if there are not many avatars wearing rigged meshes around.

The optimization simply consists in reducing the number of render passes (since shadows don't need things such as materials) when compared to LL's brute (and dumb) force method which re-renders the whole shebang for the shadows like it was for the rigged mesh itself...

Of course, not rendering rigged mesh shadows at all yields a much higher gain (since it can take up to half the time to render a frame, in crowded sims), but it causes the shadows to become "incorrect" for non-human avatars (because their rigged mesh shape is way too far from their worn, standard/legacy shape).

You should also remove the "capping" (i.e. do NOT use "Sync to VBlank" in your graphics driver, and always prefer triple-buffering to fight tearing): else, you will notice even less differences with such optimizations, because your frame rate will be artificially limited so that each frame syncs with a VBlank retrace, even if the frame is ready to be displayed, causing also a slow down of the whole viewer (the viewer will pause at each frame till the next VBlank, thus also pausing all idle tasks, such as networking, inventory operations, textures fetching, etc...).

Thanks for the clarification.

And with capping I mean: "adaptive". Where the driver tries to do as many as possible, but after 60 rather powers down than trying more.

Same thing: the driver still syncs to VBlank in that case: just don't do it !... The application always knows better than the driver, so always let the application choose. In the case of SL viewers, sync to VBlank is plain and simple evil.