Cool VL Viewer forum

What is this trick? Is it just the RenderTextureMemoryMultiple setting?

Sorry about the slight thread necro, but I recently got a Mac with much more VRAM than my old one, so I'm revisiting all this stuff.

Yep. Never understood why it was set to 0.5 on Macs by default, it's just silly: setting it to 1.0 works without any problem.

Yupyup! Only thing I did was editing the menu xml for it a bit to rearrange the entries ... so that when I move the window to the top right with 2/3 of it hidden outside, I just see what I need in the left, still visible 1/3.

On my PC even though the texture limit is 512 the Vram uses a lot more than that over 2 gb depending on where I am so the info I found is it is a soft cap. There was another viewer version that by error (since fixed unfortunately) did not have a 512 cap so I could raise it and my experience was a lot smoother and less problems with Mesh which for the past year has been an issue for me with any viewer.

That setting does not determine the total amount of VRAM used by the viewer, but only the amount of VRAM used for the textures: there are also the vertex buffers, the shaders and their data, the meshes, etc, etc...

The limit of 512Mb is not so much there to limit the VRAM consumption, but because raising it above this amount causes the CPU-side memory to get exhausted by the textures (remember that as a 32 bits software, the viewer is limited to 3Gb (4Gb on 64 bits OSes) of address space, regardless of the available RAM in your PC): each texture is stored several times, as a compressed texture, a raw texture, a GL texture, and for the latter, the graphics driver often also keeps a copy of textures in VRAM in the CPU RAM (that's why enabling the "Texture compression" setting, which is normally only dealing with GL textures held in VRAM, helps reducing the memory consumption on the CPU RAM side) !

Increasing or decreasing the VRAM usage limit doesn't affect the least the loading and rezzing of meshes (definitely a placebo effect !!!)...

Firestorm 4.4.2 allowed you to raise the texture memory past 512 however that version did not see Mesh (stretched) so may that's why it seemed to be an immediate improvement? I still have the blurry texture issue depending on various conditions usually lots of avatars but then other places it does not seem as bad and the different viewers out there vary but not consistently. Considering what's happening it's probably a bit too much to ask for what we are getting over the internet compared to the days of 33k modems. With my 780 gtx though the gpu usage is considerably low in the 20% range. Because I do Machinima Projects I know what I'm looking for is beyond what someone would need "normally" since I might be trying to film 5 avatars loaded with Mesh and particles with a 70+ avatar crowd although I usually derender the crowd but of course the SIM/ server is impacted by the crowd. I always have draw distance as low as possible (less than 64m). Some rez beautifully and some specific avatars lose their hair and shoes and sometimes I just see her name plate or eye sockets. One specific avatar is the worst with various avatars. And she only lives 2 hours away from me physically lol whereas avatars from Japan in the same SIM rez perfect everytime. It's almost like "Voodoo" .

That might be your actual issue... Such low a draw distance causes the viewer to un-load (part of) objects and their associated textures... I'm usually at 256m draw distance on 32bits Linux (i.e. with a memory address space limited to 3Gb for the viewer) and don't have a single issue with textures.
In large crowds (or sims making a heavy usage of very large (1024x1024) textures), enabling the "Texture compression" feature (before arriving in the sim, so that the textures are compressed as they load) allows to keep the memory usage low at the cost of a slightly "hiccuping" FPS rate (texture compressions/decompressions take time and when they occur, they cause a "long" frame among shorter (normal) ones), in turn avoiding texture LOD reloads.

I just had a horrible idea: will they ever be available? I mean, now they have this paying SLGo thing, what would be their interest to provide anything officially supported to help building a 64 bits TPV? Looks like the best thing to do for them is to keep the desktop viewer as crappy as possible to "force" people to go the SLGo way to get a decent experience…
And by the way, I don't know how you're doing to still use a 32 bits viewer. I just had to give up on my beloved Cool VL Viewer, it had become completely impossible. Going to any place with more than a dozen persons around and with people coming and going was just guaranteed to make me crash after 5 minutes, even if I wasn't moving at all and didn't even cam around. I just tried every possible option to lower the memory usage, nothing worked… And with a 64 bits viewer, no problem at all: no crash, no texture loading loops, even if I cam around, it just works… I just have to do myself violence not to bang my head on the desk at the pure nonsense of this V2/V3 GUI.

I have no trouble at all to stay logged on for hours in super-crowded places (30+ avatars) under 32bits Linux (i.e. with only 3Gb available for the viewer against 4Gb for 64bits Linux). If you crash so fast (you should not even crash at all, since the viewer is designed to warn you when its memory gets too small/fragmented and you can then relog cleanly... unless, of course, you disabled the memory safety checks...), then there's probably a problem with your system (memory leaks in the graphics driver is something that comes first to my mind).

Oh I meant I'm crashing if I don't relog. I do get the warnings, but I can't relog every 5 minutes… And as for a possible issue in my system, it can be, of course, but I could hardly do anything about it since I'm on a Mac, I never installed any drivers myself. I don't even know if it's possible at all…
What I can say is that as soon as I log in, the memory usage jumps at once to 70% or more, and usually, I'm home, with hardly anything or anyone around. I've seen someone in this forum saying his memory usage was around 25%: it's just science-fiction for me, it just never goes that low… And so of course, as soon as I go in a crowded place, it jumps very quickly to 90%, then 95%, and then actually crashes, which shows that the available memory is figured out correctly.
Now what is strange is that if I go to the Activity Monitor and look at the memory used by Cool VL Viewer, it's very rarely above 1GB… Right now, I have it running, it says it uses 70% of the available memory, and the Activity Monitor says it uses hardly more than 800MB… Really far from the supposed 70% of 4GB… I know some systems (Windows?) actually reduce the amount of memory available for 32 bits application to less than 4GB, but I can't see anything like that on the Mac. I haven't seen any setting for this in the System Preferences, and an Internet search didn't return anything about such a thing…