Cool VL Viewer forum

Just another observation from this morning, when I rotate and bring the bright or flashing sky into view, my frame rate goes up. If I rotate back into what I assume is the normal, darker sky view, the frame rate drops as if I have water culling enabled, but I do not. Obviously, using the new settings to enforce culling all the time, keeps the frame rate more constant and lower and the sky stays a normal brightness as well.

There is obviously a bug in LL's EE shaders and/or water rendering code... Let's hope they will fix it, sometime... In the mean time, you can still enjoy the good old (and super-fast) Windlight renderer in my viewer !

Absolutely. WL has much better performance for me overall anyway. In some area, with sparse objects/avatars, I can see almost double the frame rate, compared to EE.

It looks like there was a bug in my code, after all: I missed three lines in water pool rendering when backporting EE. Not sure it is related with the sky flickering glitch, but could someone seeing that glitch and compiling themselves the viewer test the fix for me, please ?
Of course, do make sure to turn off the new water culling setting when testing the fixed binary.

Here is the patch to apply to v1.28.0.3 sources:

If it fixes the issue, it means we can do without the costly water edges culling...

I have applied the patch and built from yesterday's source (1.28.0.3) releases. I can't be sure what else might have visually changed about EE, but the sky brightening/strobe problem still occurs for me in certain regions and/or at certain sky-viewing angles. One thing I have also noticed, for me, it seems to only happen when I am 'diagonally' viewing into another region within at least my draw distance.

I'm afraid people seeing that glitch happening will have to live with the (slow) water edges culling, then...

Yes, I understand. Out of curiosity I experimented with just changing my draw distance. I normally use 128m with my Linden Home being in the 'corner' of a region. If I move all the way up to 384m, the sky remains constant when I rotate a full 360 degrees. I'm guessing that since the water is now 'further away', so to speak, the odd water/sky interaction doesn't happen.

For me, reducing the draw distance to 128m (or below) does not change anything at all (never seeing the glitch happening), but I was in the (not too high) hope a bug such as the one I found could perhaps explain that glitch...
Still, the fact that water edges culling with the camera above water, affects sky keeps baffling me, and advocates for a even weirder bug in LL's renderer code or shaders (which will likely and sadly stay uncorrected since LL uses water edges culling unconditionally, i.e. their viewer does not have the setting I implemented to disable it).

That is my feeling as well, and the reason I keep 'poking' at this now and then. It only affects a couple of us and there are options/workarounds.

I applied the missing-uniforms-patch to v1.28.0.3. There was no effect on the sky flashing issue. While having object-object occlusion disabled can reduce how often the flashes are seen, only RenderWaterCull seems to eliminate the issue. I notice it most when orbiting the camera within a couple meters or so from my avatar. I have also noticed that the Cull Water setting always shows "Never (fastest)" even after having set it to another value. I can verify that the setting has taken effect by looking up RenderWaterCull in the debug settings. See attached image.
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Cool VL Viewer v1.28.0.3, 64 bits, Jul 19 2020 11:25:08
RestrainedLove viewer v2.09.27.23
Release Notes

You are at 256749.0, 262178.0, 52.2 in Clanis located at
sim10102.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.48.168:13020)
Second Life Server 2020-07-01T23:09:05.544419
Release Notes

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 1300X Quad-Core Processor (3588.17 MHz)
Memory: 16023MB
OS version: Linux-x86_64 v5.4.0-40-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 23 00:01:04 UTC 2020
Memory manager: jemalloc v5.2.1-20200716
Graphics card vendor: X.Org
Graphics card: Radeon RX 580 Series (POLARIS10, DRM 3.35.0, 5.4.0-40-generic, LLVM 10.0.0)
OpenGL version: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 20.0.8
Detected VRAM: 8012MB
J2C decoder: OpenJPEG: 1.4.0.635f
Audio driver: FMOD Studio v2.01.02 (PulseAudio)
Networking backend: libcurl/7.47.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2u zlib/1.2.11
Embedded browser: CEF3 plugin v74.1.19+gb62bacf+chromium-74.0.3729.157
Packets lost: 0/8770 (0.0%)

Built with: GCC v9.3.0
Compiler-generated maths: AVX2.

Compile flags used for this build:
-O3 -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -falign-functions=16 -falign-jumps=16 -fno-align-labels -fno-align-loops -fno-ipa-cp-clone -fsched-pressure -frename-registers -fweb -fira-hoist-pressure -DNDEBUG -march=native -std=c++11 -fPIC -pipe -g -gdwarf-2 -gstrict-dwarf -fno-var-tracking-assignments -fexceptions -fno-strict-aliasing -fvisibility=hidden -fsigned-char -m64 -mfpmath=sse -fno-math-errno -fno-trapping-math -pthread -fno-stack-protector -Wall -Wno-reorder -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-deprecated-declarations -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-placement-new -Wno-parentheses -DLL_LINUX=1 -D_REENTRANT -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 -DXML_STATIC -DLL_USE_JEMALLOC=1 -DLL_ELFBIN=1 -DLL_LUA=1 -DOV_EXCLUDE_STATIC_CALLBACKS -DLL_FMOD=1 -DLL_OPENAL=1 -DLL_SDL=1 -DLIB_NDOF=1 -DLL_X11=1