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Texture loop reloading makes me crazy! 
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Joined: 2012-02-09 21:01:50
Posts: 284
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I am really annoyed by this now. Apparently this getting worse and worse as time flies by.

WHY exactly are textures loop reloading/blinking? I mean, either the texture did load fully... ok. No reloading needed. OR it didn't load fully. Then it should stick at how far it did load.

I really do no understand why the shown quality is changing in a loop.

And lately it already happens right after login. I have to click everything around me to make it stop. As if there is no automatic trigger that forces textures to load initially.

I really tried everything, from changing the cache and graphics settings, bandwidth, cleaning texture cache etc.

What can it be? I am sick of having to click everything.

And what's annoying most: some stuff loaded fully. I cam away and back --> blinking. How can that be! What the heck is happening. Do get fully loaded textures ditched from the cache? :-(


Last edited by Tillie on 2013-09-02 15:58:04, edited 1 time in total.



2013-09-02 06:48:45
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Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
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This is the sign of a memory saturation: when texture memory (or just global memory) fills up, the viewer must raise the "discard level" (which in turns lowers the level of details of the textures) to prevent out of memory conditions (or more exactly, out of virtual address space since in modern systems the available memory is much larger than the 3Gb virtual address space limit that a 32bits application such as the viewer can address).

When things get really bad (too many too large textures around your avatar), it can cause the "texture trashing" issue where each texture gets its level of details lowered to save memory, and then raised again at the next texture priority evaluation loop (this is because all the textures close to you got the same and highest priority).

This is not specific to the Cool VL Viewer either...

In the last weeks, I have been concentrating on improving things by identifying (and fixing) causes of excessive memory consumption and memory fragmentation: I found yesterday two more causes for the latter (the texture "fast cache" and the image down-scaling algorithm which is a pig, memory-wise, causing a high fragmentation). While the next releases will address these issues (causing less memory allocation failures due to the fragmentation since the latter will occur later in long sessions), it is unlikely it will improve things for people seeing "texture trashing" since this is a memory consumption issue.

However, if you have more than 4Gb (i.e. 5Gb or more) on your system, you should not be seeing texture trashing that often, and certainly not on login. Check that your OS does allocate 3Gb of virtual space to the 32bits applications (the default is 2Gb under Windows, and Linux kernels may be compiled to allow 2 or even 1Gb only, even if the default is 3Gb: see the "memory split" setting in the kernel configuration tool).

Note that things are going to get worst in SL over time with materials: with the latter, each face may now bear up to three different textures (the usual one i.e. the "diffuse map", the "specular map" and the "bump map"). None of the additional textures are limited in their size (beside the usual 1024x1024 pixels upload limit), meaning that if creators are unreasonable (and they are !... Just see how many objects use 1024x1024 textures where 256x256 or even smaller would be enough, especially on small prims), then the memory consumption by textures may end up tripling for materials viewers !
I already mentioned this issue at the contents creator group meetings, but LL doesn't seem very self-conscious about this announced catastrophe...


2013-09-02 09:07:08
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Joined: 2012-02-09 21:01:50
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Hello,

oh dear! Understood. :-)

I am on Win7/64bit with 16GB of RAM. And I think I have all done to optimize the settings. :-(

May something like running it in compatibility mode or as admin improve this? I guess not.

I have set texture memory (in hardware settings) to 288MB currently. Maybe I should raise this a bit again. I lowered the value cause it was recommended from like everwhere. ;-)

EDIT: And I really appreciate it that you work so hard on all those rendering stuff. :D


2013-09-02 15:43:46
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Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
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Tillie wrote:
Hello,

oh dear! Understood. :-)

I am on Win7/64bit with 16GB of RAM. And I think I have all done to optimize the settings. :-(
When running under a 64bits OS, 32bits applications get a full 4Gb address space (32bits OS reserve 1Gb (2Gb per default under Windows) for themselves and only leave 3Gb (or 2Gb) to the applications), so there's nothing to optimize in that particular case.

Quote:
May something like running it in compatibility mode or as admin improve this? I guess not.
No, don't change the compatibility mode (it would only make things go worst), and the admin mode won't bring anything but risks, in case of a viral infection or an exploitable bug in the libraries used by the viewer.

Quote:
I have set texture memory (in hardware settings) to 288MB currently. Maybe I should raise this a bit again. I lowered the value cause it was recommended from like everwhere. ;-)
Raise it to 512Mb: that's indeed probably the reason for your issue... Lowering the texture RAM is only useful on systems with less than 4Gb RAM or with very old graphics cards.


2013-09-02 18:21:55
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Joined: 2012-02-09 21:01:50
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Yup,

that helped. :)

How bad is the quality loss when I enable compressed textures?


2013-09-02 20:19:32
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Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
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Tillie wrote:
Yup,

that helped. :)

How bad is the quality loss when I enable compressed textures?
Compressed textures only deal with the GPU VRAM: this feature doesn't help the least to lower the memory usage on the CPU side, and it is pretty useless since all modern cards got 1Gb or more of VRAM (much more than the viewer will ever throw uncompressed GL textures and VBOs at them) and old cards don't support compressed textures...


2013-09-02 21:11:47
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Joined: 2011-11-21 20:23:44
Posts: 14
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I believe I have this issue for many of the Cool VL Viewer versions. And it seems to be getting worse. I run Win7 64 bit (12 GB RAM) with i7 930 using a RAMdisk for the SL cache and a GTX 670 gpu with 2gb Vram. Using GPU-Z to monitor the video card on SIMS that use well over 1 gb of the Vram I get this issue (SLcache doesn't get anywhere near that so it's a swapping issue?). GPU usuage is in the 20-50% range and CPU never goes over 25%. Some textures seem to load partially then stop (almost like it's a progressive jpeg and stalled at the second scan). Your viewer is 50-100% faster generally and looks better graphically (brighter). The view does have a slight "fish eye" look to it like it's using a wide angle (which can be handy making Machinima). The only thing preventing me using it almost exclusively for Machinima is this issue especially in busy SIMS where it actually outperforms other viewers significantly. I have tried disabling object occlusion, refreshing textures, disabling Http downloads, different debug settings for HTTP fetches,etc. and no luck. I will have to check out the textures that are giving me the problem for a clue since they seem to be the same ones at times.

I also have the issue of some textures loading then when I zoom out it has unloaded as when I zoom it again it does a refresh.

Any timeline on possibly getting the "animation speed" feature into your viewer?

cheers
Ormand Lionheart


2014-03-15 22:58:47
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Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
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fuzonacid wrote:
I believe I have this issue for many of the Cool VL Viewer versions. And it seems to be getting worse. I run Win7 64 bit (12 GB RAM) with i7 930 using a RAMdisk for the SL cache and a GTX 670 gpu with 2gb Vram. Using GPU-Z to monitor the video card on SIMS that use well over 1 gb of the Vram I get this issue (SLcache doesn't get anywhere near that so it's a swapping issue?). GPU usuage is in the 20-50% range and CPU never goes over 25%. Some textures seem to load partially then stop (almost like it's a progressive jpeg and stalled at the second scan).
This is a different issue... Try disabling "Advanced" -> "Network" -> "Get textures retry delay from HTTP header": it seems to sometimes be causing cached textures partial loads... This setting will be disabled by default in next releases (LL didn't yet implement retry delays for non-baked textures anyway, and the texture fetcher disables caching for baked textures, the reason being precisely blurry textures...).

Quote:
Your viewer is 50-100% faster generally and looks better graphically (brighter).
Faster, yes. As for brighter graphics, this must be a placebo effect... v1.26.8 uses the non-material renderer that was in use in LL's viewer (v3.5) before the materials era, and yes, that renderer was giving, in deferred rendering mode, brighter/more saturated colours than in today's renderers (v3.6/3.7) that are also used in v1.26.10 and v1.26.11 branches of the Cool VL Viewer, but that's all...

Quote:
The view does have a slight "fish eye" look to it like it's using a wide angle (which can be handy making Machinima).
The camera view angle, offset scale and rear camera offsets ("Preferences" -> "Input & Camera" -> "Camera controls") got different default values than in LL's viewers, but you can get the same effect in any viewer by adopting the same settings.

Quote:
.../...
I also have the issue of some textures loading then when I zoom out it has unloaded as when I zoom it again it does a refresh.
To make room in memory and avoid crashes, the viewer force-re-prioritize the full set of textures when the available (CPU-side) memory gets low: this helps finding unused textures that can be wiped out from memory and to adjust the discard level of the other textures to the most appropriate level. You could disable "Advanced" -> "Memory Management" -> "Memory Usage Safety Checks" to avoid those, but do expect out-of-memory crashes !

Quote:
Any timeline on possibly getting the "animation speed" feature into your viewer?
In tomorrow's releases.


2014-03-28 09:32:32
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Joined: 2011-12-13 14:11:38
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Jumping in, because I do have this texture loading loop issue, but with your explanations, I really can't see how that can happen. I'm on an iMac with 32 GB of RAM, so RAM definitely shouldn't be an issue, I guess. I have my texture memory set to 512 MB (there's trick to do that on Macs by the way, and I used it, or the texture memory is stuck at 256 MB). I was at 100 meters of altitude, draw distance set to 32 meters, so hardly seeing anything around. I was on a photoset consisting of 3 prims without even textures in them (just a bump mapping) plus 3 invisible posestands. In addition to myself, 2 people there, and I got the texture loading loop problem on them both (not on myself). I tried to relog like 4 times: didn't help, the textures were stable at the beginning, then started looping after a couple of minutes. I cleared my cache, didn't help either: once everything had loaded, the loop started again! I eventually switched to Singularity because I was going crazy: same issue! I was trying to take photos, it just lasted hours because I had to put my mouse cursor on one of them until their skin was OK, then rush to the other one, praying that the first skin wouldn't get blurry before I could get the other one clear.
This problem is just killing me… Any hint, possible solution or dirty workaround would be appreciated, anything… If this goes on, photography in SL is just dead…


2014-05-08 20:20:00
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Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51
Posts: 5523
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ErikaThorkveld wrote:
Jumping in, because I do have this texture loading loop issue, but with your explanations, I really can't see how that can happen. I'm on an iMac with 32 GB of RAM, so RAM definitely shouldn't be an issue
You could have 256Gb of physical RAM, it won't change a thing. I explained it countless times on this forum: for a 32bits application such as the viewer, the maximum addressable virtual space (which is limited to 2^32 bytes = 4Gb) is 3Gb when running on a 32bits OS (the OS itself using 1Gb for itself), or 4Gb for a 64bits OS (the OS address space being mapped elsewhere since it can use 64bits addressing for itself).


2014-05-08 20:47:59
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