Released on June 20, 2024 – Thursday. We now have a new major update to the viewer. The Firestorm Viewer’s Project website has a long article on the viewer. Inara’s blog has more ‘explanatory’ article here. Between the two you should get all the tech info you could want. So… I’m not going to repeat it.
My take after a couple days…
Performance
The SL forum is popping with love and hate… The Luddites that long ago lost touch with reality and sing their perpetual poor me songs with choruses about how bad, stupid, and tyrannical the Lab is and how awful it is they are being forced to update their computer. And there are, as usual, a number of people rolling their eyes.
I like to check performance. I do care about appearance. But performance often decides how much appearance I’ll give up or upgrade. I want to be able to fly and sail. I’m not much of a driver. I run off the road… a lot.
So… the previous version 6.6.17 was what I ran until Friday. You can see the stats from my practical but technically lame testing here (12/19/2023).
This year I live in SL in the same place. Also, I have not tweaked the viewers setting after installing 7.1.9. Except for Draw Distance.
My new measurements are:
| Location | FPS v7 Desk | FPS v7 Lap | FPS v6 |
| Porch 512m | 51 | 18.6 | |
| Porch 128m | 46 | 10.3 | 40.5 |
| Porch 128m w/snow | Snow Melted | 37-48 | |
| Green Room @ 2200m DD=128m | 119 | 23.4 | 150 |
| Nelsonia 14peps @ DD= 128m | 53 | 70-74 | |
| Arapaima 20peps @ 128m | 63* | 50-55 | |
| Exhale Club 57peps @ 128m | 41 | 48-52 |
Performance is mixed. Some areas seems better and some worse, as in slower. The oddity in in Arapaima’s Safe Hub is from the avatars being spread out all over the place. In Nelsonia the avatars were clumped together on the landing point. So the number within the field of view probably accounts for the difference.
I run an NVIDIA 1060. A bit old but apparently more than adequate. Some are complaining about how slow the viewer is. I suspect they are using the built-in graphics in the CPU. I’ll I did test that idea on my laptop when I get around to it. It has no dedicated graphics processor.
I noticed the scenes render quickly. I think faster than the version 6 viewer. Avatars are taking a bit. I’ll have to use the viewer more to decide if it is any slower rendering avatars than the version 6 viewer.
I do see a difference in the Shinny. It tends to be bluer than in the v6 viewer.
Color has changed. Using the default region settings in Coyote, Bellisseria things are more saturated. Which I like. But, it is a change and many do NOT like change. There are EEP settings to correct the environment to look more like a pre v7/PBR render.
PBR is about Physical Based Rendering. Meaning the system tries to render materials based on what they are… metal, wood, plastic, or cloth. Still, it matters what the creator creates and the settings they use. It will take some time for PBR materials to spread through SL.
In general, I find the contrast too high and the Shinny distracting using PBR and default settings. So I want to tweak things for photos. Trying to do so I ran into a problem or two. I could NOT adjust Ambient Light. WTH! I used PhotoTools->ENV->Personal Lighting… I just couldn’t get it to work. No visible change no matter how drastically I changed settings. Then I tried using the top menu World->Environment->Personal Lighting… and it worked. Yay! I got my glorious skin complexion back.
So, just to see if this was really a problem, I went back to the PhotoTools panel and tried again. Now things worked from there too. Hummm. Relog the viewer and try again. Via PhotoTools things still work. So, I’ll assign that to ‘odd happenstance’ and be happy things are working.
I think things rez faster on login than they did with v6. I do notice a marked difference in render time for things in my cache and things I have to download. This may be why avatars seem slower to render. And that may be perceptual thing since everything else is rendering sooner.
Summary
I like the new version. I think it is an overall improvement in performance and appearance.
I do think those without a dedicated graphics card and using an older CPU will be unhappy. I suspect because I tried my laptop running Win11, which means it’s a 10th generation or newer.
I found it way slower and laggy. Things render pretty quickly. But motion (walking) was choppy. Just what I expect at single digit frame rates.
There is discussion in Firestorm Support that white listing the viewer with Anti-virus must be redone. So remove Firestorm locations from the exceptions list. Restart the computer and add Firestorm location back into the exceptions list. I haven’t done that yet.
I’ll have to see if I can tweak the laptop viewer for better performance. I don’t expect much.
UPDATE
6/25 – Using the v7 some more… attending the SL21B Townhall meeting Tuesday with 200+ people attending and after wondering around SL21B for a couple of hours a couple of things happened. One, my computer was alerting me that I was running out of memory. I have 32GB of ram. Things were running really slow even after leaving the SL21B regions. Second the viewer locked up and went black screen. I was able to close the viewer and restart. All is working well again.
So…. there may be some memory leaks that get serious after 3+ hours of use.