October 22, 2024 the Firestorm Team released a new version of their viewer: 7.1.11.
I am running 7.1.9, their initial PBR release. I’ve had a few minor problems and it is a little slow. But not so slow as to be frustrating. If I were still playing in SL’s combat games, I would probably be complaining. The FPS numbers and comparison to a previous version is here: Firestorm Viewer 7.1.9.74745 PBR.
I skipped the version 7.1.10. I wasn’t excited about it and… I have been playing with Alchemy Viewer.
The Firestorm blog is Announcing Firestorm 7.1.11. You can read more details there. And Inara has her review of the viewer up: Firestorm 7.1.11: DeltaFPS. So, I am only providing some empirical performance numbers.
| Location | FPS v.11 Desk | FPS v.9 | |
| Porch 512m | 30* | 51 | |
| Porch 128m | 45* | 46 | |
| Green Room @ 2200m DD=128m | 112 | 119 | |
| Nelsonia 4peps @ DD= 128m | 64 | ||
| Arapaima 9peps @ 128m | 55 | ||
| Exhale Club 68peps @ 128m | 30 |
*Weird. Making measurements this time I noticed a difference. FPS numbers start low and S L O W L Y build to a max. Getting to the max value took several minutes more than a couple of times. Also, when I switch away to another app the viewer gives up CPU cycles to the other app. A good thing… but coming back to the viewer I experience another slow build to the max FPS.
Also, one time I would get one set of numbers and another time a much different set of numbers. So, I got horrible numbers, OK numbers, good numbers, and better numbers. Also, switching away from the viewer app to another app had its oddities. Mostly the FPS would start recovering from the CPU conserving mode and return to something better. But on occasion I could not get the numbers to recover.
I was scratching my head on this oddity. I tried restarting the computer and running only the viewer. While I have a load of Windows background apps running that has always been the case. So, I think the change is in the viewer. Or… PBR sucks up all the performance… but that doesn’t explain the oddities I am seeing.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be experimenting as I play in SL. If I learn what is going on, I plan to update this article. And… there is an interesting new feature coming in FS. Scroll to the end. Look for the page 2 link…