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:

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.

It has been some time since I checked the performance of my Firestorm Viewer. The last check was 9/2022. So, over a year.

This year I had some trouble running the tests. My house in Bellisseria was not rezzing. I mean floors and walls were missing. After a couple of three logins, I got the floors and walls but had to wait for the textures to fully render.

I checked and found Windows again used 100% of my hard drive’s capacity when a region was being difficult. The viewer used little CPU, GPU, and network resources while it waited on the hard drive.

Ever since the release of Windows 11, my Win-10 has been having this problem of 100% disk use for 5 to 15 minutes. Occassionally more. Very annoying.

Firestorm Hot Fix v6.6.17

With this version, I am getting almost the same numbers as in 2022 with v6.6.4. You can use the link above if you want to compare.

Second Life Viewer

The FS and SL viewers are similar. Except for my Green Room. This is the recent PBR-enabled SL viewer.

The first part of this article is here.

UPDATE! 9/27/2022

It came to my attention that Firestorm 6.3.3 either changed my graphics setting for Enable Vsync or the viewer handles it differently. So I went back to check my settings and found it indeed was limiting the upper limit of FPS. So, I need to revise my measurements to keep them consistent with previous measurements.

This recent Firestorm Viewer update is said to help with performance. So, I measured some numbers and dug up the previous versions’ numbers. The numbers I get say this version is definitely faster. But the Green Room numbers in my skybox are down. Curious. They went down while all others went up.

I use presets for the 512- and 128-meter draw distance tests. So, the viewer settings are essentially the same for each test across all versions. These are impromptu tests. Basically, simple and easy rather than rigorous and precise. So, it will be no surprise if your numbers are different.

I have upgraded my network and Internet service. Previously I got about 50 to 80Mbps download. Now with a new gigabit gateway and switches download speed is over 200Mbps. So, regions rez really quickly. YAY!

However, textures still take some time to completely rez. Everything near me when I rez in will fully rez almost immediately. Stuff farther away looks good until I zoom on it. Those can take a while to completely rez. Firestorm’s right-click Texture Refresh seems quicker now and helps. But my network upgrade did not solve all my render delays.

This network change doesn’t make much difference to the FPS. Once everything downloads, render speed is constant. For the previous tests, I waited a long time for a region to rez. A region I have not been in for a time now takes 5 to 15 seconds to rez all the textures. Previously it could take minutes. Returning to a region the same day gives me an almost instant render. But not always. Not sure why it works sometimes.