Measuring Individual Avatar Rendering Cost on Sim Stability? or First Step to new Restrictions and Limits in Second Life
Measuring Individual Avatar Rendering Cost on Sim Stability? or First Step to new Restrictions and Limits in Second Life
In an interesting post on their blog Linden Labs discussed the Avatar Rendering Cost feature. The article started off interestingly enough blamming the lag of Second Life on the free nature and design freedom of Second Life. Yes I am sure that is the primary reason…. Any ways, the Avatar Rending Cost is a new feature that shows a score on how the texture, prims, scripts, etc of an Avatar effect GPU memory bandwidth. Of course this would be much more interesting to see actual values rather than a score. Or an availability score. Such as oh your darn avatar is using up 34 points of 34,000 available! The funny part is that the Avatar Rendering Cost feature takes up a large share of CPU and GPU memory bandwidth. Lol.
At the end Linden Labs asks that everyone tone down their avatars or rather that you ask them to. Lol in the blog it even says “And no, in case you’re wondering- this isn’t an attempt to offload our big responsibility to make the viewer more efficient!”. At least you know what you are saying :).
Blog comments immediately brought up the worse case scenarious of limits and restrictions in Second Life. One avatar TheBlack Box noted that average scores for new avatars was around 50 with most Second Life players (not noobs) coming in at 500 and power users with cool avatars around 5,000. Again it would have been helpful to know how many a Sim can take before slowing down.
Here is what effects your score:
Just being there +1
Each texture +5
Each Prim attachement +10
Invisible Shiny or Glowing +1
Size of Prim meter, axis +1
Bump Prim +4
Each Transparent face of prim +4
Each animated textured face +4
Prim is Flexi +4
Particle emitter +16