Friday, April 18, 2008

Avatar Rendering Cost... holy cow!

As Massively reports, the new RC client has an option (ctrl-alt-shift-D to get the "Advanced" menu, then Advanced>Rendering>Info Displays>Avatar Rendering Cost) to display the "Avatar Rendering Cost" of avatars you can see. The effects of various clothing and attachments can vary widely.

In the article, Tateru Nino shows how her ARC varies with changes in clothing and the like; her ARC typically runs from about 400 to 500. So, I fired up the client and turned on the option, thinking I'd probably run a bit higher than that...

...7500?!?!

Jewelry, alpha textures, and hair can seriously run the ARC up.

Good heavens; now I want to go around and apologize to everybody I've ever been near! Can I ever wear those gowns with a clear conscience again?

At least I have an outfit that gives me an ARC of 350 while still having nice hair for those times that ARC is crucial.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

After reading this entry I got curious about my ARC. I tend to frequent fantasy sims with elves and dragons and women wearing the most incredibly beautiful gowns and fairy wings etc. With great fear I loaded RC 1.20 and hoped for the best. Lots of graphic goodies that lagged my poor pc to its limit; removing Basic Shaders helped speed things up considerably. Of course then you lose half of what Windlight is all about. Oh well, beautiful sunsets or 30 fps? Hmmm....gotta go with the 30 fps; I'll watch the sunset out my kitchen window.

Results: My avatar weighed in around 2000. I was one of the low ones. Most avs were in the 3000-4000 range with one devastating lovely fairy tipping the ARC at 6500. Probably explains why the dance parties tend to lag. Those Linden servers are running at max with 60 avatars at 3000 or higher. And many of us have particles too (fairy dust makes things more magical).

As far as apologizing for the lag -- not going to happen. That's like me apologizing to someone half my size because I use more oxygen to live. It gets back to the root cause of problems in SL.
If you let folks do it, they will. More features means more server load. Ultra realism is great but if your pc can't deal with it what good is it? Most of us can't run out and upgrade our computers every few months to handle the new features that SL keeps incorporating. Then the bottom line becomes SL or everything else? And that's when the avatar gets put in the closet until I can catch up.

Tateru Nino said...

The server is under basically the same load regardless of your ARC - the viewer is what tends to start chunking.

Cheyenne Palisades said...

Thanks for cuing your readers in about Avatar Rendering Coast. I checked, mine was 1200. By taking off earrings that didn't show with the hair I was wearing, I got it down to about 1020. But holy cow, 7500?!!! Hehe