Searching for reviews regarding the behavior of AMD 7000 series graphics cards (7800xt 7900xt 7900xtx) in Second Life

[Henri Beauchamp]

20 hours ago, Feuerblau said:

So yes, the VRAM ran full entirely here with the viewer. No matter if dynamic memory is chosen or the vanilla 2GB option.

See this old post of mine: AMD drivers may not be the only culprits (though, running a ”fixed” viewer regarding VRAM leaks, won't fix leaks happening at the OpenGL driver level, when the said driver got bugs).

[Feuerblau]

On 10/2/2023 at 5:21 PM, Henri Beauchamp said:

See this old post of mine: AMD drivers may not be the only culprits (though, running a ”fixed” viewer regarding VRAM leaks, won't fix leaks happening at the OpenGL driver level, when the said driver got bugs).

Older drivers don't show that though. With an old 22.x.x driver (22.1.1 in my case) or early 23.x.x versions that overflow won't happen at all.
The only problem is that newer games sometimes deny to run telling you your driver version is not supported because it's to old..
But i can work with that, while no game i play right now requires the newest version.

So, seems it is entirely driver related at least in my case. While it shows also on other OpenGL related software. Not only SL, counting on other OpenGL based forum topics recently i read to pinpoint the cultrip of this issue.
Sure the viewer may also has some issues. But i can't replicate your observation with certain previous driver versions.
Also it happened sometimes immediatelly. Not just slowly over time.

In my case the amount of VRAM surely changes up and down, that's expected. But never to an extend like i saw with the new Driver versions (16GB+ while even allocating to system memory).
It dangles around 3 to 4 never going higher than that anymore.
While the performance takes a slight hit, also early 23.x.x drivers work, without the performance drop from early 22.x.x drivers.

While both are an immense performance boost for AMD Graphics cards. 
Previous that OpenGL boost my 6900XT was slower than my old 1080ti. That was abysmal.
 

Edited October 8, 2023 by Feuerblau

[Alessa Addams]

I've also bought 7900 xtx. and from my experience so far i would not say i'd recommend it, for Second Life atleast.

I keep having issues where my drivers time out which crashes my game, this usually happened to older games ive played such as The Sims 3 and Resident Evil revelations 2. So i had to uninstall them after trying everything i could.

As for Second Life, it gets abit confusing. at a sandbox with no objects around i can reach about 300+ fps. but in public places it can go down to 5 fps.  

So i have done some tests with a friend of mine, She has a nvidia 3060. using the exact same settings and aiming the camera at the same directions. her fps stays at 30 while mine starts at 20 and slowly lowers down to 5-10 FPS    (( I also have a AMD Ryzen 9 7900X CPU while hers was an older model.))  

[AmeliaJ08]

On 12/27/2023 at 10:27 PM, Alessa Addams said:

I've also bought 7900 xtx. and from my experience so far i would not say i'd recommend it, for Second Life atleast.

I keep having issues where my drivers time out which crashes my game, this usually happened to older games ive played such as The Sims 3 and Resident Evil revelations 2. So i had to uninstall them after trying everything i could.

As for Second Life, it gets abit confusing. at a sandbox with no objects around i can reach about 300+ fps. but in public places it can go down to 5 fps.  

So i have done some tests with a friend of mine, She has a nvidia 3060. using the exact same settings and aiming the camera at the same directions. her fps stays at 30 while mine starts at 20 and slowly lowers down to 5-10 FPS    (( I also have a AMD Ryzen 9 7900X CPU while hers was an older model.))  

That is certainly odd. On paper the 7900XTX should exhibit no such performance degradation, it has oodles of power and VRAM to play with and even if the OpenGL driver isn't quite as efficient as Nvidia at the performance level we're talking about it shouldn't be perceptible and certainly should never mean slideshow like framerates.

It does point to a driver issue though and it's very unlikely to be fixed given how (relatively) unimportant Second Life performance will be to a firm like AMD.

 

 

[gwynchisholm]

On 9/15/2023 at 12:24 PM, kyte Lanley said:

gwynchisholm you haven’t answered me yet what card do you have?

So if I understand correctly Second Life uses Open GL 4.6 contrary to what you said.

Coming back to this months later to see this post.

Using 4.6 is different than utilizing 4.6, most openGL titles are forwards compatible, meaning they can real time run translation of older features to newer openGL versions without issues. SL as far as I’m aware is using something like openGL 4.2 in terms of its feature set but that really doesn’t matter since it’s also technically running 4.6 as well. OpenGL is weird

It will also run on older video cards that only support down to think openGL 2.1, GeForce6 series from 2004, that will still play sl. Because it’s still somewhat backwards compatible too.

So SL is more like a OpenGL 4.2 game, where you can technically use 4.6 but not all the features of 4.6 are built in, and it can run on older OpenGL versions but it disables some graphical qualities. I’m pretty sure if you attempted to turn on PBR features on something older than the nvidia 400 series it wouldn’t actually work, but I haven’t tried that so I’m not sure.

“What card do you have” might as well be all of them, close to 80 different gpus in total, at least 30 I’ve played SL with at one point or another, including more modern cards though not a whole lot super high end.  But I can confidently compare current midrange like the A770, 3060ti, 6600xt. I need to get a 4000 series nvidia card and a 7000 series amd card at some point for reference. But I’ve played this game on everything from low end igpus to a 3070ti and my current GPU of choice, the A770 (for the 16gb of vram). And everything in between, I regularly used an R9 Nano for a while, Vega 56, GTX 1080, first gen titan and titan x pascal, a GTX 680 and 560ti, and even some weird stuff like a pair of s3 chrome 5400ew’s in multichrome, which shouldn’t even work with SL but they support openGL 4.2 and even worked in multichrome since via/s3’s multi GPU thing is a lot different than crossfire or SLI.

I mean it still sucked, two low end gpus from 2011 isn’t going to amaze,  but I’m probably the only person here who has done that.

[gmskeith]

From my experience using both a AMD Radeon 6900xt and Nvidia RTX 4070ti in my system, it all boils down to which viewer you use for Second Life. AMD suffers performance in normal SL viewer, and Firestorm. Nvidia hands down if prefer those viewers, Alchemy viewer on the other hand, my AMD Radeon 6900XT had the same or exceeded the performance of my RTX 4070ti. Alchemy Viewer is the best to use with a AMD GPU in my personal experience.

[AmeliaJ08]

On 2/18/2024 at 8:53 PM, gmskeith said:

From my experience using both a AMD Radeon 6900xt and Nvidia RTX 4070ti in my system, it all boils down to which viewer you use for Second Life. AMD suffers performance in normal SL viewer, and Firestorm. Nvidia hands down if prefer those viewers, Alchemy viewer on the other hand, my AMD Radeon 6900XT had the same or exceeded the performance of my RTX 4070ti. Alchemy Viewer is the best to use with a AMD GPU in my personal experience.

Was testing a 5500XT which on paper should perform like a GTX 1660 or even a 1070... and for the most part it does. In everything except Firestorm where it could barely break 20fps using the same settings that yield 80+ with a 1070.

I know it's not the strongest Radeon and it's more or less the same as an RX 590 but wow, either AMD's OpenGL drivers are still a mess or Firestorm really hates that hardware.

Edited February 20 by AmeliaJ08

[gwynchisholm]

On 2/20/2024 at 5:27 PM, AmeliaJ08 said:

Was testing a 5500XT which on paper should perform like a GTX 1660 or even a 1070... and for the most part it does. In everything except Firestorm where it could barely break 20fps using the same settings that yield 80+ with a 1070.

I know it's not the strongest Radeon and it's more or less the same as an RX 590 but wow, either AMD's OpenGL drivers are still a mess or Firestorm really hates that hardware.

The 5500xt is a card which is heavily affected by its vram and the bus speed it’s on. The 4gb one on pcie 3.0 will perform much worse under load than the 8gb one would, or either on pcie 4.0

 

[AmeliaJ08]

On 2/23/2024 at 2:53 PM, gwynchisholm said:

The 5500xt is a card which is heavily affected by its vram and the bus speed it’s on. The 4gb one on pcie 3.0 will perform much worse under load than the 8gb one would, or either on pcie 4.0

 

It's an 8GB, it seems to have just been a generally failed card though given it can barely outperform the much older 580.

That said it was more of an example given the RX 580 also performs terribly in Firestorm. I'd love to see how a more capable Radeon holds up vs Nvidia in Firestorm these days but I just don't have any.

 

Edited February 24 by AmeliaJ08

[gwynchisholm]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

It's an 8GB, it seems to have just been a generally failed card though given it can barely outperform the much older 580.

That said it was more of an example given the RX 580 also performs terribly in Firestorm. I'd love to see how a more capable Radeon holds up vs Nvidia in Firestorm these days but I just don't have any.

 

I’ll have to get one of the higher end Radeon cards to play around with some. I think the only two I have which are higher performers than the 580 or 5500xt are the Vega 56, 6600 xt and r9 nano

and I love the r9 nano and all

Quote

But it’s a 4gb card which wouldn’t be a fair comparison against all the 8gb cards, should probably scour eBay for something like a 6800 or 7700 and add them to the reference pool

[Kathrine Jansma]

20 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

I’ll have to get one of the higher end Radeon cards to play around with some. I think the only two I have which are higher performers than the 580 or 5500xt are the Vega 56, 6600 xt and r9 nano

Did you ever try to run the Vega 56 with the Resizeable BAR support hack enabled? (e.g. AMD Smart Access Memory)

I saw a nice performance boost that way, even if AMD officially only allows it for newer cards like the 6xxx series.

[eImagination]

HI, I recently did a custom build job for a desktop.  Has the 7900 xt  hellhound GPU, with the AMD 7800 x3d CPU and 64 RAM.  It was built for speed.  or so i thought lol.

If I didnt tweek the settings under graphics, the game would not be playable.  I average from 10 - 30 fps in a crowded club, with tweeked settings.  I am about to experirment with the AMD software after I try to do a little more research.

I am not a techie but if you have questions i will be more than happy to try and answer them.  

 

 

[Jackson Redstar]

The problem with SL is that it is not a "game" really and other than users of SL there is no outside interest, but would be nice to see some side by side testing of the latest Nvidia vs AMD GPUs

That being said I have recently discovered VRAM is king in SL Solves alot of the stuttering issues for sure. I really don't know what the VRAM' shared' memory' is - my old 8gig card never dipped into that. but in the same crowded events I go to I often see 10-13 gigs of VRAM usage out of the 16 I have now

[JeromFranzic]

7 hours ago, eImagination said:

HI, I recently did a custom build job for a desktop.  Has the 7900 xt  hellhound GPU, with the AMD 7800 x3d CPU and 64 RAM.  It was built for speed.  or so i thought lol.

If I didnt tweek the settings under graphics, the game would not be playable.  I average from 10 - 30 fps in a crowded club, with tweeked settings.  I am about to experirment with the AMD software after I try to do a little more research.

I am not a techie but if you have questions i will be more than happy to try and answer them.  

 

 

It's SL's engine that's messing with all of us, regardless of PC used. Optimization is basically not a huge priority around here. Or it doesn't seem like it anyway. (Sorry, Moles!) 

I can play some of the latest AAA games on my GTX 1050 in low settings, and they still look and run better than SL for me, but that's because they're well optimized.

Of course I will have to score a newer laptop at some point but my overall SL experience is solid for me, especially with Lubuntu.

[gwynchisholm]

4 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

I really don't know what the VRAM' shared' memory' is

When you run out of dedicated vram, modern systems will start to use system ram as video memory, which is drastically slower and will heavily impact performance. If you disable this capability, it’ll mean games will just hard crash without enough vram. 
A similar thing happens with system ram, if you run out of ram, the system starts using the page file or swap file as ram, which is extremely slow but is better than the pc outright stopping because it’s out of ram.

[AmeliaJ08]

I've got an RX6600 on its way to me for a repair, if I can get it fixed up I'll definitely try it in SL. I'm curious if 6000 series was any better in Firestorm, I have my doubts but never tried one yet. It's rare I even see these cards, either they're all very reliable or nobody bought them

On paper it should be about the same as a 2070...

Edited August 29 by AmeliaJ08