secondlife / secondlife/viewer

Improve texture streaming to reduce stutter

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#4,274 7 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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CannyUpvoted enhancement maint-pe performance team:viewer
Dominant language
C++
Stars
299
Forks
146
Avg merge
1d 9h
Merged PRs (30d)
88

Description

Texture streaming can be pretty brutal in terms of performance. Here are some examples:

  • Microstutters can occur when VRAM is low but overall frame rate can be high
  • Memory usage can be higher compared to older viewers, for example. 6.6.17. This is usually going to be due to texture usage.
  • There can be some thread contention between loading threads and the main thread with textures

Generally these issues have been difficult to nail down.

Test Plan

TBD.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the reported microstutters, elevated texture-related memory usage, and contention between loading threads and the main thread under low-VRAM conditions. Trace the texture streaming path and compare behavior with viewer 6.6.17. Done means reduced stutter and memory usage without harmful thread contention, with a completed test plan.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
game-dev, performance
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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