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If too much heat is the problem, cooling is the answer. There are Mac and Windows accessories for measuring GPU temperature and changing the speed of the fan to get the temperature under control. Perhaps you can find something similar for Linux.
I haven't really noticed FPS as a cause of heat. I get high FPS at 500m, low FPS at ground level, and suffered from more freezing at ground level before I installed the temperature monitor. If you run with GPU temperature monitoring enabled you can figure out the correlations for yourself - also watch out for areas with lots of transparent textures. "If too much heat is the problem, cooling is the answer" Yes I also thought this. I bought a laptop aluminum cooler with 2 fans. I still had to hear the internal fan making a lot of noise each time I was running Second Life and now same result... blown GPU. It's a lot easier to keep a GPU cool with a big heatsink and fan if you have a desktop computer. In a laptop you can't change anything. You can just hear the fan, and sometimes remove the dust. That's all.
Heat is a problem yes, but it's also a consequence of rendering frames you don't really need. The only choice you have in SL is to lower graphic quality, this will increase FPS, but not lower the heat. You can also increase graphic quality, this will lower FPS, but not the heat. SL always takes all available resources it can, and just tries to reach an unlimited number of frames each second. I just want to tell to SL, stop !!! Render only a few frames each second, so my laptop can remain cooler and quieter. So now I'll only use Second Life on a laptop again if there's a FPS limiter. I think an FPS cap might be usefull. I use a program called glc for video capture that does just this but it only does it while recording.
Aquarius, you did not notice that more FPS are causing heat ? I can hear my fan when VSync is off. The speed of my fan depends on the heat, and the heat produced by my system depends on the electrical power it needs. And I confirmed this with a measure of the power usage, just read my test here:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=77084 The more frames the system renders the more electrical power it needs. For a desktop user, using this limit will only help to reduce waste of energy (and sometimes noise). For a laptop user with an overheating chip it seems far more important. Thank you MdMax for your measures and the link. So you were able to save up to 32 Watts when limiting the frame rate to the screen refresh rate. Limiting to the real needs of the user would be a fantastic way to save even more energy without reducing image quality. But as you said, to get votes, we should tell this to people who care about energy waste. That's not easy to find. No one seems to care about this in SL.
Energy saving is a very good thing. Until a FPS limiter comes you can start the viewer with --cooperative option ( see http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Client_parameters
 ). Wow Armin ! Thanks a lot ! I added "-cooperative 25" to my command line for my desktop so SL waits 25ms after each frame. It can help a lot until a FPS limiter comes. But unlike a FPS limiter this seems also to reduce minimum FPS, when you need them the most. It's like underclocking hardware. But I'll use this now ! Thank you !
But you should consider some players that spend 500 $ for buying a graphic card , that like benchmarks and high FPS. I am in this category and i will not be happy and favourable about any Fps drop.
@MissSara:
I dissagree with the OP's statement: "I don't need 45 FPS or more when building. 10FPS would be enough" Personally I would love 60fps all the time. But you dont seem to understand what this feature request implies: Personally I'd prefer for this related issue to get fixed (i think it has but i have yet to test it properly ) http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1844 @MIssSara: Like BETLOG said, being able to limit FPS does not mean you will no more be able to set this to "unlimited" or to a number like 200FPS. But keep in mind that rendering useless frames (FPS above screen refresh rate), is just energy waste and additional noise from your computer fans. You may be happy to know your computer is able to render 210FPS like MdMax, but you don't need this all the time. Do you always drive at 180mph ?
 I hope sometimes you're slower.
@BETLOG: 60 FPS is allready possible if you set your screen refresh rate to 60Hz, activate VSync on your graphic driver, and if your computer has enough performance to render 60FPS in heavy sims full of avatars with high rendering costs. But I'd really like to be able to limit to something like 30 or even 24FPS. Movies have 24FPS. I don't use SL as an action game where I may need more. I hate the noise produced by fans since I know that laptop GPUs produce so much heat that they are unable to work more than 18 months. There are so much settings in SL about image quality, what to render or not (debug menu)... but no setting about the maximum frames each second. Why ? At Linden Lab, do they still use Pentium III CPUs that will never reach any maximum and have silent heatsinks ? |
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New Feature
Open
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Please add a FPS limiter
I just hope SL users also care about energy waste. So, just vote for it !
Please also check this issue:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7212