Dolphin Viewer Release Review

A new release of the Dolphin 3 Viewer is out: 3.3.3 (23731). This one seems to be mostly small bug fixes. The announcement on the release lists these:

  • The avatar offset reset button in the status panel is now properly hidden in mouse look.
  • A new setting in Preferences -> Dolphin Viewer 3 -> UI that controls what the Dolphin does when a scripted object sends you several menu popups at the same time.
  • A new reset button in the extended build options floater, which resets the pivot offset options so that the coordinate origin is back in the center of the object again. My wife is happy about this one.
  • A fix for how fading music in and out behaves when you teleport within the same parcel.
  • A fix for the bug that prohibits the mouse cursor from switching back to the normal arrow shape when hovering over certain UI elements.

Download and Experience

All seems very typical and nothing out of the ordinary.

I find the viewer gives me about the same performance as the Linden Lab® Development Viewer, 10 to 15 FPS in my Core2 Quad w/ASUS GTX560Ti.

The Viewer’s Fast Timers show it is spending 62ms rendering a frame. My CPU cores are run about 25% and the 560 about 15 to 45% load. There are almost no page faults. So, I don’t see a hardware bottle neck. Viewers using the latest Linden Lab® code are just slow. Finding a fix is like questing for the BIG ‘O’.

3 thoughts on “Dolphin Viewer Release Review

  1. About your frame rates – what is you draw distance, Viewer network config, etc., and are you talking normal or deferred rendering active – and if the latter, with / witout lighting options being set?

    I’m curious, as I run a Q6600 Quad core and older Ge9800GT (w/1024Mb), with Win 7/32. If your frame rates are in “normal” (non-deferred) mode, then I’m getting around double your own experience. If you’re running in deferred & with lighting set, then we’re probably running at around the same rates.

    Obviously, frame rates are highly subjective, but it would be interesting to run cross-hardware / OS comparisons based on the same broad criteria…

    • I run with L&S, Ambient Occlusion, and Sun/Moon shadows. I’ve tried VBO on and off, better on. Multi-thread on/off, better on. DD is usually 128m. Changing DD usually only affects rez time more than FPS for me. AA is 2x. Anisotropic On and adds no performance hit, most of the variable network choices in the viewer are set to HTTP and multi-threaded. Depending on the day HTTP or UDP is better. With bandwidth at 1,500kbps my network load seldom goes over 600k. I’m Vista 32-bit, which is known slower than Vista/Win7 64-bit.

      The nVidia settings I’ve played with for some time. I usually have CUDA on (no choice), Pre-render 3, multi-display Single, power to Performance, Texture Quality, Tri-linear On, Thread Opt On, Triple Buff On, and Vert Sync Force Off.

      From time to time I go through playing with these settings. The very first time I went through them I got a 30% improvement. I’ve not seen any better settings than I use.

      I can start turning off SL features and improve performance. For play in some SL games I do.

      I am mostly experimenting with various hardware settings in BIOS to see if I can find a bottleneck. Over-clocking obviously helps some. But, when I tweak up the clocks enough to make much different the chips run way hotter.

      Niran’s viewer is excellent for experimenting with settings. I run faster in Niran’s. I just can’t find anything in the menus… 🙂

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