Second Life® Viewer Comparison

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Just 3 viewers. More about my curiosity about AYAstorm than a real PSA.

I am surprised how much slower AYAstorm is than Firestorm. I did notice AYAstorm includes OpenSIM support. Maybe that slows it down, but I doubt it. I tried to get AI to give me some idea of how much OS support might slow the render/FPS. That was pretty much a dead end. What little I could get from AI suggests what I already surmised, it is the render pipeline accounting for the difference. But there is no solid evidence that is the case.

Note, this test is not useful for comparison to earlier tests, at least for the Ground Level test. I have changed my front yard. Adding trees and grass and stuff has changed the render cost. The green Room (now orange), Nelsonia, Arapaima, and Warehouse 21 tests should be comparable.

I put some effort into making sure the Graphics settings are the same for all the tests.

AYAstrom Render
AYAstrom r31.2 – Render Test

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Second Life® Performance Benchmarking Report: 2008-Era Assets vs. Modern Animesh/Bento/PBR

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This is a research project I took on so I would know how to answer the uninformed grievance posters. You probably know some of them if you participate in the SL Forum. They complain and gripe. Whatever you challenge them with, they ignore. They don’t mind contradicting them selves.

The claim came up that Linden Lab® was not upgrading SL as they should or at all. I play in SL every week… almost daily. You’ve seen me post benchmarks on various viewers and features of SL. But if I wanted to prove I know what I say is accurate, what could I point to? There isn’t a “thing” or “article”. So… I had AI do the research and write a report. The report follows.

You’ll see the AI setup the comparison by figuring out what SL was and is now. It got pretty detailed. After all that is done and it makes all its disclaimers, it gets to the comparison.

What can you do with this information? Other than embarrass the dofuses? Actually, if you are considering upgrading for better performance or saving money on a new computer then this is a guide to what to spend money on and where to save dollars.

Executive Overview

Over roughly fifteen years, the dominant performance bottleneck in Second Life® has inverted. In 2008 the viewer was network- and asset-stream-bound: scenes had to be downloaded over a connection that the official wiki described as adequate at only 500 kbps, then transformed into a 3D view in real time (SL Wiki: Lag). Assets were tiny — a classic system avatar cost a baseline of just ~1,000 complexity points and rendered as a handful of baked-textured mesh pieces (SL Wiki: Mesh/Rendering weight).

By 2026 the picture reversed. Bandwidth and caching improved one to two orders of magnitude, but asset complexity grew roughly two orders of magnitude — so the bottleneck migrated off the network and onto local GPU rasterization, CPU draw-call setup, scene traversal, and VRAM/texture pressure. On mid-range hardware, a crowded region of modern avatars collapses well before the network does. The limiting resource is now compute and memory bandwidth inside the user’s own machine.

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Second Life Doom and Gloom

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This Second Life® is dying claim is an ongoing subject of discussion in the Second Life® Forum. See this thread for the current discussion: Doom thread. (July 2026) I want to add some RL reality to the discussion. But, I decided I have too much to say for the forum. So… here.

Closed Shopping Mall - Second Life
Not going to happen…

Consider

I am convinced Second Life is unlikely to explode or vanish in the next five years; it’s far more likely to keep slowly shrinking while Linden Lab tunes the business to a smaller, older, high‑spend audience and lets the grid quietly persist.  [community.secondlife]

So… here’s the thing. Every year the forums light up with another “Second Life is doomed” thread, and this one is no different. Same worries. Same dark jokes. Same fear that one day we’ll log in and find the grid gone, which is very dramatic for a platform that mostly behaves like an aging mall with a few busy clubs still open.

The important question isn’t whether SL is doomed in the theatrical sense. It’s whether the platform is on a controlled glide path or headed for an ugly break. I think the answer is the first one.

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What If This Breakthrough Changed the Second Life World We Travel In?

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I saw this way interesting video. It is about how we are mapping the world into 3D space for computers. It is so good it is being used to train pilots for rescue missions in dangerous terrain. Also for training self-driving vehicles.  So, can we walk our avatars through such a world?

The interesting part of Bilawal Sidhu’s “Craziest Mapping Breakthrough” is not the map UI. It is the idea that this tech could eventually change the 3D world we move through, especially for sailing and flying in spaces that feel bigger and smoother than today’s 256×256 regions.

So… instead of dreaming about a shinier World Map window, think about longer, more continuous routes. Less “box to box,” more “real journey.”

Where SL Is Today

Second Life’s foundation is still the region grid: each standard region is 256×256 meters, with teleports, crossings, land impact budgets, and simulators all tied to that. It works and it is part of why SL has lasted this long.[2][4] Or so some think.

You feel that grid most when you travel. Sailors in Blake Sea, pilots over mainland, and drivers on Bellisseria roads all hit the same issue: region crossings can be smooth or they can be… memorable.[5][6][7] Duh!

LL has been modernizing in other ways — performance, mobile viewer work, better onboarding, and AI helper experiments — but the 256×256 region structure is still the skeleton everything hangs on.[8][9][2] So… can that change?

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Second Life User Group Tech Report – June 2026

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NEW

I went looking for more interesting news. This post is an experiment. A.I. is doing the research and structuring the information. I’m trying to keep it focused.

There are videos posted by the Lab and third-parties that get very little notice by the basic search engines. Also ‘X’ does not seems a favorite of Google or Bing. But much of the juicy news is in those sources. I don’t have time to make it to all those meetings nor watch all those videos. So… A.I. It researches it all in less than 5 minutes.

Leave it to AI
Very Tired Hobit Researcher – Leave it to AI

I know many are concerned about AI hallucinating. I got burned earlier this year. But as I learn, I have realized ‘machines’ do not hallucinate. But AI has been taught to speculate, guess, theorize, and unless told to do otherwise, make up answers. Often doing whatever is easy. Do we have lazy machines now?

Humans hallucinate. You cannot tell them to stop. They can’t. But you can prompt AI to NOT speculate, guess, theorize, nor make up answers. It works. So, the information appearing here should be solid. See what you think. – Nal

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Second Life Technology Report – June 2026

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This is a busy month with Pride celebrations and SL23B. Lots to see and do.

Official SL Platform Updates

  • June 8, 2026: Linden Lab announced fee adjustments, including reduced land tier prices for many Private region types (effective June 15), lower minimum L$ purchase fees, changes to LindeX transaction fees, and increased Premium membership subscription fees (effective for new/renewed subs from July 8). These aim to make land more affordable while expanding membership value.
  • Ongoing: SL23B celebrations (June 18–July 19) highlighted platform aspects through “Meet the Lindens” sessions, including discussions on engineering challenges like performance/rendering, OpenGL-to-modern API transitions, region crossings, WebRTC voice, and upcoming Lua scripting.
SL23B - Funky Monkey Temple
SL23B – Funky Monkey Temple

Simulator / Grid Updates

  • June 12 & 25: Simulator releases with routine maintenance and rolling restarts.
  • Grid Stability: Multiple rolling restarts. L$ transaction issues around June 25–26 (investigated and fixed). World Map region name display issues in some TPVs addressed.

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