Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I haven’t been working with Blender lately. RL work and sort of waiting for Project Bento to move into RC status. But, I do skim the Blender news and art. One of the interesting places to look is SketchFab.com. Where I came across this 3D picture.
If you aren’t familiar with 3D miages; the icon in the lower left is the clue it is a 3D image, click inside it and drag, roll the mouse wheel to zoom. Once the model is loaded you can click into VR or Full Screen.
Rights management is complicated. Photo sharing sites are by necessity complicated. Flickr.com has made it as easy as possible to share and manage rights. But, people still mess up, authors and consumers. Especially in an age where people are moving fast and using technology to speed things up.
A point in debate is whether an image placed on Flickr and marked All Rights Reserved can be shared. That is a different question from WHETHER it should be shared.
Today my Internet service sucks. I finally restarted my gateway. That helped, but some sites remain a problem. So, I started to look at what’s up with that…
It hadn’t occurred to me but, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are a target for hackers. I’m not sure why they choose to attack them. I wasn’t curious enough to dig up reasons. But, that they do get attacked affects our use of Second Life™, since the Lab changed over to using CDN’s.
August 2, 2016 Nvidia released their top of the line video card the Titan-X. There is a previous generation Titan-X. To distinguish between the previous gen and the current generation we have to include the architecture descriptor; Maxwell (previous) or Pascal (new).
How much faster is this Titan-X Pascal than the previous one? Almost twice as fast.
You can see the card is about 30% faster than the GTX1080.
In the last 10 minutes or so of the Third Party Developers’ Meeting the problem with AMD video cards problems came up.
It seems especially the R series of video cards (RX480 etc.) have a problem with OpenGL. See: BUG-20057 – Visual Artifacts with ALM enabled on some AMD graphics cards.
This bug is dependent on screen size. So, you may be able to escape it by changing your viewer window size or screen resolution.
There is a thread in the AMD forum about the problem. It is way techy. See: OpenGL display artifact on W7100.
There is debate in the SL Forum as to which video card is a better choice for Second Life™. I’ll try to provide the information needed to make a decision. But, I don’t see a deal maker or breaker that would pull the choice to any one card.
Also there are no good benchmarks, yet, of which new cards work best with Second Life. The following benchmark tests show the cards’ performance are very dependent on how the game is designed.
In the above video he is testing DirectX12 verses Vulkan. Vulkan is the next generation OpenGL. While development on OpenGL has not stopped, it appears to be similar to SL and Sansar. Except I have no doubt Vulkan will be the render engine of choice for most game makers moving on from OpenGL.