Second Life and Virtual Worlds
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.
Road to VR has an article and video up on how to fake an infinitely long corridor in VR. Some people have found a way to give the impression of walking in a straight line while actually walking in a circle.
This is pretty awesome. But, it also shows that VR developers have realized there is a space problem for VR. What they have requires a room bigger than 7m (20ft) x 5m (15ft). This is typical ‘small’ master bedroom size in America.
AUSTIN TATE has written an article on how to use VorpX with Second Life and OpenSim to get a VR view. See: Second Life and OpenSim in VR using VorpX.
Sounds fun and reasonable, US$40.
Adobe updates their software often. Recently they updated Photoshop (15.5.0). I just got the previous version figured out… now things have moved around again.
This image required I clip me out of the picture and put in a shadow and background. The entire refine selection process has changed. I had to go find a tutorial. Here is the tutorial that got me started on the right foot.