Second Life and Virtual Worlds
May 7th NVIDIA released two new video cards; GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The 1080 seems to be the most impressive card going, at least for the moment.
These cards sell for GTX 1080 US$599 and the GTX 1070 for $379. It sounds expensive, but these cards outperform anything else being made by a large margin. The Titan X is listed on Amazon for $1,149. The GTX1070 outperforms the Titan X. It outperforms the 980 by nearly 2 times and generates VR imaging at more than twice the rate.
In Second Life we run on OpenGL. Most Windows games run on DirectX. Microsoft has announced DirectX 12. It will essentially make NVIDIA 500 series and older cards obsolete. To use DX12 you’ll need a 600 or newer series card. This video explains what is happening. OpenGL is not left out.
It looks like ATI/AMD is making a replacement for OpenGL called Vulkan. It sounds like Vulcan is targeting more devices than DirectX 12. I expect to see Vulcan working on an Android mobile device way before DX12. I still have serious doubts we will see real time 3D render of good quality on mobile devices in the near future.
So, is the Lab planning to upgrade SL to Vulkan? I don’t know. I’ve asked. Vulkan is open source.
Word is OpenGL will still be developed. I think that odd. OpenGL is referred to in one place that came up in my research as a high level API, higher than Vulkan. The basic geek speak uses high and low to refer to how close you are to the hardware… the closer you get to the hardware the more programming you have to do. With higher level languages the more the language does for you.
Think of it this way… a low level addition command would be written as: place this value in Reg#1 and this other value in Reg2 then preform an XOR operation on then and place the result in Reg3 then move Reg3 to memory as variable X. A high level language would let you write the code as A + B = X and handle all the registers, operations and moves for you.
There are good reasons for using higher and lower level languages and API’s. But, generally we want API’s that produce more overall efficiency. From the other stuff said about Vulkan I would think it should be called a higher level API…. it does way more for the programmer. Whether it is higher or lower it is the next gen descendant of OpenGL.
For those of us playing in SL this means little today. But, suggests that play in Sansar will mean we will need a 600 series card or higher.
If you are looking for more details start at the Wikipedia: Vulkan API.
I came across a link to this article in the SL Forum: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains. That means if you are getting 20 FPS you should jump to 300 FPS.
The long version is the video and it is way techy:
[youtube -bCeNzgiJ8I]
So, what are they saying? Loosely… They are creating sides of the render process that are not locked together. This means the CPU and GPU are mostly never waiting on each other. As it is now, single note pads (large blocks of memory} are being cleared, being drawn to by a single process to build up images, then used, and erased with the process starting over. Multiple processes need multiple note pads. The next process can’t use the resources until the preceding processes release the resources/note pads. The memory that makes up the note pads has to be moved around.
There is a new driver out. If you are using all the latest nVidia software, you are getting automatic update notices.
I am just now downloading it.
I’ll post more information once I get to use it.
If you are an nVidia owner and have used the nVidia forum, you know they closed it to upgrade it. It like many forums was being overrun by spammers. The forum has been down for weeks. Now it is open, as of November 1 or 12, depending on who you read.
The forum has been rearranged. CUDA developers now have their own forum. If you don’t know, CUDA is more for math geeks than gamer geeks. So, apparently they haven’t played well together.
A new video driver is out from nVidia. The previous good one or at least one that worked for me was 301.42. Development for this new one has taken longer than usual for whatever reasons. But it is here now.
My nVidia 306.23 install is working with Second Life. No pink textures, which some nVidia users were starting to see. Pink textures are caused by the video card and the viewer getting out of sync on which textures are which. When the viewer can’t get a texture to display, it shows the texture as pink. So, while the problem is in the video card and driver the pink is the viewer’s error signal.
I did have a problem with the PhysX failing to install. I am researching that now. There are a number of known problems with this driver. See the nVidia 306.23 Release Notes (PDF file) for a list.