NVIDIA 15 Times Faster?

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.

Read more

Flickr 2014 Review

I joined Flickr in 2009. I made use of Flickr up until March 2010. By that time I had nearly 200 images and that was the limit for a free account. That is almost 4 years ago. A lot has changed. More is changing. Yahoo is changing Flickr faster than people make tutorials for it.

I was way behind on Flickr. I didn’t know how it had changed. Many of you probably already know. For those that don’t here is some news.

Flickr 2014 - Image by: Alexander Kaiser, Flickr
Flickr 2014 – Image by: Alexander Kaiser, Flickr

With Jo Yardley adding a new group named Second Life is Looking Good I wanted to add it to my collection of contacts and groups. Wile I haven’t been adding photos I have been looking at what others post and I use it as a source of Creative Commons images I can use in my blog. I think I have some interesting images to add and wondered what it was going to cost me to with a Pro account. They don’t have ‘Pro’ accounts any more.

Read more

Drax Files Radio Show #11: The Road to VR

Drax Files Radio Show #11: The Road to VR. This audio is interesting in that 40+/- minutes are an interview with Ben Lang, who is doing the Road To VR blog, link the article near 20 minute index marker. I found it insightful and Ben

As always this synopsis is what I heard. Before reacting to anything written here, take the time to listen to the original audio of the show.

Time marks are approximate, but they should get you into the audio before the subject’s starting point.

Virtualizer
Virtualizer

Jo Yardley has her Oculus Rift. Yay! We should get some interesting reports from her. I suspect there will be some stuff that is NDA by the Linden Oculus Rift project, but hopefully she’ll still be able to tell us some of what the Lab is doing.

Read more

Adobe And Second Life

Ciaran Laval has an article up: A Massive Cross Promotion Opportunity Stares Linden Lab And Adobe In The Face.

He makes some really good points for combining Second Life™ Premium accounts and an Adobe product subscription. I think the trigger for his thinking is the current Adobe off to provide Photoshop and Lightroom for US$9.99/month on a yearly basis. This is a deal.

Photoshop sold as a standalone package for about US$600. I’ve forgotten what Lightroom sold for. I think it was another $200 or $300.

I never paid much attention to it. I didn’t think I would use it. But, with the big CC package that has everything Lightroom is thrown in. I love it. Anyone that deals with large numbers of images, needs Lightroom.

Read more

OpenSim News: Hypergrid Market 2014-12

You probably know that in the Open source world of OpenSim they have a thing called Hypergrid. The basic idea is one can live in a grid and visit other OpenSim grids. The really neat thing is your avatar and it’s stuff go with you. So, if I put on my red dress in OSGrid and go to Kitely I look the same in both grids. My dress, skin, etc. came with me to the other grid.

OpenSim - OSGrid - By:  Linux-Screenshots, Flickr
OpenSim – OSGrid – By: Linux-Screenshots, Flickr

IBM and Linden Lab were cooperating on building the Hypergrid. The problem was they could not find a way to protect Intellectual Property Rights. So, they gave up. As much as novices think: there must be a way, there isn’t. After 25+ years the movie and music industry have not been able to find a way to protect digital content from theft. They have spen millions trying to figure out a protection scheme. They have failed. 

Read more

Second Life News 2014-12 #2

So far I only have bits and pieces of Second Life™ news.

On the technical side Oz Linden announced the closing of the codereview.secondlife.com instance of ‘reviewboard’. The same code review work is done using the JIRA and the bitbucket.org repositories. This only matters to those building viewers and/or submitting viewer code.

VR Glossary Explained

Hypergrid Business has an article explaining the Virtual World (VR) terms being thrown around by bloggers. See: Virtual reality: 5 terms you need to know.

Maria Korolov says you can order a Rift (the developer kit). But, I hear they are out of stock.

Whatever, Maria does a good job of explaining the terms.

Read more