Performance

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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Firestorm Viewer 6.5.3 Released

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Wow! We have a new Firestorm Viewer Release. (3/21/2022) This one has a bunch of new stuff. The Firestorm Blog explains what is new and the changelog explains what has been fixed. As usual, Inara explains in more detail on the Modem World blog than Jessica does on the Firestorm Blog. However, for the quick read go with Jessica’s.

My Graphics Settings

The viewer is a quick download. It is now 140MB, up from the previous 120MB. The installation is simple. Launch the downloaded file. No clean install is needed.

The Splash Screen is of course the first thing you’ll see. It was first seen in the previous version. A bunch of people didn’t like it. That is normal for SL residents. No matter what one does about half of SL peps won’t like it and will complain.

The screen hasn’t changed much. There are ‘operational’ improvements. It works better. It is still a lot of information in one place. But it is easy to ignore.

The FS Team has taken a different approach to destinations than the Lab did. When the Lab first added ‘What’s Hot Now’ to their destinations list several people pointed out that busy places we often full. Clicking to TP to a full region resulted in a failed TP and people wondered how new people would see/react to the error. I don’t know how much testing the Lab did or didn’t do but I do know the Lab decided to limit entries in their list to regions that were not full. Thus, no TP fails. Noobs were protected.

Inside the FS Viewer, the destination guide uses the Lab’s destinations. So, only the splash page on viewer startup shows the really BUSY regions, like Exhale with 91 people in region. Versus the Lab’s panel showing Freebie Galaxy as the most populous with 28 people. Whether this is a good thing or not… you decide.

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Second Life: Performance Changing

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As the Second Life™ system advances more of the content will be transferred to the viewer by HTTP protocol. This takes load from UDP and the region server-simulators and moves it to the Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Shadow Puppets!
Shadow Puppets!

We expect some degree of region performance improvement, especially in crowded regions with lots of avatars. But, there may be a cost for those on slow Internet connections. It is hard to estimate the impact on those with slow connections. But, there are things they can do if they see performance degrade.

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Hardware: Intel CPU’s – Review – What’s Up?

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Over the last 4 months I’ve been dealing with what I can buy now and what is the best for the money. But, when considering what to buy it makes sense to look ahead. Earlier I wrote about looking at AMD CPU’s and what they have coming. Now I’ll write about what Intel has coming.

[ kunst ] - Industrial Loft Gacha
[ kunst ] – Industrial Loft Gacha
Intel’s 6th generation CPU’s are about a year old now. So, what do they have in their pipeline? For 2017 it is Kaby Lake… In January 2017 we will see Kaby Lake chips coming out for phones and tablets, Later in the year for laptops and even later for desktops. These will be 7th generation iCore CPU’s in the 7### series of i3, i5, and i7 CPU’s. 

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Hardware: AMD CPU’s – Review – What’s Up with Zen?

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I don’t use them. The basic reason is cost and timing. When I’ve been ready to buy Intel has had a CPU with a better performance to price ratio. I have no particular love or hate for either AMD or Intel. Its who has a well performing CPU and what will it cost me at the time I need  one?

CW: Chryss - Earth
CW: Chryss – Earth

One of the commenters here suggests people looking for a new CPU wait for AMD to release its new Zen CPU. One can always wait for the next new thing but, then they wait. However, I did wonder if a wait would be worth the time. I started researching AMD and their next CPU.

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Hardware: Picking a New CPU for Second Life

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The skeleton and brain of a computer is the motherboard and CPU.  A CPU is the Central Processing Unit. This is most like our brain.

The mother or main board is like out nervous system or skeleton. It is the large circuit board that every part of the computer plugs into, including the CPU. It holds everything together.

For detailed information on CPU’s see the video: (jump to TM 6:07 to skip the explanations and see the benchmarks.

There is a lot of jargon in the video, I’ll get the important stuff explained.

First the TL:DR, the video shows there is very little difference between the various CPU’s. When it comes to frames per second. The three tested CPU’s are about equal. However, if you are going to use Intel’s HD Graphics without a dedicated graphics card, he shows there is a difference and the 6th generation CPU wins. So, laptop people… go for 6th gen CPU or a dedicated video chip.

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