Second Life and the dual-core deliberation

2006-10-31

If you love Second Life and dual-core processors like I do (I'm on an Opteron 170), you'll know how handy it is to let a phat app (e.g., Photoshop or a video editing suite) sit on one core while Second Life gobbles up the other. For medium-to-heavy multitaskers, the investment's well-worth it. Not to mention prices are coming down and popularity's going up.

Catch is, Second Life isn't yet optimized for dual-cores, so you may have some unpleasant problems like stuttering and general slowness. You should really read "What do I do if I experience poor performance on a dual-core computer?", and one more tip I learned from Steve Linden: pop open your Client menu (Ctrl-Alt-D) and turn ON Rendering > Use VBO. For me, it effectively solved the problem of SL grinding to a halt with RenderPool usage — which you can see using the Fast Timer charts, Ctrl-Shift-9, and expanding Geometry. What a noticeable speed difference, and less of that nauseous upon-login crawl.

BTW, this doesn't seem to apply to dual-core Intel Macs. If you've found differently, please leave me a comment.

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{ 54 comments… read them below or add one }

Torley 2008-12-12 at 3:47 PM UTC

@Hiro: SL still doesn't make full use of multi-core machines, aside from texture decoding, supposedly, but I haven't noticed a change with that. The key benefit for me on quad-core (and now, Mac Pro with octo-core) is running SL AND other stuff at the same time. =)

Lili B. 2008-12-16 at 3:37 PM UTC

So, having a quad core desktop over a dual core laptop wouldn't make a difference, what matters is to go for the better, newer video card ? I'm currently considering both options for a new machine.

Two years in SL and I only just now heard about this. I've been on a dual core laptop all along that I want to replace now, and just did the thing in Sue Baskerville's blog, about going to the task manager and assigning a core to SL while it's running. My fps more than tripled! Admittedly, my fps has been stuck between 1.5 and 3 for over a year, so that didn't make for a noticeable difference, but wow, a lot of people would love to know about this that have no idea. By the way, the link to the knowledgebase doesn't show the intended content anymore, and I coudln't find "Use VBO" in my menu, guess it's gone ?

Torley 2008-12-19 at 6:20 PM UTC

@Lili B.: It depends on your needs, and the specific setup. There's no substitute for a well-balanced system, e.g., it makes no sense to have a fast CPU and lousy GPU.

I used to notice gains when manually assigning cores like that, but not currently (on my Q6600-based PC).

Della Demonia 2008-12-19 at 10:14 PM UTC

Wow, Torley thank you thank you thank you. I have been swearing like a pirate since trying to play SL on my new Pavillion dv5 with core 2 Duo, 4g ram, nvidia 9600 graphics… my sl has been slow and stuttery.

I have a nice 3 fan cooling pad, I always run on power and take the battery out for sl as this keeps it cooler and I took your advice and "and turning up antialiasing all the way is one of the clear joys" – instant success! SL is smooth once more and flying is wonderful again.

thanks again : )

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