Second Life and the dual-core deliberation
Posted on: October 31, 2006If 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.
Related Posts
Be my friend!
Stay up-to-date
Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to me and be auto-updated when new stuff is out!
October 31st, 2006 at 9:49 PM PST
Thanks for the hints. Just curious…what does "Use VBO" do exactly? The rez speed is amazing now.
October 31st, 2006 at 11:16 PM PST
You're super-welcome, Dana! From what I know, VBO = Vertex Buffer Objects, and is a faster method of rendering triangles which comprise the prims in Second Life.
Steve told me it's not fully stable yet; it's off by default. My experiences with it have of course been marvelous, and I'm happy to hear your rez speeds are up too!
November 9th, 2006 at 4:38 AM PST
Will it improve things much on single-core CPUs I wonder ?
November 9th, 2006 at 8:14 PM PST
I haven't tried it — has anyone noticed any difference? On the safe side, I'd go with yes, since it'd benefit far more Resis, and… I haven't heard any indication to the contrary.
November 13th, 2006 at 6:42 AM PST
Yes I've tried it with dual core processor PC and the speeds are amazing, yet my PC repeatedly crashes after a few minutes. Most frustrating since this PC replaces my old P4 processor PC when it blew up :))
Will there be any updates for Dual core PC's?
November 13th, 2006 at 7:07 PM PST
Captitan, good to know… harsh re: the crashes tho!
Longer-term, YES, VBO will be more stable. And I'm also hoping that SL becomes optimized for multithreading and our dual-core PCs. Since they continue to gain market share and a bigger userbase, it makes sense.
December 11th, 2006 at 6:18 AM PST
I've tried it on an Intel Mac, and something happens — the lines in the Geometry become mountainously spiky. Doesn't seem to have changed rez speed much, though. Oh, Torley, any ideas if the "up to 2X" World of Warcraft frame rate improvements on dual core machines with Mac OS X 10.4.8 could be duplicated in SL?
http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/12/20061207152229.shtml
December 12th, 2006 at 7:51 PM PST
Ali, I don't know for sure if those great gains could be applied to SL too, but I would hope there'd be substantial performance improvements, because Second Life can always stand to be faster.
I wonder what the actual performance findings are for WoW on dual-core vs. single-core machines (I notice the link to the comments thread).
May 9th, 2007 at 6:08 PM PDT
Ok, i realize this is an old thread but I just found this and tried it, and I do not see an option to "Use VBO" in the Render menu. Does this feature no longer exist? I am crawling along with my Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 (dual 1.8 ghz), in fact, my performance was better with my AMD XP 3000+ (2.1 ghz) with less ram and an inferior graphics card
May 10th, 2007 at 7:39 PM PDT
I'm running Vista Ultimate & duo core & I keep sinking into the ground when attempting to walk for any length of time.
Also.. if I fly It will not stop & eventialy logs me out. The same happens when I walk.
Any advice?
Tks!
May 13th, 2007 at 9:04 AM PDT
@Lyndi: VBO moved because it was deemed stable, it's now a graphics option in Preferences. So yes, still exists, but has formal checkbox.
@ChefG: Could be a number of things, sounds like packet loss. I'd encourage going to http://secondlife.com/support and search the Knowledge Base for "packet loss" too. Hope things get smoother for you soon!
May 16th, 2007 at 6:12 PM PDT
Ok.. this isnt the place to post this, but I am wondering if you can possibly help me Torley. I'm having big problems in the region where my mall is. We have a bunch of failed linden transactions (they time out), we all have problems rezzing objects, it lags so bad at times that i cant turn without crashing..etc etc.. I sent a support request 4 days ago and have gotten nothing but an auto reply. I know it is not just a problem with my pc, because it happens to all of us there and we are all geographically all over the world (US-Midwest, US-Texas, Canada, UK-London, Netherlands, and Spain).. Any suggestions?
May 20th, 2007 at 2:13 PM PDT
@Lyndi: I'm sorry I can't provide official support help from my personal blog, I'd be flooded and I'm not the best person to help. But, one of my work focuses is the Issue Tracker, so what I'd suggest is to search there for previous reports of the same specific problems. (At this point, I'm wondering if it's region-specific or a wider-scale problem.) I do hope it gets better!
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:19 PM PDT
I understand completely! Thank you for your response
July 4th, 2007 at 7:18 PM PDT
I need the Mac OSX 10.4.10 of those apps!
MacBook Pro 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo … SL is eating all of my available RAM (2 Gigs) in about 10 minutes …
and then I found this article …
* sorry day for Ruli Tenk *
July 12th, 2007 at 12:29 PM PDT
As newbie to Second Life with a fast dual core processor systemI have not found any graphic problems.
I'm no techy guru!!!
Keeping it simple would the graphic demands be more or less than Flight Simulator X?
For that programme it seems folks with very fast computers were let down by not having a high grade graphics card.
Could the same apply to Second Life
July 15th, 2007 at 7:37 AM PDT
@Ruli: We had worse memory leak problems earlier, some known ones like https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-364 have been fixed.
@Masterful: I'm not sure how Second Life's graphical resource usage is re: Flight Simulator X, but SL currently and generally places more importance on your CPU… so I strongly, highly recommend getting the fastest processor you can. As for graphics card, I recommend at least a higher-end NVIDIA 6xxx series… I have an 7800 GT which is still going on reasonably well, and turning up antialiasing all the way is one of the clear joys. I don't know much about ATI.
July 17th, 2007 at 8:26 AM PDT
Wow, if Dual-cores have a problem.. (And yes, my dad has a new dual core + Nvidia's TurboCache = B-A-D!) I wonder how the new upcoming Quad-cores will work! xD
By the way, if someone has a dual-core computer AND an Nvidia graphics card that has TurboCache, he has the evil duo. TurboCache eats up Second Life's part of the RAM, destroying the viewer like a rude 5 year old running on the long table in a fancy dinner O.o .
No matter what you do to make it take 1 CPU, it'll still end up on 0-3FPS on ground, and 5-8FPS in the air when nothing's around.
By the way, VBO saved my life! I jumped from a sad 4FPS to 15FPS thanks to VBO
July 18th, 2007 at 3:31 PM PDT
Hey… I got a new laptop Pavilion DV6220LA, unfortunately I ran into troubles running Second Life.. suddenly it becomes really slow until finally I have to finish the task in my task manager!!!
I used the processors affinity to one single processor and nothing improves… someone has a better idea about it???
Help!!
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:25 PM PDT
@Smiley: Intel quad-core prices dropped bigtime yesterday… it's good that powerful computer hardware keeps getting cheaper, accessible technology at good prices is what we need as a hungry society of consumers, haw-haw!
@Jalcom: I don't have a better idea without knowing more, sorry… if you meet the System Recommendations and are a Premium or Conciege customer of Second Life, you can contact our support… http://secondlife.com/support
July 26th, 2007 at 3:42 AM PDT
So yeah I have the 2.4GHZ MacBook Pro (NVIDIA GForce 8600M GT w/256MB VRAM).
I've found that Second Life runs significantly faster (frames-per-second-wise) if I boot into Vista using BootCamp, and run the Windows version of the Second Life client.
The Intel Mac version runs at about 1/2 the frame rate, and the Avatar Vertex Program remains grayed out no matter what. Also the Mac version consistently crashes my computer requiring it to be powered all the way off, and turned back on. Often sound glitch that repeats over and over happens after the crash before the power-off.
Why would the Windows version run so much faster?
July 26th, 2007 at 3:48 AM PDT
PS — In Windows there is an NVIDIA Control Panel (which does not exist on OS X) that lets you force anti-aliasing to be on for Second Life. WOW! It looks awesome and did not lower my FPS at all!
What is wrong with OS X that it does not have this?
July 29th, 2007 at 7:27 AM PDT
@Gistya: I'm glad to hear you discovered antialiasing! Yeah, that's one of the "secrets" I use behind making Second Life look better. Esp. if your graphics card can handle, go for it.
So, from what you've said, I know we have some performance problems with the new MacBooks and SL — congrats on getting one, and please see https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1757
But, I think even when that's addressed, Avatar Vertex Program will be grayed out. Brent Linden previously explained this:
SOURCE: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?p=1283557
August 24th, 2007 at 2:04 AM PDT
WHERE is that little blurb that explains what a Dual Core Processor user needs to type into the {"Target" block on the "Shortcut" tab of the "Properties" window that pops up when you right-click on your SL desktop Icon and then left-click on the "Properties" pop-up selection} in order to log in and run run two copies of SL simultaneously, one for each of two different SL Alts? I've searched and searched for it and I cannot find it!
August 26th, 2007 at 8:10 AM PDT
@Theo: Great question, it's in the Knowledge Base. Sadly I can't link to it directly, but go to http://secondlife.com/support , log in, and search for "multiple". It should be the first article that shows up.
KNOWLEDGE = POWER!
August 28th, 2007 at 9:17 AM PDT
I cannot find the VBO selection anywhere. it is not in the client>rendering tab. It is not in preferances>graphics. where has it moved? that responce that said it moved was in may 2007. why hasn't second life kept up with the proliferation of dual core processors?
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:02 AM PDT
@Rebecca: Ah, some of the above info is OBSOLETE… VBO is now called "Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects" and is in Preferences > Adv. Graphics tab. *However*, it currently appears to be buggy — it makes my framerate inconsistent and choppy when turning around and zooming my camera.
You may also want to try Client menu > Rendering > Run Multiple Threads and see how that works for you.
Our devs do want to make SL more multithreaded, but that isn't trivial (with the Q6600 I'm on, I'm chomping at the bit!). I surely hope we'll see more improvements.
September 6th, 2007 at 3:50 PM PDT
Hello!
I downloaded SL yesterday. I start walking around with my avatar and then my PC stopped, closed the programme and it turned to a weird windows mode. Now everytime I open windows or turn the PC on it makes weird and awful sounds. I know nothing about pcs, can you help me and try to solve this problem?
Thanks
September 9th, 2007 at 10:17 AM PDT
@Cris: That sounds harsh but unfortunately I can't do more from here, and more details are needed. I suggest posting a new issue on http://jira.secondlife.com with your complete system config… but I wonder if the problems you're having are specifically related to SL.
November 13th, 2007 at 1:02 PM PST
Any advice for Dual core intel Macs? Is it optimized yet?
Intel core 2 Duo 2.
33GHz G33 Processor
4MB L2 cache per processor
NVIDIA GEForce 7600 GT
Also machine currently runnng Client 1.18.2 (1). Does not recognise any client update files (now up to 1.18.4.3)
November 18th, 2007 at 7:49 AM PST
@Peter: To my knowledge, there haven't been significant changes with multi-threading recently; those specs look a little off tho (33GHz? Maybe you mean 3 GHz?).
January 17th, 2008 at 4:18 PM PST
im running a HP Pavilion with intel pentium 4 dual processor. 2G ram, video = intel 82945G 256 mb
ive done the single core selection, and enabled the VBO but im still having the same ol' problem,,,
after a few minutes into the game everything begins to turn black and stays black. All i can do is log out and log back in every few minutes.
January 20th, 2008 at 3:27 PM PST
@DeeDee: I'm not 100% sure of this, but unfortunately, I don't think Second Life supports that graphics chipset.
See http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php
January 28th, 2008 at 6:00 PM PST
Ok this is getting seriously stupid. I'm using last year's dual core machine, the AMD 3800+ as a replacement for a Intel system that SL caused to crash permenantly.
YAY I get my new computer all put together and everything and install SL hoping that the extra processing power will keep SL from killing my computer again.
NOW IT RUNS WORSE THAN BEFORE. FUCK.
Maybe you should put something under system requirements about SL requiring an OLD SINGLE CORE CPU to be able to run.
Things I have tried:
Updated BIOS
Updated drivers for chipset
Updated drivers for video card
Updated drivers for AMD CPU's
Microsoft's Dual Core Hotfix v4
AMD's Dual Core Optimizer
Enabling VBO
Disabling VBO
Running at minimal settings
Running at max settings
Running with affinity set to CPU 1
Running with affinity set to CPU 0
Running with affinity set to both
Various combinations of the above for the last WEEK
Every time, no matter what, SL starts… runs GREAT for about 2 minutes… then WHAM less than 1 FPS.
Next weekend I'm going to try one more fix. Uninstalling SL, turning my $L to US dollars, getting a new game that actually supports dual core CPU's, and advising everyone I meet to stay the hell away from SL. It has been a nightmare in poorly developed software from day one and only gotten worse.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:13 AM PST
Not that I really expected anyone to respond to the above hysterics but last night I was nearly in tears at the thought of losing all of the friends I've made while in SL because of a bad motherboard.
Last night however after about 8 hours of installing, reinstalling, trying new drivers, trying old drivers, and all of the above my boyfriend took a look at it…
… he updated the existing network card drivers. 2.0 to 4.3. Within about 5 minutes SL went from crashing non-stop and being unable to detect my hardware half of the time to running better than ever before.
I felt really dumb since it had never crossed my mind that the network drivers fresh off MSI's install CD for this motherboard wouldn't be compatible with SL. It had nothing at all to do with dual core problems. I got the new ones from Realtek's website and they worked great.
February 3rd, 2008 at 6:29 PM PST
@Sapphire: Ugh, sucks to hear what you went through… computer woes like that totally blow, and I'm glad to hear that you figured out what was going on (WHAT a relief) so you can be back in Second Life.
February 18th, 2008 at 1:51 AM PST
Dunno if I am right to post here, but me too having problems with my graphics card: I bought the new Dell XPS M1730 … with 4 Gb memory and a very fast dual 256 Mb graphics cards:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz)
Memory: 3262 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista (Build 6000)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8700M GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: 1.1.0 (Mozilla GRE:1.8.0.12_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 2/49164 (0.0%)
Viewer Digest: ffac34f4-0452-2fcc-16b7-c2868f0923ef
Still I cannot use in Graphics Adv (Preferences) the 256 or 512 Mb option they are both gray … This is a 2×256 Graphic card … so why cant I use the 256 Mb or the 512 Mb option?
Or if you know where to post my problem … thnx!
April 30th, 2008 at 4:42 AM PDT
Hello everyone.
I just wanted to say Thank you Torley… Although I really couldnt find an obvious way to fix my FPS problem with my new core duo, knowing about the VBO feature helped, because when I deactivated it, my SL started to run normally again, even if i take the quality and performance graphics slider to Ultra.
Youre great
keep it up with the fun vids. aswell! 
May 4th, 2008 at 7:23 AM PDT
@Allen: I'm glad to hear that, and also make sure you've updated to newest stable graphics drivers! Always good common advice.
@Bob: In the newest Second Life (1.19.1 onwards), you should be able to manually set graphics memory usage if it's not recognized automatically.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:15 PM PDT
Hi Torley
This has been very frustrating. Have had a ticket in for over a month. I've been in SL for over a year with no problems until a month ago.
I have a dual core intel(r) pentium4 4cpu 3.00 gzh
an All in Wonder x800 and All in Wonder x800 secondary display adaptor and an intel(R) pro/1000 CT network adaptor.
I've updated drivers, gone to one processor, enabled and disabled VBO and my FPS still drops to 0 after a couple minutes. I've sent log files and dxdiag files three times. do you have any suggestions - SL has become almost unusable and support has been of little help.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:52 AM PDT
I recently updated my Nvidia Drivers, 175.19, running on an SLI set of two 7600gs boards. Previously I had no problems with video and have always been very pleased with my view of the world. Now however, I can no longer see terrain under water. I can see objects fine, can see the surface as before, but terrain is just black.
Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.
DRD
June 29th, 2008 at 10:47 AM PDT
@DR: While I apologize I don't know the answer to your problem (aside from rolling back drivers?), I'd recommend filing a bug @ http://jira.secondlife.com and hopefully other people will know more.
July 6th, 2008 at 9:56 AM PDT
No problem Torley. I did roll back the drives to the 163 version and my water views are back to normal. I filed in JIRA and on the NVIDIA site as well. Keep up the great work. Rainbow pie to you…
DRD
August 17th, 2008 at 4:34 AM PDT
Hello everyone,
I've played around with settings on my new macbook pro 2.4 GHz Intel core 2 duo with 4 gigs of ram and came to the conclusion that no matter what graphic setting I use my fans keep spinning at full speed all the time.
So I looked at some forums about this issue and it seems that lots of people have this problem. I solved it a bit so I think. I have installed a program called Fan Control. With this I can manually speed up the fans to run at 3000 rpm. This way my macbook runs cooler and SL runs like a baby.
My question here would be: can this constant fan speed harm my hardware? Does anyone have a better solution besides installing windows on my mac?
Thanks for your comments and suggestions. Torley keep up the good work!!
Jo
August 17th, 2008 at 11:01 AM PDT
@Jo: I haven't experienced problems with running fans constantly for a long duration — the bigger potential problem here is your machine overheating, which the fans are counteracting. And hopefully the ambient room temperature is also relatively cool. I haven't run SL on my MacBook Pro a lot recently, tho. You're welcome!
September 29th, 2008 at 7:29 PM PDT
does anyone know if the EVGA GeForce GTX 280 Video Card - 1GB GDDR3, PCI Express and the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor 2.40GHz work for SL?
October 23rd, 2008 at 6:56 AM PDT
I have just built a computer with a GTX 280 and Intel quad processor just like that of above. Re question from Chris.
Having a nightmare, system crashes every 20 mins or so with blue screen of death and a full screen of info which only stays for a second before the system re-boots. Only on sl all other programmes work fine.
sl worked fine with my old four year old AMD single core system just everything now a bit slow, but at least stable.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:57 AM PDT
Torley - sorry to bother you on your blog, but I'm having trouble finding this information elsewhere.
Any idea if SL (Linux) is now properly multithreaded? It works fine on my Pentium D (dual core) but I'm now considering an upgrade to core 2; however the decision now rests between a higher clocked duo or a lower clocked quad.
I'm sure there's others considering such upgrades too, so any guidance would be useful. More cores or higher clock?
If it matters: Linux, 4Gb RAM, Nvidia 9800GT.
Thanks
November 1st, 2008 at 11:32 AM PDT
@Binky: I don't know if it is. While I don't 100% know who'd know, I'd suggest asking Tofu Linden, who's done a lot of work with the Second Life Linux viewer. Send him an IM.