Talk:Choosing a computer
Share your experiences with various system configs here! - on 2010-07-19 @ 9:58 AM Pacific
Torley's benchmarks
Context: In response to "Does the Viewer run faster on Mac OS X or Windows?", I knew one way of getting close is to have a similar setup on the same Mac hardware, then use Boot Camp. I had previously done anecdotal comparisons, but decided to followup with something more in-depth. Usual disclaimer applies that this is only my experience, YMMV but I've observed similar results on four Macs now. Keep in mind Second Life is ever-evolving and my conditions can't exactly be replicated because of how content will change and avatars will move in and out of a scene, but between reboots, I got similar enough situations to make this a more worthwhile comparison than nothing at all.
Config:
- Second Life 2.1.0 (207030) Jul 16 2010 12:08:58 (Second Life Release)
- CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz (2793.03 MHz)
- Memory: 8182 MB
- OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit (Build 7600) and
- OS Version: Darwin 10.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.2.0: Tue Nov 3 23:08:29 PST 2009; root:xnu-1486.2.11~3/RELEASE_I386 i386
- Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
- Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 4850
- Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.14.0010.0700
- OpenGL Version: 2.1.9026
- On Mac, OpenGL Version: 2.1 ATI-1.6.6
Setup notes:
- Screen resolution is 2560x1440, iMac running in a maximized window.
- On Windows 7, I installed Catalyst 10.7 drivers but had to roll back the Boot Camp 3.1 graphics drivers due to a color banding issue.
- The iMac is still on 10.6.2 because 10.6.4 has known, sporadic freezing issues.
- I chose the City Female Avatar from the Library.
- I waited 5-10 min. for a scene to rez and the Statistics to stabilize. There's the known issue that textures don't always rez unless you move your cursor over them, but
- S
Graphics Hardware
The usual recommendation is to use nVidia hardware for the best OpenGL support. This is a combination of the actual OpenGL functions, and the utilities to adjust the display. The DirectX labelling is mostly a guide to the available GPU power for the purposes of OpenGL use.
Many motherboards have built-in graphics hardware, which is, frankly, barely adequate. If your cash-flow is a problem, it's good enough to run SL, and you can add a graphics card later. Don't expect to get a high frame rate. The Viewer 2.x family seem to be setting graphics to get a higher frame rate, and if you're following this approach, you could find detail settings are low enough to be ugly--circles appearing as hexagons--and trading frame rate for a slightly higher detail setting may be worth it.
WolfBaginski Bearsfoot 07:44, 25 July 2010 (UTC)