05-03-2007 05:55
As noted on the Second Life Issue Tracker there has been a marked reduction in LOD performance after an update that has yet to be fixed. Performance in Second Life is critical to being able to do anything, no amount of new features or fancier graphics do us any good if the graphics we have now are getting MORE demanding due to failings with the LOD system.

I'd like to know if any of the teams at LL are committed to making what we have NOW run better, and if not...why not? I'm all for some of the cool new features, and obviously bug-fixes are very important too; but we also need people focusing on improving existing performance so that we may get more out of what we have at the moment. I know it wouldn't be a particularly rewarding job for anyone to be taking existing code and making it run better, as it doesn't have as much wow factor, but it is nonetheless important.

Due to the sheer scope of SL and all the systems involved in its creation there are likely hundreds of places where code may have uneccessary redundancy, or where there are inefficiencies. Things like Occlusion Culling improve frame-rates, but sometimes I wonder if it could do more, or if there are other techniques which could improve the performance of SL. For example; in the current version there is an option to run multiple threads, but it does very little as much of the client is still heavily single-threaded, but we've heard no more about it. A list of EVERY project currently being worked on and an indication of status would be nice, so that we can better see if issues that we are interested in are even being touched upon. Having to send in a letter with 1500 signatures just to find out about a single issue isn't very efficient :)
_____________________
Computer (Mac Pro):
2 x Quad Core 3.2ghz Xeon
10gb DDR2 800mhz FB-DIMMS
4 x 750gb, 32mb cache hard-drives (RAID-0/striped)
NVidia GeForce 8800GT (512mb)