Poll: Dual Core Processing + Upcoming Windows Vista How Will it change Second Life?

Ok, very good news. The first release of the beta (Windows Vista) has arrived! It's to be based upon 64 bits, better security (woot) along with enhanced UI performances and effects.

Along with Dual Core Processing has released this summer with full fledged 64bit support.
Your opinion? How will this affect Second Life?

From Paul Thurrott's review of beta 1 Windows Vista:

Longhorn [renamed Vista]... promised to deliver every single bit of technology you could imagine, all wrapped around a Flash-like UI that was based on Anark technology. It all looked really impressive.

I have yet to see anything like that materialize in an actual Longhorn/Vista build....

The bad news is that a lot of the super futuristic stuff appears to be gone, and may be gone forever. The sort of bad news is that Windows Vista more closely resembles Windows XP than was the original plan. That is, there's a Start menu that looks a lot like the XP Start menu. The windows are prettier but still Explorer windows. All the right-click, power user stuff we all learned for XP still works. And so on.... The good news in all this is that Windows Vista will work the way you expect. That is, it will be pretty and powerful, but it's still Windows. Everything works in basically the same way.

But so far, so bland: Beta 1 is a big improvement over build 5048, but it's only an evolution over Windows XP. We were promised a revolution, dammit, and I want a revolution.

Vista is still a long way off. They've already postponed alot of 'cool featurs' like...

- a stable filesystem.
- a new and improved commandline.
- the 'flight' feature that was advertised but not released with XP.

It will, we're guessing, be DRM'd to hell and back. Oh joy.

Lindens, better get on that Linux client.

was just reading this earlier today.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003897.php#003897

As far as Windows Vista, Microsoft has repeatedly said that this beta is not even really for tech enthusiasts - it is to test the infrastructure. The more general beta will have the new UI in it. I have used it as well, and it is not dramatically different on the surface. Having also begun to develop for it, however, I can tell you that it is very different under the hood. Will it be a dramatic update? Yes, i think when it is released it will be. I am interested to finally see the new UI.

I don't however think that Vista will have a tremendous impact on SL at all, since SL is consistent across platforms and does not make much use of the underlying OS. It would be nice if they can put in some code to take advantage of UI elements on the Mac and Vista ultimately, as the SL UI is teh suck.

I am running SL on a Pentium-D. Obviously it is not currently taking advantage of the chip, but I hope the future engine will take advantage of more sophisticated underlying hardware - both processors and graphics cards. SL is hardly impressive even on a Geforce 7800 FX card right now (though it is nice to finally have local lighting back on). SL has never been really optimized for the hardware it runs on - I hope that future iterations of it change that.

PS - on the DRM/Vista thing, I offer this, about DRM implemented in the forthcoming Intel/MacOS kernel:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/31/apple_to_add_trusted.html

I'm running SL on a Mac. Many of them have had dual CPUs for years, and so lots of programs support it, in fact some level of support is automatic. SL Doesn't seem to take significant advantage of multithreading at this time on the Mac version. It's pretty simple to implement on the Mac (I'm a developer) you can create any number of threads and the OS runs time slices on whatever CPUs are available. It works very well. When quad processor machines come out, lots of programs will automatically speed up, as will the OS in general.

All programs actually have some threads - even the little built-in routine that pulses the OK buttons in dialogs runs in a thread. My machine currently shows 260 of them and I'm not doing much right now. SL shows it runs 12 threads. But the system spawns some threads in virtually all programs - system calls such as those that deal with the network run in threads, for example.

SL doesn't seem to spawn it's own threads, it probably just runs one main one. One CPU is pinned at 100%, the other mostly runs the rest of the computer, and system threads, and is only at around 5%. I bet there is a HUGE amount of improvement that can take place. I'm looking forward to it!

And to both of the above posts, I suggest this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1845259,00.asp

Dvorak is always good for a chuckle.

It might be a good idea to redo SL's code eventually to handle 64bit. Faster processing=less lag etc. It'll also help out wth rendering 2.0.