First Look bragging and question

First of all, the bragging. I am foolish enough to run SecondLife on this machine:

* IBM Thinkpad x31 (a 5ish year old machine)
* 1.3 GHz PIII
* Radeon Mobility M6 (similar to Radeon 7000) w/ 16MB of video RAM

(And, in case anybody wonders, I'm using the free video drivers that come default with Debian Etch.)

As you can imagine, I have to turn a whole lot of stuff down to make this work. No local lights, low resolution terrain texture, low detail on all sorts of stuff. Even then, things rarely fully rez; I always have some blurry textures, and many things remain grey for a long time.

But, I can exist, and I can tool around.

However... with the First Look client, things were rezzing a bit faster (although stll they didn't fully rez), I was routinly getting 7-8 frames per second...!!!

I can't wait to try out First Look on my "real" machine.

Here's the question : in a nutshell, what is the technical difference between the First Look client and the old school client?

Second question: are the first look changes in the source release?

-Rob

The First Look client uses OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects to render graphics if you check the box in Preferences that tells it to. The regular client never uses VBOs.

There was a blog post that said that the VBO code will be available as open source once it is included in the main client, which they expect to happen in the next release or the one after that. They have not announced any plans for an open source release of the First Look client.