Blast from the Past

Inspired by ignorant ranting, I thought I'd go back to my old computer, install the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex beta and whatever proprietary nVidia driver it offered to install, and then try out the latest SL Release Candidate client to see just how slowly it ran.

It's lame by today's standards. (Heck, my current system would be so characterized by many. PCI Express 1.0? Puh-leeze. Dual-core? LOL. Athlon 64? AMD fangirl! DDR2 800? [eye roll] Just one graphics card? ...) The venerable old computer that served me well for years has one gigabyte of DDR 333 RAM, a 1.6 GHz Athlon (of the 32-bit persuasion; we're talking Socket A), an nVidia 7600 AGP graphics card, and an IDE hard drive. Apologies for not grabbing the detail of the CPU and motherboard, but they can't be less than four years old. Reviews of the 7600 appear to date from early March 2006, so it was presumably new then.

The Ubuntu install was a pleasure. On went SL, and...

It was definitely slow. Home on Whimsy, frame rates hovered around 9 or under while textures loaded, then headed up to around 12, with peaks of 16 from time to time.

Over to Apollo, a sim that is always well populated, and has lots of landscaping and associated objects and textures... and again, a plummet while textures loaded, followed by a rise to somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 to the low teens.

Running the graphics slider the one that goes from "Low" to "Ultra" down to "Mid" (I thought it said "Mild" at first... time to check glasses!) helped a little, and setting it to "Low" helped a little more, but not much. Given the relatively low change in frame rates with graphics slider settings, I have to think the CPU and memory are the real bottleneck for the old computer, especially compared to the throughput of HyperTransport. I bet a Socket 754 or 939 system would be quite acceptable with the same graphics card.

I went to a skybox to say good night to a friend, and sure enough, the frame rate jumped to 20+ fps.

Here's the thing, though--from what I remember, things were very similar in the pre-Windlight days. I would regularly see people dancing at frame rates of 5 or 6 per second, and a post from January, 2007 shows me reveling in a frame rate that actually approached 30 fps, on a plot in the sky.

So, now seems to me about the same as then, save that with "Mid" graphics I can take at least some advantage of the lovely skies that Windlight provides (and no, they're not all garish).

Actually, that's not right. There is one thing that seems more prevalent now--the long waits for textures to load and objects to rez... but that has nothing to do with Windlight, more with the delays involved in waiting for the asset server to send one the info about the objects and people in your sight.

So, I'm sorry, but I can't say that Windlight makes much of a difference, save that between the boring old photos we used to be amazed by and those we take today.

UPDATE: I can't replicate the conditions, but just for the heck of it, I went back with my current computer this morning. On Whimsy and Apollo, there were still times that frame rates dropped to near or even a little below 10, though those were with graphics and draw distance cranked all the way. The difference between facing out to sea and facing a lot of objects is quite striking, and the way that one's surroundings still dribble into existence--in Apollo, I believe it took well over a minute for everything and everyone that should be visible to rez--despite having a fairly reasonable computer. Again, I believe this shows that the bottleneck lies with the asset server.