Does Second Life support Crossfire? Radeon HD 7660g + HD 7670m?

[rachel435]

My friend has an Asus 15" laptop with the AMD A10-4600m APU. The fusion APU has a built in Radeon HD 7660g GPU and 6 GB of RAM. Using the Firestorm Viewer, he is able to get 36 fps+ on most areas of SL while using "high" graphics detail.Graphics look awesome in world.

Since AMD seems to have good graphics performance for laptops and I need a laptop as I go online from different locations, I am considering a laptop with an AMD A10-4600m APU which has the AMD Crossfire, dual graphics. The Radeon HD 7660g + Radeon HD 7670m with 2 GB of dedicated video memory. Is this a good combination for SL?

Does Second Life take advantage of the OpenGL Crossfire features of the AMD Catalyst drivers?

[Jean Horten]

Hi.

SecondLife does not support Crossfire, so having two low to mid  range performing on-board GPUs in that laptop will not bring you any advantage over having just one. The 7660G is a graphics card that uses shared memory which means it does not have own, physical memory and will 'tap' the system's ram when it needs memory because it does not have it's own memory. Benchmark tests in known benchmarking programmes show, that the 7660g only delivers low to mid range performance in 3d applications,  and to be honest, the way I see it, SecondLife's requirements for graphics power will certainly not go down, but up in the future.

SecondLife and ATI/AMD Graphics are known for not always working too good together, which is due to the fact that AMD graphics are DirectX (Windows proprietary) optimized. SecondLife does not use DirectX, but OpenGL as 'grahics language', so you might run into strange problems in Sl with AMD Graphics cards. The AMD graphics card drivers are also famous for not always working good, only every 3rd or 4th verson of them works fine, the others usually are buggy.

I'd go for a laptop ( /me sighs, why do people always want laptops, they are more expensive, less performant and die earlier from overheating) that comes with one  high performant nVidia graphics card ( Series 660m, 670m, 675m, 680m)) that comes with it's own physical memory ( min 1.GB is recommended) instead of a machine with AMD shared memory graphics. Asus ( and of course many other hardware manufacturers) offers such systems with nVidia  graphics.

IMHO you buy a lot of problems  from the money you save on AMD graphics.

Jeannie

[Nalates Urriah]

Crossfire is the ATI equivalent of nVidia's SLI.

SL does and does not use dual GPU's. So, answers either way can be correct depending on context.

First, the SL viewer's render process is currently a single thread. That thread can only use one GPU. So, technically SL does not use more than one GPU. But...

SL's render process runs numerous threads to decompress textures. With nVidia it takes some tweaking in the control panel to enable a second GPU for use by SL. I'm not sure what is required for ATI.

Using 2 GPU's gains some performance because the decompression work is off loaded to a second GPU and the primary rendering GPU has less work to do resulting in higher FPS.

 

Currently the rendering process is being revised to handle the materials system that is being added. I don't know if it will become a multi-threaded process. But, there is a chance.

Other games certainly do use multiple GPU's.

Depending on cost, your budget, and how you plan to use the computer having 2 GPU's may be worthwhile.

Jean's advice is good and most points made are valid considrations. The AMD CPU's are good. The ATI/AMD graphics cards have weak support for OpenGL, which SL uses. That can cause problems.