OS X Viewer vs. Windows Viewer in Parallels 8

[Jamethiel Wickentower]

 

Hi There,

 

Well, this is a truly sad day; I did try to run the Windows Viewer on VMWare Fusion 5 under Windows 7 with little success. Over the weekend I spat the dummy at VMWare Fusion 5 and installed Parallels 8 and tried again. Here is the sad thing:

 

• My frame rate under Windows 7 in Parallels 8 with 3 virtual CPUs and 4GB of memory is at least comparable to that when running the OS X native client but most of the time better;
• Textures on prims actually rez in the Windows Viewer;
• The cache obviously works on the Windows Viewer - whilst it "may just be a problem between the monitor and the user" (i.e. I'm doing something wrong), I logged out of the OS X Viewer at Tempura island and back in and then waited a while whilst all the prims downloaded again (and yes, they were all downloading again - I have a self-run proxy between me and the Internet and I was watching the requests) - but on Windows, I log back in after having visited and kaboom it loads almost magically fast

Something is seriously wrong with the OS X viewer; my crude benchmarks are based on a totally unfair comparison, in that:

 

• When running the OS X Viewer I have no Parallels 8 running and only Safari (with no web pages) and my Apple Mail running (plus other applications) but when running the Windows viewer I have Parallels 8 running and Safari and my Apple Mail running;
• The OS X  Viewer has full access to the hardware under OS X, no virtualisation layer and has access to all 8GB of memory, again not virtualised;
  
• The Windows Viewer has access to the hardware using Intel's virtualisation technology, needs to have Parallels act as arbiter for its memory and uses whatever Parallels uses to virtualise the file system;
  
• In other words, theoretically because I'm running Windows 7 and the Windows Viewer under Parallels 8 with an OS X host operating system...everything else being equal...I find it truly strange that the Windows Viewer does, effectively, run rings around the OS X viewer

Let me hazard a guess or two:

 

• The OpenGL implementation on OS X is particularly bad (especially on ATI Radeons); or
• The OpenGL implementation on OS X isn't that bad but the way the Viewer source communicates with it is particularly bad on OS X;
• Parallels 8 somehow avoids OS X's implementations and the DirectX or OpenGL on Windows is much better than Mac (this, by the way, wouldn't surprise me at all);
• The Viewer was written for Windows or all it is written to some set of abstractions, either way the infrastructure in the viewer favours Windows performance

As an OS X user I'm used to being left behind on games performance but this is just silly and disappointing.

 

JW

 

  Model Name:iMac

  Model Identifier:iMac11,1

  Processor Name:Intel Core i7

  Processor Speed:2.8 GHz

  Number of Processors:1

  Total Number of Cores:4

  L2 Cache (per Core):256 KB

  L3 Cache:8 MB

  Memory:8 GB

  Processor Interconnect Speed:4.8 GT/s

  Boot ROM Version:IM111.0034.B02

  SMC Version (system):1.54f36

 

I'm running Windows 7 with the latest required patches.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

You might want to try the Cocoa project viewer - word is it's faster on newer Macs as the current viewers still use Ovaltine Carbon.

inden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers

[Jamethiel Wickentower]

Unfortunately, that particular viewer is even worse than the official viewer - sits there with the beach ball (and no, it's not my Internet connection - beachballing for 1 hour means it's definitely dead).

DSL