OpenGL

[Lyssa Greymoon]

53 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I ran a 64mb mx400 until 2010.  and then 550ti, then now dual 980's.  so I upgrade when I can.

If someone was fumbling around in SL last weekend using a ten year old HP workstation with an ATI HD5870, I don't know anything about it.

[lucydesmond]

Any new updates? im a mac user :(

[Russell Skyther]

The issue isn't that players with 15 year old GPUs exist, it's that accommodating those GPUs causes headaches for anyone who *doesn't* have a 15 year old GPU. I would have worded it nicer then "Anyone still using a 15 year old GPU isn't paying for the game" because some clearly do, even if just a little. But the size of that group is fixed: People's old GPUs die, and the replace them with newer GPUs (even if not the latest). SL is one of the few examples where an upgrade can make your performance *worse*.

I wager that the eventual Vulkan pipeline will improve the experience for enough people (using anything from $100 x86 single-board computers or newer off-lease workstations with AMD APUs, to high-end desktops with gaming GPUs) that the above group of legacy users is going to get completely ignored fairly quickly, which is unfortunate.

[Mollymews]

2 hours ago, Russell Skyther said:

I wager that the eventual Vulkan pipeline will improve the experience for enough people (using anything from $100 x86 single-board computers or newer off-lease workstations with AMD APUs, to high-end desktops with gaming GPUs) that the above group of legacy users is going to get completely ignored fairly quickly, which is unfortunate.

is a interesting question this

i read in a User Group report recently (over on Inara Pey blog as I remember) Linden may also go with  more than one render API in the future, if/when they do a major rewrite of the viewer. Like Metal for Apple, DirectX for Microsoft. Maybe?? also continue with OpenGL for Linux and Potato. So three viewer versions for each release maybe

Linden do have do something for Apple users going forward, so some kind of quite major viewer rendering rewrite has to happen at some point

[Flea Yatsenko]

4 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

is a interesting question this

i read in a User Group report recently (over on Inara Pey blog as I remember) Linden may also go with  more than one render API in the future, if/when they do a major rewrite of the viewer. Like Metal for Apple, DirectX for Microsoft. Maybe?? also continue with OpenGL for Linux and Potato. So three viewer versions for each release maybe

Linden do have do something for Apple users going forward, so some kind of quite major viewer rendering rewrite has to happen at some point

Metal and DX12 are all based on Vulkan. Sadly I think we are heading into a future of fragmentation, Vulkan should be supported on all major platforms, even if it requires some third party libraries to go from Vulkan to Metal or Vulkan to DX12. It just depends if Intel, Nvidia, and AMD are going to support Vulkan properly going into the future or not. I hope they do, having different APIs for OSX, Windows, and Linux is going to make a huge mess of things and distract from features like having a proper Android and iOS client.

OpenGL was never a first choice for graphics, it's focused on accuracy, not speed. But it was chosen by many projects because it's easy to get it running on multiple platforms.

These new APIs will allow SL to use more than one core effectively, but it's going to take a lot of work, they'll be better off starting from nothing then trying to get it working in the current engine. They did a really good job with Sansar though, I know they can handle it fine.

[Mollymews]

1 minute ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Metal and DX12 are all based on Vulkan

my understanding is that Vulkan began as a wrapper for Metal. And that there is a Vulkan work in progress to wrap DirectX as well

Linden may go with Vulkan as a general framework yes. In doing so tho there will be performance/ease tradeoffs in the same way as there is with OpenGL

i am on Windows and I would quite like a native DirectX viewer if that was ever available

[Mollymews]

9 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

They did a really good job with Sansar though, I know they can handle it fine.

agree. Lets hope for a bright future

[Fritigern Gothly]

2 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

they'll be better off starting from nothing

Like they did between viewers 1.x and viewer 2.