System requirements - 8 cores?

[Lana Callow]

Having been absent from SL for a few years, I now plan to purchase a Mini PC that can run SL without issues, so I checked the current system requirements - and was surprised that these recommend 8 CPU cores. Mini PCs with 8 cores are rather expensive, so what do you think? Would 6 or 4 cores provide a significantly worse experience?

[bigmoe Whitfield]

I run an i7-5820k which is a 6 core processor and I do fine with it, but I also have the ram/ssds/gpu to not cause a bottle neck.

[Kathrine Jansma]

The requirements probably confuse hyper threads vs. cores.

A typical CPU core these days allows Hyperthreading, so for Intel & AMD you quite often get 2x the hyper threads vs. cores. So a 4 core CPU with 8 hyperthreads should be fine.

Recent work on the performance viewer allows the viewer to distribute work to a thread pool, this improves a few things like faster rezzing speeds for texture heavy environments and others. So having extra cores helps to get a better experience.

Why 8?

That is probably a rule of thumb thing. To get an optimal experience a lot of variables need to be balanced. If you have a really fast network, you want many threads to decode the textures fast as well. If you have a slow harddrive you want more threads too, as the worker threads for disk access block longer. And if you have a good graphics card that offers nice multi threaded support (like NVidia cards usually do), you might also want more threads. Add one or two threads to make your virus scanner behave and any other background things, and you reach some number in the 4-8 threads range. With just four hyper threads, you might not get any real benefits from the new thread pools. Basically 1 for AV, one for the mainloop, one for the disk writer/read thread and one for texture decode and a bit for extra GL threads. Of course, the operating system will allow more threads to run, but the best performance shows when you have about one application thread per real hyperthread of the hardware.

[Lana Callow]

Thanks for the answers. So I guess I can relax and save some money with less than 8 cores.

[Flea Yatsenko]

Those are just what LL recommends, the minimum is only 2 cores. You don't need 8 cores. But SL is currently limited by the CPU, not the graphics chip. But that might change a bit when PBR releases.

[Love Zhaoying]

Apparently, I run with only 4 cores and am just fine.

Help=>About says, "CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K".

[Frionil Fang]

For what it's worth, this is what the average situation when the scene is stable looks like for me: 2, sometimes 3 threads hard at work (billions of cycles), about 6 threads doing minor work (100s of millions of cycles), several doing very little but *something* at least. Changing the scene launches more threads for texture decoding and whatnot, up to the 24 this CPU has, saving some time from the hard working cores.

I'd guess 4 cores (8 hyperthreaded) is probably fine for most situations, more cores has more effect during scene changes.

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 1/3/2023 at 2:06 AM, Lana Callow said:

I checked the current system requirements

Wow, LL did update these, at (long) last !...

Sadly, the Linux requirements are all wrong:

Quote

A reasonably modern 32-bit Linux environment is required. If you are running a 64-bit Linux distribution then you will need its 32-bit compatibility environment installed.

Hey, LL, wake up !!!

It's been years that 64 bits Linux viewers have been available, and many months no more TPV bothers providing 32 bits Linux builds.

You do not need any 32-bit compatibility environment installed (not even for SLVoice, which most TPVs now run in its Windows 64 bits incarnation under Wine, by lack of an up to date Linux SLVoice version).

Quote

800 MHz Intel® Pentium® III or AMD Athlon™

Nope !... Linux viewers need SSE3 minimum because of a newer CEF version (currently at 108 and soon 109 in the Cool VL Viewer Linux builds) than in current Windows/macOS LL official builds, but the latter will soon need SSE3 too, when their old, bugs and security holes riddled CEF 91 version will finally get updated.

Also:

Quote

** The Linux viewer is community supported, and may not be fully compatible with all Second Life features.

The Linux TPVs are compatible with all Second Life features, with one exception: the path-finding capsule displaying, that requires the Havok proprietary library.

 

Could we please have a Linden fixing these misleading Linux ”requirements” ?

Edited January 11 by Henri Beauchamp