Multiple core cpu

[todd Falmer]

Is sl written to take advantage of using multiple cores?

[Nalates Urriah]

Yes... and no...

The viewer can use multiple cores and has multi-threaded processes. Some will say not. But it depends on what is being spoken about. The actual render pipeline is apparently a single thread. So, it supposedly uses only one thread and CPU core. The part of the viewer that uses KDU to decompress textures/images uses a number of threads. The CURL process that pulls assets (downloads) is also multi-threading.

If you are on Windows, the Performance Monitor will show SL Viewer running 20 or so threads.

The common word is also that the SL Viewer will not use SLI, duel video cards. I've talked to a few people that are using duel cards and know how to set the nVidia Control panel so that SLViewer can use the second card for some tasks. I'm a single card type person so I haven't tried it.

You can see what performance others are getting here: How Fast is Your Viewer? - Second Life. It is not scientific nor is it tabulated. But, you can see duel core people get less performance then quad core people.

Look in Debug Settings and use your browser search (Ctrl-F) to find 'multi'. There are 3 or 4 settings you can check to see if your viewer has multi-threading turned on.

In the viewer use Ctrl-Alt-D to enable the Advanced menu item. Access to the Debug Settings is in that menu item. If everything goes sideways because to wakup the settings, delete the file c:\Users\[window_login_id]\AppData\Roaming\Secondlife\user_settings\settings.xml. That will restore the viewer to all default settings.