what is vbo? and what does it lag my viewer so bad?

[rhonin Nissondorf]

some random person told me if i use  ati grahpics i need to turn off  vbo and sure enought this improved my performance dramatically.  i have  a grahpics card that i can play  every quality video game at a high level of graphics its not like i have a old system.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

VBO is "vertex buffer object".  It's an OpenGL feature used in rendering for programs using the OpenGL rendering architecture such as Second Life.  Enabling VBO should give better performance for your graphics....but the key word is "should".  Some video cards and the associated drivers show problems with VBO and by turning the feature off in your preferences you get a noticable increase in performance and quality.  Both nVidia and ATI (now known as AMD) cards have occassional issues with VBO enabled in preferences...........most to the time the problem is fixed with a driver version that doesn't have the problem.  ATI/AMD cards have historically had more problems than nVidia in the past........that's probably why you were told to turn off VBO in preferences.  If you've done that it fixed your problem then leave it off.  Over time a new driver will be released for your card and if you update to it, you might try VBO again to see if that driver fixed the previous issue (that would be up to you).

The reason you don't see any issues with VBO in your other games is that those other games are not rendered with the OpenGL rendering architecture..........they are most likely DirectX (especially if you are using a Windows machine).  You won't have any problems or issues with a rendering engine that use the VBO feature because DirectX doesn't have that feature.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertex_Buffer_Object

[Theresa Tennyson]

Because SL viewers are open-source and run on Macs and Linux machines they use a graphics language called OpenGL. Most commercial games use a different language called DirectX which is basically Windows-only so you can't directly compare the performance between the two types of graphics. DirectX is where the money is so graphics card manufacturers work harder on performance for it and OpenGL performance is an afterthought. VBO's are sort of a cached shortcut that video cards can use for objects in OpenGL. For some reason the way Nvidia cards support VBO's works fine with SL and the way ATI cards support them works badly. Newer drivers for the ATI cards seem to work better.

[Baloo Uriza]

DirectX is a layer on top of OpenGL; straight-on OpenGL performance is crippled on Windows intentionally as a marketing ploy and vendor lock-in for DirectX. If you want better OpenGL support, don't use Windows.