YUP, completely agree on the faster all the time on all features you mentioned. MP was perhaps most noticeable. I have not spent enough time in group chat this past week to notice improvemnets, but will take your word for it that speed has increased.
Overall through the past several or even dozen viewer updates, I have been delighted to see how quickly even dense scenes just POP into view.
However, the reason I write is to complain about a performance enhancing feature that drives me crazy (typical I know, and I'm sorry). Since the start of the interesting code, things, or rather the surface textures on things blurs in and out of focus after any length of time in world.. say about an hour or more. The only cure is to relog, though normally I end up doing that with a sense of last resort and am ummm mad by that point.. I said drives me crazy, right. Turning on Full Res textures in develop menu will also prevent the blurring,( *thrashing* ? ) or "wonkiness" as I call it, but this seems to be too high a performance hit in other respects for some areas and definitely too high a hit for some people.
It is most noticeable standing around in a more or less empty environment and as someone who spends most of her time on a platform working closely with local textures to get things just right, having the focus of everything on screen dissolve to fuzz is soooooooo irritating. Also, it seems worse on alpha masked textures, they are almost always blobs of blur that using them feels like a deadend.
Sorry for the whine. This is the ONLY bad in what has been a solid year or 2 of steady improvements and thoughtful little touches. Love the frequent updates, love how beautiful everything has been looking, love how well materials are working and how easy they are to use, love how scenes POP into view, love being able to spin my camera around in crowds and not crash.... just hate that the interesting code in the viewer (or whatever it is) cannot be made to HOLD STILL and stay in focus.
Anyway, I just wish there was a way to opt out of this feature even if only temporarily, something like full res textures perhaps but only withion a close range or even a version of the viewer without it. Or maybe there could be some crazy easy fix such as it's only engaged when the avatar's position changes or something (????).