[sldev] Why is Second-Life viewer so slow on Samsung Q1 uiltra?

[Kamilion]

First of all, that system has a unknown Intel "A100" 600Mhz processor.
The Second Life system requirements are at least a minimum 800Mhz P3
or Athlon.

Second Life performs a lot of intensive vector calculations -- Can you
discern if SL is running with runtime support for SSE2? Intel's
documentation specifies that the A100 supports it, but I am unaware of
SL's featuretable specifically identifying this processor and enabling
SSE -- in fact it may be explicitly disabled due to the low clock
rate.

Second of all, the Intel GMA 950 is not directly listed as a supported
graphics accelerator; however the system requirements mention the 945
explicitly.
IIRC, the GMA 950 is the umbrella specification the 945 falls under --
the 945GU, 945GM, 945G, 945GZ all fall under the GMA 950 revision
series.
See VWR-3099 in JIRA as a meta-issue for unsupported GPUs.

Also, The GMA 950 shares the same architectural weakness as the
original GMA 900s: no hardware geometry processing. Neither basic
(DX7) hardware transform and lighting, nor more advanced vertex
shaders (DX8 and later) are handled in the GMA hardware -- therefore
this must be performed in software on the 600Mhz A100, which is the
most likely candidate for your reported slow behavior.

Since linux seems to support the GMA 9XX series with the Intel
released v2.1 drivers, I would suggest you attempt to test the viewer
under linux and let us know if you notice any difference in framerate.
Since most GL accesses under linux go through the MESAGL shim, any
fallback to software rendering is handled there instead of the
underlying Intel driver in windows, and MESAGL may process things more
efficiently since it's software fallback codepaths are much more
rigorously tested and optimized.

Good to see someone from Samsung.com asking these questions! I assume
you're one of the hardware engineers of these UMPC platforms?

To put it simply: The Intel GMA adapter is forcing the (slow) CPU to
perform most of the necessary functionality that SL requires. This is
the most likely reason SL runs slowly on the Q1 ultra.

I have this same problem with SL on my Fujitsu Lifebook S2020, using
the ATI Radeon Mobility U1, another chipset lacking hardware texture
and lighting -- fortunately the lifebook has a AMD 1.66Ghz Athlon XP-M
that can pick up the slack in ubuntu linux. Versions of SL prior to
1.8.X on the windows platform would refuse to run entirely for this
system. I get framerates of about 7-8 FPS with no avatars around on an
unloaded sim with draw distance at 64m with all graphics options
disabled. As soon as another avatar comes into view, my FPS drops to
1-2FPS. I have not tested windlight's avatar imposter support yet on
this hardware.  See VWR-520 on JIRA.

-- Kamilion Schnook

On Jan 2, 2008 11:42 PM, 김승현 <ptpto.kim at samsung.com> wrote:
> Hi~! Everyone, I'm wondering why is Second-Life viewer so slow on Samsung
> Q1 ultra?
>
> Is it graphics driver problem?
>
> Let's check graphics accelerator driver Q1 has. It's Intel GMA 950
> chipset. See the product specification
> (http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/spec.do?group=computersperipheral
> s&type=ultramobilepc&subtype=ultramobilepc&model_cd=NP-
> Q1U/600/SEA&fullspec=F) Q1 supports DirectX 9 and OpenGL 1.4. Current
> graphics driver version that is installed on my Q1: 6.14.10.4833 and latest
> version: 6.14.10.4864. It seems that's not key factor of our problem.
>
> Second-Life viewer self-problem?
>
> Official viewer may have problem with GMA 950 series but I'm not sure what
> the problem is exactly. SecondLife doesn't make good harmony with OpenGL
> 1.4 ver.? If it's true of not, what is the critical problem point? As you
> know, my point is not chipset level, but graphics API level!