Comparing Second Life on Windows and Linux

Here's something I found interesting. I logged into Second Life a couple times when I was still running Ubuntu, and I noticed something about my framerate. (Unfortunately, Blogspot appears to convert any image uploaded to a jpeg, which makes it hard to see the individual red dots in the screenshots.)


You can't see the dots very well, but there are two distinct columns on either side. On my old computer, I used SL in both Windows XP and Ubuntu, but I never saw this. My framerate is oscillating between about 35 and 42 fps, forming those two columns. Usually the distribution is more chaotic. It might have something to do with the dual-core CPU, or could just be that I'm running it on a much newer Ubuntu installation without a lot of other software installed. I thought maybe it had something to do with the window manager, so I ran SL without a window manager to see what it would look like.

Now we see a much more steady framerate. It also looks like this if I switch to fullscreen mode, but am still running a window manager (GNOME).

Now that I'm running Windows, I decided to do the same experiment. There's no point in comparing the actual framerates, as I wasn't always in the same place when I took these screenshots (but I did make sure I wasn't looking at any avatars or anything that was moving and might cause fluctuation).

In windowed mode, there's is a lot of fluctuation, and it tends to be all over the place. What's shown here is perhaps a little more extreme than the norm.

Fullscreen is better, showing slightly less fluctuation than Linux in windowed mode.

On a side note, I have probably used SL about equal amounts in both Ubuntu and Windows XP, so I'm going to write a short comparison for anyone who's interested. For me, it always feels smoother in Ubuntu, although when I actually look at the framerate there doesn't seem to be any significant difference. The Linux viewer also seems more stable. A downside to Ubuntu is that there is no support for video playback in the Linux viewer (which is why it is still tagged as 'alpha'), but I don't need that very often. One thing that always annoyed me in Ubuntu was the sound. I won't go into the technical details, but there are two options. If I just run SL normally, the sound is delayed about 1 second from when I should hear it. This is kind of annoying, and might actually hurt my dueling ability since a lot of my reaction is based on sound. If I edit the script that runs SL by commenting out a certain line, the sound delay is fixed, but there is a side effect that SL doesn't allow anything else to play a sound. There are times when someone will post a youtube link or something like that, and I can't watch it without logging out. It also makes it so I can't listen to music while I'm using SL, which is something I do a lot.