I have run some interesting benchmarks running the Second Life™ viewer on my Apple Mac Pro™ under both Microsoft Vista™ and OS X.
Hardware/Network Environment:
- Apple Mac Pro with 2 Quad-core (8 cores total) Xeon processors at 3.2GHZ
- 8GB of Ram
- Nvidia GeForce™ 8800GT w/512MB
- (3) 500GB 7200RPM SATA drives
- Gigabit Ethernet connection
- Internet connection via Verizon FIOS 50Mbps/15Mbps (bridged business class w/static IPs)
Operating Systems (Dual Boot using Bootcamp – each OS on seperate drive):
- OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard) w/all updates as of 05-May-2008
- Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit w/SP1 and all updates as of 05-May-2008
- Bootcamp drivers from OS X Leopard DVD
- Nvidia drivers manually updated to Forceware release 169.25
Second Life Viewer:
- Second Life Release Candidate 1.20.5 (86279)
- All testing done in full screen mode
- Settings:
- Maximum Bandwidth: 1500 kbps
- Disk Cache Size: 1000 MB
- Disk Cache Location: <seperate drive from OS boot in each case>
- Graphics: <clicked Recommended Settings – no changes otherwise>
- Voice chat: Not enabled
Testing methodolgy:
- Teleported to 8 distinct locations in-world w/varying object/texture views
- Stood in same position (via landmark) at each location and faced a predetermined direction
- Monitored Statistics window to wait for network utilization to drop to approximately 20-50kbps to indicate texture/object downloads were complete
- Ensured that no other avatars were in the field of view when noting fps numbers
- All tests were completed within 10 minutes of each other
FPS Results:
| Location | FPS under OS X | FPS Under Vista 64 |
| 1 | 37-39 | 57-60 |
| 2 | 25-27 | 39-41 |
| 3 | 79-82 | 121-123 |
| 4 | 48-50 | 97-101 |
| 5 | 24-25 | 49-51 |
| 6 | 33-34 | 68-71 |
| 7 | 52-55 | 84-87 |
| 8 | 19-21 | 39-41 |
It is interesting to note that on the exact same hardware that the FPS on Windows Vista 64 is on average between about 1.5-2X the FPS under OS X. From reading a number of sites there definitely seems to be similar results running other OpenGL applications under the two OSes. Related to graphics driver implementation issues? some other reason? I would love to hear any insight others may have on this.
