Client Performance for Wonderland by Hardware Platform

Project Wonderland provides a flexible platform that should run on a wide array of hardware with varying performance characteristics. One of the critical elements is graphical performance which has not traditionally been important to many users, this is obviously changing with the rich interfaces being created in most operating systems (Compiz on Unix, Aqua in OSX and Aeroglass in Vista) but there are lots machines deployed with lower end hardware. When building a virtual environment the most critical aspect that will affect performance is the complexity of the art (amount of geometry, size of textures etc). For the sample world, MPK20, included in Project Wonderland the art is targeted at a mid range graphics machine, for example GeForce^? Go 5200 card in a laptop should provide good performance. If you run the wonderland client and observe poor performance there are a number of things you can do to improve it

• Check you have the latest graphics drivers installed for your hardware (this is especially important on linux which does not normally include hardware accelerated graphics drivers)
• Make the Wonderland window smaller.
• Lower the desired frame rate of the wonderland client (under the View->Max Frame Rate menu)
• Try quitting some apps. When the on-board texture memory fills up some graphics cards push textures out to CPU memory. Textured rendering is slower from this type of memory. Reducing the number of app windows will free up more space in the on-board texture memory. This will reduce the number of CPU textures and will result in faster rendering.
• Scrolling an app window with the mouse wheel can generate huge amounts of data traffic that can swamp low bandwidth clients. Using other types of scrolling features (such as scrollbar buttons, scrollbar elevator, or arrow keys) is easier on this slower clients.

This table provides information about observed performance running Project Wonderland on various systems. Please add to this list for your hardware platform.