It is becoming possible to make actual, real-time mirrors. The secret behind this is called "Physically-Based Rendering", PBR in short. It's available from OpenSim 0.9.3.0 on and from Firestorm 7 on.
It's heavily disputed, though, for four reasons.
One, Firestorm 7 is still rather buggy, and PBR is not wholly defined itself yet. It's all a WIP.
Two, Firestorm 7 is even buggier.
Three, Firestorm 7 has the Advanced Lighting Model permanently on. No way back to "good old" forward rendering without ALM. No way back to turning all fancy rendering features off because your machine is weak.
If you have a sufficiently powered computer with dedicated graphics, and your performance bottleneck has been the CPU because Firestorm 6 only uses one core/one thread, then Firestorm 7 will be faster because it uses multiple CPU threads.
But if you have a toaster with on-board graphics where the graphics have always been the bottleneck, Firestorm 7 will be dramatically slower because a lot of the fancy-schmancy graphics bling-bling that you had turned off for performance reasons is now turned on permanently.
Finally, four, OpenSim with PBR does not look like OpenSim with ALM or OpenSim with forward rendering, only with mirrors. PBR is an entirely new rendering system. You'll notice things like a higher contrast, as if someone had wiped a layer of dust from your screen, or reflective surfaces suddenly being blue because they reflect the sky.
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