Still on Viewer 1 what is the best NEW VIEWER

[MarinaBrooke]

Ok dont LOL but im astill on viewer 1.. its smooth as silk.. so im not sure  about upgrading to any NEW viewers..i heard that Phoenix is the best? but cant see mesh? V2 is laggy... and not sure about Firestorm? HELP!

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Hello MarinaBrooke. There is no a specific answer for your question. We know nothing about your system specs. Many users prefer Phoenix and Firestorm. Both support mesh now. Don't exclude also the official Viewer 3 if you haven't tried it yet. So the best you can do is to try gradually all the viewers till to find which is the best for your system.

[Theresa Tennyson]

All mesh viewers use basically the same code to display mesh and it isn't completely optimized yet so all mesh viewers are slower than non-mesh viewers. Phoenix with mesh will have the interface closest to Viewer 1 but even the people at Phoenix would like to see it phased out. Firestorm can be tuned to look similar to Viewer 1 and the latest LL viewer is quite customizable. Note that if you have an older computer, especially with an ATI video card, you ma\y not want to change at all.

[Alicia Sautereau]

I`m still in favor for the kirsten viewer, untill the depth of field is fixed in firestorm when shadows are enabled

[chloe Seljan]

Kirstenlee stopped to work on his, fabulous, viewer. For some "RL" reasons. I hope that one day that Lee can come back to work on Kirstens Viewer.

But for the moment... no more developped and so... 

For the fan of Kirstens, you have also Nirans Viewer. Only on PC (or mac but with bootcam or others)

 

To answer at question : It depens... Firestorm is nice. Viewer 3 also. It depens of what you need and your pc. 

 

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Best bet? Try and see how they work for you. Just make sure you DO NOT share the same cache location between viewers. Or the same config file, really.

[Nalates Urriah]

This is really a matter of personal preference.

Hardware also has a lot to do with it. If your computer was made before 2001 you may not be able to render mesh. The problem is support for SSE2 a feature  in newer processors. You can download CPU-Z (free program) to find out if your CPU is SSE2 capable.

With Firestorm you can set a Phoenix like mode and cut down on the User Interface change shock.

There are over a dozen third party viewers out. It is impossible to know which you may like. You can read about most of the viewers at my blog. Look for the menu bar just below the top banner.  There is a Menu item for most of the available viewers. If you don't find one your looking for in that menu, look down the left side for the Category selector. All the viewers I've reviewed are listed there, along with all the other categories. Nalates Blog

Most new viewers are slow. With the release of mesh a new render pipeline is being used. They have not had years to optimize it as they have with 1.23. They are working on it and things are getting better. You can see the performance people are getting with various hardware and viewer combinations here: How Fast is Your Viewer? - Second Life If you haven't already, please add your information to the thread.

Suggestion

Changing from V1 to a newer viewer is likely to be a bit of a pain as you learn where controls are and the changes in how SL works. Appearance and Inventory have changed and more changes are coming. So, any viewer with the new user interface is going to be somewhat a challenge. It takes about 3 days to adapt. May be longer for the new OUTFIT's idea.

I like the new user interface way better and think it is easier to learn than 1.23's. But, that is me.

Since you are going to have to learn a new user interface, I suggest you get the main SL Viewer and start learning. From there you can shift to most any viewer and quickly adapt. You can keep 1.23 installed and use it when needed. The new SL Viewer installs in its own folder.

If you want to skip the relearning, get Firestorm and use the Phoenix mode interface. I am not recommending Phoenix as it is a dead end viewer. You won't see much future support for Phoenix. The developer says they will NOT totally abandon it. But, they are very clear it is not their primary focus. They want to put their effort into Firestorm. The FS-PH Team just did a long Q & A about the future of Phoenix. I summarized it here: My Take on the Firestorm-Phoenix Q&A Video.

With Third Party Viewers you can install and uninstall them easily without much problem. With SL Viewers uninstalling them can wipeout your chat logs and settings for other viewers. Often it is safer to do manual removal of viewers than run the uninstall. For help with that see: Second Life Clean Install.

Since you have stayed on 1.23, you must not mind being behind the curve. In that case you could use Cool LV or Singularity. Both are striving to maintain the V1 user interface and add new code from the new viewer. They are hybrid interfaces somewhere between 1.23 and the new FUI (Flexible User Interface). New features take some time to arrive in these viewers. They are catching up, so that may not always be true.

Good luck picking a viewer.

I am in love with several viewers... I change between them throughout the day. I can't say I have a favorite. I like the SL Viewer because its user interface is the most stable. I like Niran's viewer because I think it is the follow on to Kirsten's viewer and has the best render and shadows (like Wow shadows). I like Dolphin Viewer 3 for its particle editor and complete build tools. However, Firestorm has the same tools and will likely have the particle editor in the next release. (They have it but wanted it working better before releasing it in FS. - They are picky about having things right in FS, which is a good thing).

It just depends on what I'm doing as to which viewer I want to use. Dolphin and Firestorm are the best for building, IMO. Niran's is the best for photography and machinima. LL's is the best general purpose.... and those are my opinions.

[SatguruS1488312156]

If you are on version 1 then check out Cool VL viewer.

It is based on version 1 and supports mesh.

The new Phoenix version (the one which supports mesh) has borrowed code from this viewer to support mesh.

The viewer is pretty fast too. I think it is the fastest

 

[Linda Brynner]

Hi,

It all comes down to your computer and what viewer works best with it. However, in my many years of SL and having tried so many viewers including Pheonix versions and Firestorm, V3, and all V2's i still come to the conclusion that V1.23.5 still is the best in terms of speed. The highest FPS, the smoothest, the least buggiest, simple, easy, fun. It cannot render mesh, it does not support shadows or multiple attachments, it doesn't have DOF and avatar physics. But The more options a viewer has, the slower it gets due to more overhead in the code. Many don't need all that extras at all as they prefer a solid balance between speed and quality. V1 provides this still for many as i understand both inworld and in the forums.

V1 is kept alive and even many estate owners (thus content creators) still use it (or Pheonix which is V1) since many of them have older computers, consenquently mesh will be adapted slowly.

The point is, the viewers aren't coded so very brilliant, and not everyone will buy a super computer just for SL. We can see it in the decline of new users and logins since V2/3. It just means that SL isn't fit for the average computer, and it is why so many older users keep on going with V1 based viewers. Pheonix has the most options, V1.23.5 is the fastest.

It's like ppl using IMVU and so on. They want fun, more than high quality and loads of options. SL has followed the path of beauty and options rather than performance since V2.

If you want speed, smooth, easy and fun: V1.23.5. (or V1 based).

If you want options and more beauty: V2 based, V3, Firestorm (less performance).

 

 

[Credo Rolland]

Late post here but it might help someone doing a search:

Since 2005 I've found that one viewer just doesn't cut it for me.  It all depends on what I'll be doing when I log in.

For building I really like Phoenix and FireStorm.  They have great copy/paste functions in the building editor that come in handy.  They make it super easy to see link numbers in a linkset, and the list goes on.  Imprudence and Dolphin 1 and 2 have many of the nifty building features as well, but don't yet do mesh that I know of.

For running vehicles, playing shooters, and doing lots 'moving around' I'm torn.  I want mesh, so that limits me to Phoenix (Cool Viewer does mesh, I don't see it on the TPV list anymore?) or something newer based on the V3 code as far as I know.  The odd thing for me is that for Pheonix to render at its best...all maxed out, I have to step back to older ATI drivers (11.6) for my 5570 card.  For the V3 stuff...I'm better with the latest ATI drivers.  It's a juggling act.

I have pretty dated hardware (4X AMD Phenom II and 5570 ATI on a cheap bottlenecked DDR2 MB), but even so, I can't get over how smoothly and beatifully Nirans viewer is working for me.  The nice thing about this viewer is it splays out all the rendering controls and you can gradually enable/disable or otherwise adjust things until you find what agrees with your hardware.  So far it's the smoothest V3 based viewer on my system.  At first I had to work at it a bit to find what works best for my video card...but once I found it man is it sweet!

I still run SL on some older single core XP 32 bit computers as well.  I.E. an ancient Pentium M laptop with Intel Graphics.  Phoenix works there, but I'm not going to be driving any VICE combat jets at 40FPS on that rig I'll assure you!  More like low to medium settings and barely walking around.

At the end of the day...I find I use more than one viewer.  Part of it depends on what video drivers I happen to have loaded at the moment (different things I do besides SL work better if I swap drivers).  Part of it depends on what I'll be doing in SL.

As of June 2, 2012...My personal faves are:

Phoenix or Firestorm for building.

Nirans for playing the game  

Others out there worth looking into as well.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory 

Try them all and see which one fits your hardware and your fancy  

As for the NVIDIA VS ATI delima.  I'm stumped.  Open GL is open GL right?  I've had a long chain of mid-level GPUs over the years...both brands.  They both rock.  I often have to hen-pick the best drivers with either brand GPU.  Case in point...11.6 ATI drivers do Phoenix great with my ATI 5570.  The latest ATI drivers and the same app is a disaster.  Oh well, happy hunting

[Amethyst Jetaime]

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Alicia Sautereau wrote:

I`m still in favor for the kirsten viewer, untill the depth of field is fixed in firestorm when shadows are enabled

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I use the latest Firestorm and can use both depth of field and shadows with no problem.  In fact I used them both tonight to take some pictures.

If you are having a problem with this I don't think its the viewer and you should ask in the Pheonix support group about it.