Sept. 6 Update:

Our development team has posted another update on Second Life performance enhancements. See the latest update here.

Aug. 26 Update:

We are happy to announce that we have promoted the Atlasaurus Viewer to be the official Second Life Viewer today. As mentioned, this Viewer contains performance improvements that will benefit lower-end systems, stability fixes to reduce the crash rate, and also contains WebRTC Voice support (more info on that in this blog post). More performance improvements are coming in future releases. See a full list of features and fixes in the Release Notes here.

ORIGINAL POST BELOW:

Are you experiencing graphics issues or increased lag with Second Life after recent Viewer updates? Let’s get you back up and running without missing a (virtual) beat. 

OFFICIAL SECOND LIFE VIEWER: UPDATE NOW FOR IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

If you are having issues with the Official Second Life Viewer, you can immediately download an update here that addresses many of the issues affecting performance, particularly among those who may be using older or less powerful computers. We are continuing to work on additional fixes that will further address texture loading issues and low framerates. If you don’t update proactively now, you’ll soon see a prompt when you go to login to Second Life in the coming days encouraging you to update.

FIRESTORM & THIRD PARTY VIEWERS: UPDATE OPTIONS 

We are working closely with the Firestorm team to coordinate the rollout of updates that will improve your performance. You have a few options:

• If you are having performance issues and don’t want to wait for the next Firestorm Viewer release with fixes, you can download the older 6.6.17 version of the Firestorm Viewer which its development team recently announced will continue to be available “forever.” While this version is more stable in the short term, it may not be the best option in the long term for those who want to continue to see future enhancements to Second Life including updates to voice chat in the coming weeks. Once the new release with performance fixes comes out, we encourage you to give that a try.
• The next release of the Firestorm viewer will include all the performance fixes we are working on. You’ll be prompted to update your Firestorm Viewer once it is ready in the next few days, but you can also be one of the first to try it by joining the Firestorm Preview Group inworld and continue to stay connected with their development progress on the official Firestorm Viewer website and its dedicated download page.

As a reminder, our Third Party Viewer directory contains a variety of specialized Viewer options that have been vetted and approved as alternative ways to access Second Life.

SO WHAT HAPPENED?

We are always striving to add more improvements to Second Life and we’ve been particularly excited to roll out integration of PBR Materials, which has the potential to improve and modernize much of the look and feel of our virtual world. However, the introduction of PBR has not gone as smoothly as we would like and we have heard community frustrations and feedback with recent PBR-enabled Viewer releases of both the Official Second Life Viewer and Firestorm Viewer.

We share your frustration and are taking steps to make things better for everyone on both lower-end and high-end systems. This means that we’re actively focused on improving the performance in a variety of areas including improved FPS, VRAM management, texture loading, alpha blending, and even how lighting is rendered within the world. Additional fixes are already in our development pipeline and will head to QA soon.

We know that many of you just want to log in and enjoy your Second Life and we are committed to making things right. We appreciate your patience and loyalty to Second Life and encourage you to continue to send us your feedback and help us continue to improve as we move forward. We also have the PBR wiki and several Support resources available if you get stuck or need help.

We’ll see you inworld!

The Second Life team