Why are the graphics so bad? Why is there lag time?

[PabloBeCool]

I thought SL would have superior graphics. Why are the graphics so unsophisticated? 

[Freya Mokusei]

Compared to what? SL does fairly well for a product that's 15 years old. See if Quake 3 still stands up.

It sounds like you're making some mistakes in your reasoning though, lag happens because of network delays regardless of how good your PC is at rendering. Second Life is entirely online, and entirely user-generated - which means a lot of performance is network and optimisation based (and no-one can guarantee optimisation).

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

In other virtual worlds, most or all of what you see is generated by a design team employed by the world provider. As a result, everything is optimized for performance and adherence to some central storyline and principles. All Second Life content is created by residents, so there's little chance for optimization and the place is completely unprincipled. We make our own stories here.

The result is that we trade away some performance for the opportunity to peek inside each other's brains. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to you.

Second Life is one of the finest examples of a hot mess I've ever seen.

[Rhonda Huntress]

Why are the graphics so bad?

You see, Second Life (the program) is a tool.  Everything you see is made from the tool.  If you use the tool properly, you get better results.

What graphic settings are you using?  What windlight settings are you using?  Did you make a custom setting or are you using one of Firestorm's presets? 

 

Why is there lag time?

Because the speed of light is 11.8 inches per nanosecond.  Nothing is instantaneous.

Lag can mean many different things.  What kind of lag are you experiencing?  Network latency?  Hard disk thrashing? Graphic lag?  There should not be any disk thrashing in SL since none of the data is on disk.  It is a100% user created and needs to be downloaded on the fly. If are running with minimal RAM, low RAM graphic card or worse yet an integrated gfx, you will see disk thrashing since all the data will have to start using the OS swap file.

Network speeds have been touched on already.  If it takes a long time for a sim to rez but runs smooth once it is up I can guarantee you have a slow connection.  In crowded sims you may never get everything to rez as people come and go causing more network traffic with each change.  It is possible to run SL on a 4G wireless connection but you need to be in a quite place and have a ton of patience.

Graphic lag is my bet on your complaint considering the other question.  Do you have the newest drivers?  Do you have a modern graphic card?  If you do, is it on an old motherboard and choked by a slow bus speed?  Is it well ventilated; heat is a very real problem for the amount of work SL will put on a card and CPU.  Do you have a sufficient  power supply? An under powered chip is also a major source of heat. 

 

[Nalates Urriah]

They are guessing at what you are seeing. You didn't tell us enough for us to be able to give you an accurate answer.

To see Second Life the way others see it, in an average sort of way, look here for images: https://www.flickr.com/groups/secondlife/pool/

To see what SL looks like at its best, look here: https://www.flickr.com/groups/skyriverlanding/pool/ (some nudity)

Another section to look at: https://www.flickr.com/groups/most_excellent_sl/pool/

Example: https://flic.kr/p/FqKmQ6

Some of the images have been Photoshop'd. But, the source for all the images is the SL viewer, Linden or Third Party. The viewer can be set from LOW to ULTRA quality graphics in Preference. If you have a weak video card the viewer will automatically turn down the quality of the graphics on initial start up. You can over ride that setting. The viewer is designed to balance performance and render quality with the tech's at the Lab giving a bit more weight to performance.

Limits

Second Life is old, as has been pointed out. While new features are being added to the render pipeline, the engine is not on par with the latest Unreal or Unity graphics engines, close, but quite as good.

Also, other games are made by professionals and highly optimized for performance and appearance. Second Life as 10's to 100's of times more content than any game I know of. Most of it made by amateurs. Very little of it optimized. So, for older computers the Lab has made it possible to control the graphics engine and reduce render quality to improve performance. But, even on the Ultra setting poor content will render poorly.

Compare

The new game Black Desert uses the latest in graphics tech. Looks good. But, I have to take that world as I find it. In SL I can build and shape my world and avatar anyway I want. So, depending on what you want... SL is better or worse.

With skill you can make SL look very nearly as good as Black Desert. But, SL has made technical compromises to handle massive amounts of non-optimized content. That means you will generally have few frames per second for comparable scenes and quality.

Future

The Lab is building a platform with better (?) graphics to support VR (Oculas Rift). Some of that tech is leaking back into SL. So, image quality is slowly improving. But, to get the highend graphics that is state of the art, you'll have to wait for Project Sansar to come to open Beta.