Will this work?

[lvictoria]

I'm just gunna make this short and sweet. I haven't been on SL for years. I am not tech savvy whatsoever.  I know  everyone's gunna say "don't use a laptop" but I need one for school. So, just please tell me if and how SL will perform on this laptop. I know it's very low budget. Thanks in advance. 

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-inspiron-15-6-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i3-8gb-memory-128gb-ssd-black/6387169.p?skuId=6387169

[Pamela Galli]

Have you checked the recommendations LL gives? In the Knowledge Base?

[lvictoria]

Yes and I've read that the info listed there is outdated and irrelevant. 

Edited February 1, 2020 by lvictoria

[Lyssa Greymoon]

It's a budget laptop that wasn't designed with gaming in mind. As long as you dial the graphics settings back appropriately it should be okay. It will definitely run SL, but not all the eye candy.

[Pamela Galli]

1 hour ago, lvictoria said:

Yes and I've read that the info listed there is outdated and irrelevant. 

I don’t know much about computers — can someone who does let us know how much is relevant?
https://secondlife.com/my/support/system-requirements/

[Fritigern Gothly]

I've read the following:

Quote

Intel® UHD Graphics 620

On-processor graphics with shared video memory provide everyday image quality for Internet use, basic photo editing and casual gaming.

That tells me it's going to run like crap. No two ways about it. It has a Passmark score of only 1,077, which is really low to today's standards. Even my graphics card, a GeForce GTX 660 scores a mere 4,130 points, whereas a current card like a Geforce RTX 2060 scores 12,809 points. The more points, the better the graphics performance, and for SL goes that the better your graphics card, the better SL works. 
CPU and RAM and even hard drive still have some influence on how well SL works for you, but the biggest decider is the graphics.

Now, SL probably will still work on that laptop, but don't expect to be able to do much at all, like walk or build. But I'm sure you can chat, as long as the area is not too busy.

 

[Lillith Hapmouche]

That's a text processor and the original $450 would have been a total rip-off.

The problem is: if those $350 are your hard limit, you won't find anything new worth spending your money. Check second-hand offers for something with a halfway modern CPU, preferably 8 GB RAM and dedicated graphics at best instead of low-end entry class iGPU.

This is the only offer I'd look at... but $500.

[lvictoria]

You all, thank you so much. I truly appreciate the info. I guess I should just stick to what I'm supposed to be doing on the laptop anyway, which is school. 😩 But I do miss sl. Thanks again! 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

9 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

That tells me it's going to run like crap. No two ways about it. It has a Passmark score of only 1,077, which is really low to today's standards. Even my graphics card, a GeForce GTX 660 scores a mere 4,130 points, whereas a current card like a Geforce RTX 2060 scores 12,809 points. The more points, the better the graphics performance, and for SL goes that the better your graphics card, the better SL works. 
CPU and RAM and even hard drive still have some influence on how well SL works for you, but the biggest decider is the graphics.

Over here in the potato computer lab I have an Nvidia GTS 250, which scores a pathetic 875 and it is just fine for SL. No, I don’t run it on ultra, but I get a perfectly usable experience out of it and it still looks great. I see cards with the same scores that run SL vastly differently.

 

24 minutes ago, lvictoria said:

You all, thank you so much. I truly appreciate the info. I guess I should just stick to what I'm supposed to be doing on the laptop anyway, which is school. 😩 But I do miss sl. Thanks again! 

Try it and see, keep your expectations in line with what you’re buying and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

[cheesecurd]

13 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

I don’t know much about computers — can someone who does let us know how much is relevant?
https://secondlife.com/my/support/system-requirements/

Absolutely none of it is useful. For reference, the GTX 295 is a dual gpu card from 2009, SL wont use multi-gpu nor is a gtx 295 anything reasonable to own or buy today.

16 hours ago, lvictoria said:

I'm just gunna make this short and sweet. I haven't been on SL for years. I am not tech savvy whatsoever.  I know  everyone's gunna say "don't use a laptop" but I need one for school. So, just please tell me if and how SL will perform on this laptop. I know it's very low budget. Thanks in advance. 

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-inspiron-15-6-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i3-8gb-memory-128gb-ssd-black/6387169.p?skuId=6387169

Itll run absolutely fine, HD620 is a lot more capable than you would think. Im currently running a Thinkpad X220 from 2011 with intel HD3000. Its a 2nd gen i series system, in comparison your choice of inspiron is 8th gen with 7th gen graphics. I can run pretty much anything but ALM and manage 15-20fps any place non crowded in 720p, and if theres a lot of people i have to cut out avatars.

I used to have an Acer aspire with an i5 7200u and HD620 and that had no problems at all playing SL in 1080p with ALM on at all times UNLESS places got super crowded. Lots of avatars kills performance, on your own you can pull a comfortable 20-30fps, lose a few with a few people around, but as soon as youre looking at 5+ avatars you have to drop ALM and transparent water and eventually start limiting avatars and such.

Itll play, pretty comfortably. Dont expect it to push max settings and high framerates at all the times but itll play SL without problems.

 

 

I would like to take this moment to inform the others in this thread, benchmarks are unreliable. Integrated graphics are not the same as they were 10 years ago, and SL is not a demanding game, its an unoptimized game. Know the machine a person is talking about and know how its going to perform, whether through comparison or firsthand experience.

 

addition:

Also just to add, because im a devout follower of "business class or no class", if youre on a tight budget you should be looking into used off-lease business laptops.

Lenovo Thinkpads, Dell Latitudes, HP Elitebooks. They are very cheap due to the way office lease cycles work. Right now you can get a Thinkpad E470 (though try and find a T470 if you can), which is a 7th gen intel i series laptop with HD620, for about 270-300$ in ready to go condition, SSD and windows 10 and an ac adapter and all that. Of course youre buying used so you might get some scuffs or whatever, but you get basically the same performance for cheaper.

The bigger benefits though are that these machines are built to last, you get a lot of professional laptop features, because theyre not consumer laptops. Things like non mushy keyboards, metal alloy frames, IPS displays depending on the model, lots of expansion and i/o, theyre internally expandable and upgradable, removable and even hot-swappable batteries, etc. Theres a reason why i dont have my acer aspire anymore but am instead using a Thinkpad X220 from 2011, its a better laptop in ways other than raw performance.

 

Edited February 1, 2020 by cheesecurd

[Pamela Galli]

13 minutes ago, cheesecurd said:

Absolutely none of it is useful. For reference, the GTX 295 is a dual gpu card from 2009, SL wont use multi-gpu nor is a gtx 295 anything reasonable to own or buy today

Well they really need to keep that current, since they have posted it more than one official place.  People need a reliable reference for things like this.

Amy knowledgeable volunteers?

Edited February 1, 2020 by Pamela Galli

[Lyssa Greymoon]

1 hour ago, Pamela Galli said:

Well they really need to keep that current, since they have posted it more than one official place.  People need a reliable reference for things like this.

Amy knowledgeable volunteers?

I did a bit of a snarky markup of the system requirements when LL announced they were dropping Windows 7 support about a month ago. Looks like they did remove Windows 7 and the pointless reference to the macOS 10.14 beta. It’s still a mess of useless. I’m not sure what the point of removing Windows 7 because it isn’t supported anymore while leaving unsupported Widows 8 and macOS 10.9 there. The graphics cards in the minimum requirements either won’t run Windows 10 at all, or they won’t run SL without some editing configuration files. The minimum Intel GPU should be the HD 4000 series. Intel GPUs shouldn’t be in the recommended list at all.

The recommended video cards will at least run SL and support all of its features. Although turning everything on will bring them all to their knees, and none of them have gotten driver updates in years. 

The CPU and memory requirements are woefully inadequate. I mean, sure you can launch SL on an Atom processor, but that’s effectively trying to run SL on a cell phone.
 

 

[cheesecurd]

13 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

I did a bit of a snarky markup of the system requirements when LL announced they were dropping Windows 7 support about a month ago. Looks like they did remove Windows 7 and the pointless reference to the macOS 10.14 beta. It’s still a mess of useless. I’m not sure what the point of removing Windows 7 because it isn’t supported anymore while leaving unsupported Widows 8 and macOS 10.9 there. The graphics cards in the minimum requirements either won’t run Windows 10 at all, or they won’t run SL without some editing configuration files. The minimum Intel GPU should be the HD 4000 series. Intel GPUs shouldn’t be in the recommended list at all.

The recommended video cards will at least run SL and support all of its features. Although turning everything on will bring them all to their knees, and none of them have gotten driver updates in years. 

The CPU and memory requirements are woefully inadequate. I mean, sure you can launch SL on an Atom processor, but that’s effectively trying to run SL on a cell phone

 

Ill take this as a chance to bring up a compatriots nerddom on here,

and

SL will run on anything, running well is another ordeal.

Edit

For anyone wondering, yes this account is shared, because a certain someone was a complete brainlet and let their account remain disabled for too long while in a different country. So now two idiots share this forum account after the original solitary idiot got far too much backseat poster input. You can probably tell whos posted what replies.

Edited February 1, 2020 by cheesecurd

[Lyssa Greymoon]

2 hours ago, cheesecurd said:

SL will run on anything, running well is another ordeal.

At its heart, SL is a turn of the century game engine, so as long as you turn back the clock on the graphics settings and use a period correct monitor it should run about as well as it ever did. At least in theory. Where it breaks down is there aren't any drivers for those old cards, so even if you can get them to run, they won't run it right. Most of them weren't that great for SL when they were new. Especially Team Red's cards.

[lvictoria]

Ugh, I didn't even make it 5 minutes before it froze

[Lillith Hapmouche]

"It"? The laptop that was said to barely make it? Or what?

And fellow posters - comparing desktop components and laptops is a pretty pointless idea. You also don't go comparing motor bikes and bicycles just because they have two wheels.

[cheesecurd]

7 hours ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

And fellow posters - comparing desktop components and laptops is a pretty pointless idea. You also don't go comparing motor bikes and bicycles just because they have two wheels.

Not ideal, but doable. With the wonderful catalogue of real world benchmarks in various games you can generally estimate how laptop vs desktop hardware will perform.

Though synthetics still suck, they are somewhat usable for cpus at least. For GPUs thats not a good idea and while the real world gaming benchmarks in comparison are not super precise, theyre pretty distinguishable to see what your laptop will perform like in comparison to a desktop.

HD 620 for example, limited to at minimum an i3 7100, will perform about the same as a Core2quad Q6700 and 8800 GTX in most games. Low end mobile and igp from 2017 = high end 2007. Kind of impressive in other ways. But inconsistent regardless, thats a pretty good generalization and from there you can compare the 8800 GTX to other cards, to say HD 620 = a GT 730, or a GTS 250. But if youre looking at just synthetics theres much larger gaps, real worth results are the only way to compare.