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I think we should, collectively, be somewhat embarassed.

Suzanna Soyinka

By Suzanna Soyinka,
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Henri Beauchamp
Henri Beauchamp

If you get only 5-10 FPS with that PC, then you have a very badly configured system... For example, you did enable multi-threading in the NVIDIA driver, right ? In any case, with a 5.0GHz 9700K (

Ansariel Hiller
Ansariel Hiller

It's only deprecated by Apple trying to convince people it is "outdated technology" while in reality they were too lazy to fix their broken implementation of it and push everyone into using their Meta

Monty Linden
Monty Linden

Hey!  That's our internal motto!

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Paul Hexem

Paul Hexem

Posted
Posted (edited)
22 hours ago, animats said:

I'm doing that in my experimental viewer. But, according to the Lindens at Creator User Group, about 30% of SL users can't run Vulkan. They have a GPU so old it lacks essential features. SL currently runs on OpenGL 3.0, from 2008. Current OpenGL is 4.6, from 2017.

 

13 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

and those 30% are more important than platform growth

It's not unreasonable to expect people to upgrade their computers once a decade.

 

12 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I doubt very much, that once ”those 30%” would have left by lack of proper hardware to run SL, you could grow the remaining user base by 43% to compensate the loss (100 * 30 / (100 - 30)). Come on, we are not in 2006-2007, when SL's growth was skyrocketing.

I've said it before- if they can't get on modern, even "less out of date" hardware, they deserve to be left behind.

I'm quoting myself from another thread-

Quote

SL is the only place where this is even a discussion. Any other game wouldn't even entertain the thought of crippling modern computers so that old out of date junks will work.

At the end of the day, hobbies come with costs. My drone requires a hefty investment, accessories, a license. My motorcycle requires additional expensive gear and a license. In paintball you need ammo and gear. Gardening needs tools. The list goes on. And online gaming, like SL, needs up to date computers. That's life. And Second Life, turns out. 

Edited by Paul Hexem
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Wulfie Reanimator

Wulfie Reanimator

Posted
Posted (edited)

While it's true that upgrading an ancient computer to slightly less ancient one is pretty cheap (no need to go for the average $200 GPU), the people who are still using such computers are probably not hugely concerned with looks or performance.

Second Life might be the only game on their computer, which is otherwise used for basic functionality like documents, email, maybe Facebook/Twitter and maybe YouTube. They're probably not even spending double-digit hours on SL every week or two. (The average session is short, and I can't imagine these people spending above-average time.)

I don't think a significant majority of these people would spend the money/effort to upgrade their computer because SL stopped working, if they even realize it did, or why it did, or if they can figure out what to get, or if they have the income, or if they care enough.

Should they be left behind? Maybe. I would.

Would it benefit SL on a technical level? Probably.

Can SL regain the lost userbase, is it worth it? My magic 8-ball says "inconclusive."

I'd still like to see a mobile viewer, which wouldn't have the same (technology) limitations. Nothing's stopping a new PC viewer from being developed alongside the existing one either, besides time. Nobody besides Animats seems to have put in a significant effort in trying something new.

Edited by Wulfie Reanimator
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Coffee Pancake

Coffee Pancake

Posted
Posted
20 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

But those garbage Intel iGPUs would be incapable of running SL at decent frame rates, be it under OpenGL or Vulkan...

So are all the machines that are being protected by being in the 30% can't run vulkan. 

Nvidia 600 series cards are 10 years old and run modern SL like garbage.

 

 

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Henri Beauchamp

Henri Beauchamp

Posted
Posted (edited)
4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Nvidia 600 series cards are 10 years old and run modern SL like garbage.

Wrong !

With the Cool VL Viewer and under Linux, I can run SL just fine on my second computer (2500K @ 4.5GHz + GTX 660) and even on the third (Q6600 @ 3.4GHz + GTX 460)... Of course, not with ALM for the latter (too slow), but still at 256m DD in main land.

Here is the proof:

GTX460.thumb.png.9a199ca4cf654ffc1014e1fff9e39251.png

Picture taken on main land (at Horizon info HUB, that is a HUB with neighbouring sims) with that third, super-old computer and its GTX 460. Draw distance is 256m and most graphics settings maxed out (4xAA + anisotropic filtering too), 16 avatars in the FOV, all 16 as non-impostors. Look at the FPS rate in the upper right corner: 27 fps.

Of course, ALM totally kills that frame rate (down to 8 fps in this setting), thus why I am advocating for keeping a forward rendering mode for the future PBR viewer: ”weak” GPUs, such as even modern Intel iGPUs will need it !

Edited by Henri Beauchamp
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Coffee Pancake

Coffee Pancake

Posted
Posted
9 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Come on... Can't you admit you are plain wrong ?.... Do I *really* need to post more screen shots for proofs... 🥱

I have a few of these cards Henri, they aren't worth getting all protective over. 

A GTX 650 is .. $25 second hand with shipping, for another $10 you can buy a 750. $70 can get a basic 1050.

Just because some vintage junk can run SL, doesn't mean it should always run SL at all costs.

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Henri Beauchamp

Henri Beauchamp

Posted
Posted
11 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I have a few of these cards Henri, they aren't worth getting all protective over.

You said a GTX 600 won't be able to run SL. I demonstrated that even a GTX 460 (with an old quad core CPU) can. Period.

I won't loose any more my time with you since, obviously, you cannot admit it when you commit a mistake. 🙄

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Ardy Lay

Ardy Lay

Posted
Posted

I use an NVidia GTX 1070 to run Second Life Viewer.  It's fine.  I get to turn features on.  I use an Intel i9-9900K CPU with it.  This pairing exhibits the 'amazing moving bottleneck' phenomenon that commonly plagues Second Life Residents.

I have an NVidia 8800 of some flavor that hasn't melted yet.  You can't make me use it with Second Life Viewer.

Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 performs slightly better, but I will only use it with Second Life Viewer when I have no other choice.

Intel(R) HD Graphics P4600/P4700 in my previous computer suffers mightily if my avatar is not the only one within the render frustum.  Nope.  Not running Second Life Viewer on this for any length of time.

I imagine many people put up with equipment I would refuse to use, because I have some choice and they mostly do not.

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Fluffy Sharkfin

Fluffy Sharkfin

Posted
Posted (edited)
3 hours ago, animats said:

The SSOC people have been busy. They're building a good-looking urban combat game in SL.

That's very impressive. It opens up a whole new market for SL.

The stuff they're creating is certainly impressive but I don't know if their urban combat system is quite game changing enough to open up a new market in SL purely because the limitations of the platform will always mean that combat in SL will never compare to the experience you get using a proper game engine.  It would certainly be great for creating custom roleplay systems and environments which is something that I personally think SL does better than any other existing platform.

The environments they've created are definitely impressive and I suspect that a similar level of detail and quality is what Luca had in mind when discussing worldbuilding in the video you posted earlier.

If new residents first impressions of SL were experiencing environments like this then perhaps less of them would turn their noses up at SL within the first few hours.

 

Edited by Fluffy Sharkfin
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Aishagain

Aishagain

Posted
Posted

A truly typical "dialogue of the deaf".  By the end of this thread most readers will have given up in disgust at the blinkered and sectional interests displayed.

Second Life will never be directly comparable with "A list" video games - that argument was done to death years ago.

Second Life is run by many people who had never otherwise bothered with video games...I am one of them.

SL is saddled with trying to be "all things to all folk".  As such it is populated with many who are resistant to change in order to appease the gear-head fashionistas. Guilty as charged.

Not everyone is keen to transfer heaps of personal bric a brac to a new computer to get the latest shiny, regardless of the cost.  We live in a real and rather costly world.

Speaking entirely for myself, I am fairly content with how SL looks on my far from potato PC, but I am probably not your typical SL user, being largely immobile and close to my eighth decade.

Just my little rant.  Please continue your esoteric and utterly pointless "discussion".

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Andred Darwin

Andred Darwin

Posted
Posted (edited)
16 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

You said a GTX 600 won't be able to run SL. I demonstrated that even a GTX 460 (with an old quad core CPU) can. Period.

I won't loose any more my time with you since, obviously, you cannot admit it when you commit a mistake. 🙄

Henri, yes, "could" run, but… really? Experience is mediocre at best! The bare minimum for SL would be around a GTX 970 with a fast 4th gen intel processor (i5 4690k or i7 4770K and above) using your viewer or SL official viewer (a used build with these specs and a small SSD would be around USD $250).

A GTX 1060 with a fast 6th gen processor will allow you to run with ALM On (with at least 30fps on a HD monitor 1920x1080) at most places in SL for a little bit more (USD $300 to $400).

Linux, which I not only like very much but use most of time for work, it's a pain in the a** for the everyday user, let alone keep a SL viewer running... (even though you did a great job!).

Intel integrated GPU's will not run SL to the point you can really explore, there might be something misleading in that 30% mentioned earlier in the thread.

SL without ALM is not only boring, but also ugly!

OpenGL is showing its age, SL could benefit a lot from Nvidia DLSS and AMD's FSR super sampling and many other new features, new laptops (which some people use even for gaming) are coming with default resolutions over 2K, which "cripples" the viewer fps even more specially with integrated GPU's, it's huge difference to run any game at 1280x720 vs the quite common default of 3840x2160 (whoever is reading this, if you have a monitor with resolution higher or at 1920x1080, close SL, lower the desktop resolution and run again to compare).

I'm not saying my opinion would be to just ignore the 30% of users (of course it should not), but maybe just "branch out"... have a viewer tailored for those machines, with its own "improvements" to at least "see" SL, and continue with the latest, will not be easy, in this case, to deal with 2 opposites in the same branch, one will stop or block the other and nothing will get done … (time and TPV viewers will take care of the rest... gee, you, mostly by yourself, kept v1 for how long time now and did a very nice job!.

Edited by Andred Darwin
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Henri Beauchamp

Henri Beauchamp

Posted
Posted (edited)
2 hours ago, Andred Darwin said:

Henri, yes, ”could” run, but… really? Experience is mediocre at best!

It is barely passable, but bear in mind that I purposely pushed the graphics settings way beyond the ”recommended” ones for that hardware (which, again, was weaker than the one that was supposed to ”run modern SL like garbage”), on a large screen (larger than standard ”full HD”, since mine is a 16:10 screen, i.e. 1920x1200) and with a large draw distance (256m)... The idea was to see how far I could push things while keeping the frame rate over 25fps.

I never said that I would recommend running SL on such a hardware (neither would I on any iGPU-based system, which are even weaker than a GTX 460) if you can afford better, but if you can't, it still can do the job !

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Linux, which I not only like very much but use most of time for work, it's a pain in the a** for the everyday user

I beg to differ... Windoze is a PITA !!!!  It is slooowww, vulnerable, unstable. Today's Linux distributions are not harder to install, configure and use than Windows; they are also far easier to maintain (updates are so easy and take only a couple minutes every month when Windows needs half an hour and breaks almost once every three updates).

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SL without ALM is not only boring, but also ugly!

Here again, I beg to differ. Read my prose here, especially about anti-aliasing, which is plain ugly, unless you run Alchemy or the Cool VL Viewer with the SMAA shader to replace FXAA, and even then, it's much less pretty than native 4xAA with the forward renderer.

Edited by Henri Beauchamp
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Andred Darwin

Andred Darwin

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I beg to differ... Windoze is a PITA !!!!  It is slooowww, vulnerable, unstable. Today's Linux distributions are not harder to install, configure and use than Windows; they are also far easier to maintain (updates are so easy and take only a couple minutes every month when Windows needs half an hour and breaks almost once every three updates).

No question about being stable and the fact that it can really give a new life to that old hardware  ( I use it too! ),  but to "get there" is not as simple as you mentioned (its easy for you!), you need to know your hardware, choose a distro, a desktop manager, find the "current" drivers, and in most cases, build the right machine for it ...  the fact is that the average user won't deal with it... it barely broke 2.5% in desktop market share... and for SL is probably even less... 

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Here again, I beg to differ. Read my prose here, especially about anti-aliasing, which is plain ugly, unless you run Alchemy or the Cool VL Viewer with the SMAA shader to replace FXAA, and even then, it's much less pretty than native 4xAA with the forward renderer.

Also no question about SMAA (I keep your viewer installed and updated on my machine, even though I don't use it much while playing SL, but I really enjoy seeing what you were able to do with it)... but when it comes to ALM just as "enabled" and "disabled"... ALM enabled (provided your machine can handle, for most new players and players coming back, it can handle ) is 200 to 1 compared to it disabled, as on the screenshots below (It's a random area from the Destinations Guide, really nice actually,  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Holiday Magic/114/182/40 )...  ALM enabled easily makes SL way more interesting... the current improvements on the viewer were just great and should continue and not be hold back... Coffee Pancake has a good point in saying "runs modern SL like garbage", is not even close.

You proved, yes, it can run... but how many will actually will go through install Linux, on a "old potato" like many people labels an old machine,  along with its pains for someone not used to Linux, install a viewer.... just for SL.. do you really believe it... in itself it means it doesn't matter if it can run... 

image.png.b8da2602b2b3f3d5bda29bf8c5589c67.png

ALM On above compared to it turned off below... (Not even close!)

image.png.8c3e9eab63ad2897766d6c3b5e442f98.png

Edited by Andred Darwin
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Henri Beauchamp

Henri Beauchamp

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Andred Darwin said:

ALM On above compared to it turned off below... (Not even close!)

Quite dishonest snaphots... Here is what I get over there, First, with ALM & FXAA shaders (LL's shaders):

ALM.thumb.png.c5d9a0b8338ce84ed869819238d50901.png

Notice the blur on the panel (you can hardly read the sign with ”Game room”, ”The barn” and ”Train station” so much it is blurry).

(next screenshot in next post, because there is a 4MB limit on attachment, and we need full resolution PNG pictures, not JPEG-degraded, or downsized screen shots, so to compare properly).

Edited by Henri Beauchamp
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