Secondlife Graphics not being lived to its full potential?

[Tommy Rampal]

So Secondlife is releasing graphics intensive features, depth of field and shadows, but has not been optimised to take advantage of high-end/today's hardware?

I've been playing around with Nvidia settings to try and make use of my SLI (2 x GTX 580) for Secondlife, but haven't really had any improvements on performance. Does Secondlife take advantage of GPUs and SLI as it truely should?

[Alazarin Mondrian]

No idea. I only have an Nvidia GT440. I can enable all the new graphics options and still move around in a crowded sim but it's like looking through a fresnel lens smeared with vaseline. For some reason 'lighting & shadows' disables antialiasing :-((( So I leave them all disabled for the time being.

[Poenald Palen]

I don't know but I do know SL is known to not be very quick with the graphics. But there is a lot of checking and streaming going on because of how the world is and how the physics work ect. So, I can't imagine that you can compare it to many other games. Many online games are pretty much low graphics quality and they stream a bunch. But even flash games. you wait for it to load!! So, it is hard to compare and compared to high quality 3D flash games, SL is pretty quick to let you get around and start interacting! But then again, I haven't played to many with such a large world and haven't played flash games in over a few years! But it is the closest example of a streamed or streaming type game online.

[Void Singer]

SL is memory intensive, and not processing intensive, so short answer is no, it does not take advantage of SLI or Crossfire. in fact most users find poorer performance with those setups than in single mode.

[Baloo Uriza]

SL doesn't take advantage of SLI.  It's still a rare enough feature I wouldn't expect support for it for a while, but I've been pleasantly surprised in the past.  Either way, don't hold your breath on it happening soon.

[Tommy Rampal]

I also like to run my viewer at full resolution 2560 x 1440. This works fine with Lighting and Shadows turned off (I get around 100-200FPS in a skybox on average), and it doesn't seem to make any difference when I resize the viewer...

But it's not the case with Lighting and Shadows, it really has trouble keeping a usable frame rate when at optimal resolution (around 8FPS). I have to resize to around half, which gets me around 20-30FPS with everything set to the max. I just really hope LL optimises the lighting and shadows engine to support large resolutions (which it was good at until now...) on high spec machines without getting choppy, the same goes with Kirsten's Viewer. True SLI support would really help this problem.

[Baloo Uriza]

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Tommy Rampal wrote:

But it's not the case with Lighting and Shadows, it really has trouble keeping a usable frame rate when at optimal resolution (around 8FPS). I have to resize to around half, which gets me around 20-30FPS with everything set to the max. I just really hope LL optimises the lighting and shadows engine to support large resolutions (which it was good at until now...) on high spec machines without getting choppy, the same goes with Kirsten's Viewer. True SLI support would really help this problem.

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At some point you just have to throw beefier hardware at the problem or accept the limitations of your existing technology.  2560*1440 is 3.6 million pixels give or take 100,000, or roughly 4½ times the screen real estate as the majority of users today.  SLI is a bad hack; it's mutually incompatible with similar technology from ATI, meaning to support the either means not supporting the other vendor.  I wouldn't expect any company with a large userbase that has been sticking to standards to maximize compatibility to support any multi-GPU technology until real, vendor-neutral standards for the same exist (don't hold your breath on this ever happening).