Forced Updates issues

[TrithonofBorg]

As viewers more and more into PBR and other new things. There is an alarming amount of elderly, veterans like me struggling but enjoys the world of Second Life as a format to explore things we cannot do in real life.  It is a very social and enjoyable 3D world.   I have a hard time using second life viewer, so we use firestorm.   But with all the support badly given falls back to Linden labs.

 

    Many of us cannot afford new computers with the higher demand of graphics Second life PBR   . There must be a way to keep a viewer still operational for lower end computer users...please

 

 

 

 

[Nalates Urriah]

The viewers have well over 3,000 settings and controls. The reason is simple. The Lab provided a way for users to customize their experience and the viewer's performance. This allows people to use a WIDE range of hardware.

The Lab sets a "DEFAULT" level of render quality balanced with performance. If one just installs a viewer and runs it, the viewer probes the computer to learn its capability and enables and disables features based on what it finds. In the past we have had many discussions of how well that does and doesn't work. We had many people writing about how to tweak the viewer for better performance. They generally explained which features to disable and why and which settings to tweak to balance quality and performance. While not many new articles appear these days and the number of people with good technical knowledge of computers and virtual world rendering commenting in the forums has deceased, it is still possible to find articles. Also, the old articles are still informative. The technical side hasn't changed that much.

An example of how that change changes and remains the same... Anti-aliasing... this technology seems to constantly improve and develop new processes. Whatever the process used it remains true that the more of it you want the more CPU/GPU cycles you have to devote. Meaning 'more' makes things slower. And vice versa. Meaning if you want more quality you turn it up and for more performance you turn it down. Several setting behave similarly. Some are opposite.

Our world is a set of trade-offs. You can spend money and buy hardware that easily supports a viewer running default settings. And newer hardware will use more of the viewer's new or CPU/GPU expensive features. Or one can spend time and learn to tweak the viewer to get the balance of quality and performance desired. Since we are all different and have different personal preferences, it is a good thing we have all those settings... even if it is a PITA to lean about them. But the price of SL is either money or time. Your choice.

My viewer on my 2016 hardware can run anywhere from 5FPS to 150+FPS depending on my settings. I balance quality and performance and generally get 20-30FPS.

Our society is training/conditioning people to depend on agencies outside our self. You are here asking for help. I am here telling you if you become self-reliant you can keep your viewer running on your hardware indefinitely. There is some limit to that. But I do know one person that attends the UG meetings that still runs WinXP on a stone-age computer. I doubt I would find his experience acceptable. But, this should give you an idea that FORCED UPDATES are not as forced as one may think.

We have several third-party viewers. Alchemy Viewer is very similar to FS with some Black Dragon added in. Cool VL Viewer while it uses the ancient UI it is a high performance viewer and great for older hardware and I suspect far less buggy then any other viewer... especially the newest FS 7.1.

Now it is up to you...