cykarushb

Linden Labs has a listed system requirements page for SecondLife, at least for the standard viewers. You can find that here: https://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/ As a general synopsis of what im going to be talking about in this thread, i have all the hardware to test the overall performance and playability of the "minimum" and "recommended" system requirements that LL has set for the game. This is going to be comprised of 4 sections, the first being the system requirements list and why it is entirely irrelevant and out of date, the second is the performance of minimum, the third will be about recommended hardware, and the last will be a personal opinion on an updated system requirements list. This is only going to be talking about the Windows standard LL viewer. I dont want to go out and buy a bunch of expensive mac hardware and performance is generally going to be the same on Linux but without so much CPU overhead. The System Requirements List LL's system requirements page is below: What this is recommending for the non-tech literate people out there is a minimum of Windows 7 32 bit, "cpu with SSE2 support", 1gb of ram, a 1024x768 resolution screen and a Nvidia GeForce 6600. Windows 7 is obviously getting pretty old now although its still a very capable operating system and i still use it on my main computer. The problem is the "32 bit", 32 bit operating systems have only been around to provide modern functionality to older hardware, originally during the production of Windows Vista Microsoft was actually considering entirely omitting the 32 bit operating system and forcing 64 bit as a standard, but the fear would be that instead of upgrading hardware, nobody would upgrade their OS, which would likely be true. So 32 bit operating systems remained into the age of 64 bit computer hardware, basically just as an option if you had 32 bit hardware or only had 4gb or less of ram and wouldnt need the benefits of 64 bit. Thats the major limitation of 32 bit OS's, this is a bit more extensive to explain so if you want to learn why that is, read this article on it: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2013751/why-cant-32-bit-windows-access-4gb-of-ram.html The reason why i think this is false and overall in need of an update is because its referencing hardware that pretty much nobody owns anymore, or the hardware just isnt going to be utilized. A fine example of this is the recommended GTX 295, which is a dual-gpu graphics card running in SLI that secondlife wont utilize because SL wont use SLI. The sheer range of hardware here is also kind of strange to all lump into "recommended", such as the 9600 GT which was at one point a midrange card, not incapable of decent performance but far from high end, lumped in with the HD 5970 which is a few years newer and is in an entire different league than the 9600gt. If you are not a tech savvy person you may not know what they are referencing here but this is something you would have to notify consumers of if it were still maybe 2005? The list of "not compatible" cards are mainly things from the late 90's like the Nvidia Riva TNT2 or just the brands used like S3 which are old PCI diamond multimedia cards from the mid 90's. The "have not been tested" cards include Quadros, which are just workstation versions of regular graphics cards, ive done some work with them on SL and they work fine, its a matter of driver differences. Same goes for FireGL and FireMV, although those are much more outdated lines and some of the cards may not run SL, but not due to their branding, simply because theyre incapable of it at a hardware level. Also Intel GMA 945 wont run SL, if it manages to start at all from a dependency standpoint its probably going to instantly crash or give you worse performance than what youre about to see. This page needs to be updated and fixed, because this is just a bunch of irrelevant and outdated information. As i stated above, the end of this will be my personal suggestions on hardware for SL and what the systems requirement page could look like. So heres our completed system. The GPU is a 6600, i got a 6600 GT, its essentially the same thing, the card came out in August of 2004, in about 6 days here it will be 14 years old, it has 128mb of video memory. The GT variant is the more powerful version but when it comes down to this, the difference in performance in games of the era wouldve been a matter of 5-8fps, its not going to give us much of an impact. That 128mb of video memory is the major limitation and its going to kill performance. The ram is just 1gb of 667mhz DDR2. The CPU was a weird choice, it lists "CPU with SSE2 support, including Intel Pentium 4, Pentium M, Core or Atom, AMD Athlon 64 or later.". That basically means any processor, i had to choose something appropriate that would be representative of a current low end processor. I chose the Pentium E6500k because it sounded fun. Its similar performance wise to a Core2Duo E8400. Its a bog standard LGA 775 dual core, except that it was designed originally for overclocking, which we wont be doing in this thread. It will also work for the recommended testing as it fits the bill. The only reason i went with this and not a Pentium 4 was that i kinda knew from the start that a 775 Pentium 4 and a 6600 GT with 1gb of ram would be so abysmal at this game it would probably lead me to commit sepukku with the cpu heatsink. Ignore the matrox card, thats there for other purposes and is disabled. Windows 7 32 bit installed smoothly and besides some RAM related performance problems the system otherwise runs pretty smoothly, youtube is extremely laggy over 720p but regular old web browsing was fine. I tested it briefly with 4gb of ram installed and it was just as usable as any other desktop for basic tasks. But it does not run SL right, it installed just fine and then got hung up on every single step. It seriously took about 40 minutes for the game to install and give me a login screen. And when you finally get in, youre greeted with the default graphics options it chooses which are a bit weird. I changed these around a bit, i turned pretty much everything to the minimum and turned basic shaders on to offload some of the rendering to the GPU instead of the CPU (ive talked about this in another thread when i tested the Radeon HD 4870x2). That gave me a bit of better performance but it didnt last long. I disabled transparent water, bump mapping and shiny, and lowered non-impostor avatars to 1, disabled particles and reduced every mesh slider to low. And this is the end result in any place that isnt social island or an empty flat piece of land. This was taken at NCI Kuula, note the FPS counter in the top right, the high 80's are from the black loading screen, the 0 is what i got. In fact i got less than 0, it took about 20-30 seconds for anything on the screen to change, i did not get through typing that message you see in the chat box because it simply took to long and eventually SL crashed. Nothing loaded correctly, menus wouldnt even open, i moused over the icon for the application and got that little view window of SL and it got stuck there. This caused so much general system lag that i couldnt even close SL, i couldnt open the task manager, i couldnt ALT-F4 my way out of there, it practically hard locked my entire computer other than the mouse and i had to flip the power switch. My general idea here for minimum is that this is entirely unplayable. It will technically start, it will also technically start and run on hardware older than SL is, so im not sure what to think about this, this should not be considered a minimum because minimum would at least imply playable, stable, maybe not max settings or high res, maybe not 60fps. But whatever accomplishes 30fps at lower settings i think would be considered playable and the minimum. Thats a difficult task for SL because different places will give you different framerates, and due to the CPU heavy nature of the game you might not even get 30fps on mid tier hardware. But whatever this is, no, this aint even close to playable. This is worse than if it just crashed on startup, because this prolongs your suffering. Coming later today in the reserved post below, the "recommended" system requirements, 64 bit windows 7, same processor, 4gb of ram, gtx 275 and probably a higher resolution.

I'm definitely gonna have thermal problems

a certain two pieces to the puzzle arrived SL vs its system requirements tomorrow...

Im probably gonna close this particular thread when the parts arrive and make a new one, gonna do a simple post of SL vs its System Requirements, 32 bit Windows 7, the E6500k (its not really a minimum but the page references "core" architectures), 2 or 4gb of ram and the 6600gt as a minimum and the GTX 275 as recommended. Vista was part of the reference thread talking about 32 bit hardware for the 32 bit viewer, but due to the difficulty im having with it, im probably gonna just do 7 as the system requirements page states.

So this is now going to wait until next week, but im gonna do this a little more properly. I have found a way to install vista, a friend of mine has an Optiplex 780 and hes replacing the HDD so ill take that with the original vista 32 bit installation (again referencing the old post, thats 64 bit hardware that has a 32 bit OS from the factory). And im going to get some of the system requirement GPU's, a Geforce 6600GT and a GTX 275. I also might try it on that Matrox card if anyone wants to see if a matrox card can run SL but thats low priority.

im gonna postpone this for the night because i forgot XP doesnt have SATA drivers and im like 1 bluescreen away from setting this computer on fire

So this was talked about in another thread, basically "why does the 32 bit viewer exist" and its because theres still people on 32 bit hardware. Ive already done a post on it running on legitimate 32 bit ONLY hardware, a 2002 pentium 4 system of sorts. The idea was to run on either early socket 775 processors and matching GPU's or something like a core2duo and an appropriate GPU. Another stipulation was Windows Vista 32 bit, since its the "minimum" OS secondlife will run on with the current version. Frankly im not even sure if thats true since the system requirements page hasnt been updated since like 2009 or something. Note there will be more added onto this post later on today, im working on the actual benchmarking right now. The problem is Vista, im plain and simple not paying for an operating system from 2006, anyone who would pay for a 12 year old OS thats entirely depreciated now is out of their mind. And Vista is basically in a loop of uncrackable-ly-ness. Or however i could word that. It cant really be pirated without an extensive amount of effort that i just dont care enough to apply. Whats happening is you can install vista on any key, i have a key on my 775 system which is a Dell Precision T3400, but thats already been used and activated at some time. Then you get a desktop, i installed wifi drivers, and because i knew the key wouldnt work when i started again because its been used i installed MSToolkit, which is an activation program for most versions of windows. That requires a version of .NET framework, and after installing that you have to restart. So theres the problem, as soon as i restart, i get "limited functionality mode", where i cant do anything besides use a web browser basically, executable files wont run from the browser even though normally they would. Essentially youre stuck, you cant run mstoolkit to activate, and vista wont let you activate the normal means without buying a brand new never used key. And im not even sure there are any brand new keys. So what ive got here instead is the Pentium E6500k, 8gb (3.84gb in 32 bit) of ram, and the Radeon HD 4870x2. Hardware from around 2008-2009. And im going to be running it on 32 bit Windows XP. Using the legacy viewer of course. This really isnt anything special, maybe it'll give you some idea of how SL would perform on old hardware but ive already done this in another thread using a Core2Quad Q6600 and the 4870x2 in the same system, all im really doing is installing XP instead of windows 8.1 and using a different processor. So i guess this is really just to see if the 32 bit legacy viewer is even usable anymore. I can tell you right off the bat three things: 1) If you already have vista installed for some reason, for the love of god install 7 to begin with, but your hardware will run SL. Later Core2duos and other similar era processors will have no problems with SL and will be fine on windows 7 optimally. 2) Even low end hardware from the late 2000's will run SL, ive run it on way worse, little core2duos and 775 pentium 4's arent that great anymore but SL really isnt the most demanding game. 3) The 32 bit viewer is fine, theres probably not a lot of reasons to use it, but the only limitation is the amount of ram it can use, and stock SL doesnt really use that much ram. Maxed out with a bunch of people around im using maybe 1.5gb tops. Most ive ever seen it use is 2.6gb and that was in a super bloated space with two bajillion high res textures.

1) that is a terrible way to shop for a computer, thats how companies are getting people to buy systems with 5400rpm hard drives still, big number != better performance 2)Very good point, if you want decent gaming performance at non-inflated prices, dont bother with Alienware or MSI or whatever, Clevo and its partners are the best for this kind of thing As for OP, depends on the budget. At the low end of the budget look for anything with a 7th gen or higher intel mobile processor, i3 7100u, i5 7200u, i7 7500u. Those systems will have intel HD 620 integrated graphics which are enough for most places in SL at 1080p around medium/high settings. I have a cheap little Acer Aspire 15 with an i5 7200u that gets me "meh" performance but far from bad performance. Moving up the scale, anything with a decent mobile i7 specifically (SL is very single thread reliant, the better single threaded performance of an i7 over an i5/i3 will be preferable). But its not too big a performance gap between the comparative i5 or i3 to be honest. 8th gen intel mobile processors would also be a good choice but a little more expensive as the systems are more recent. Many of the higher end ones are using mobile RX Vega graphics intel of anything intel graphically, and theyre incredibly well performing chips for the price. Essentially a mobile APU but with intel CPU cores and AMD GPU cores. For dedicated GPU options, start at the MX150, essentially a mobile GT 1030, and move up to a mobile 1050 or 1060 at the maximum. With mobile hardware the 1070/1080 mobile graphics options wont be utilized too much and would be a waste of money. So on a list of least to most expensive, new, from newegg: 8th gen Acer Aspire 15 with an i5 8250u, 8gb of ddr4, 256gb SSD and HD620 graphics, for a mere 480$ its a pretty good deal https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1TS-000X-00SY9&cm_re=acer_aspire_15-_-1TS-000X-00SY9-_-Product ASUS FX503, with an i5 7300HQ (quadcore mobile), 8gb of ddr4 and a GTX 1050, under 800$ for this kinda machine is probably the best option https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834234807 The high end option is a little different, its an Eluktronics DIY laptop, you need to provide a CPU, ram and storage as well as install an operating system. It isnt hard to do these things and might be a good option for a 1060 system with a significantly more powerful processor than any mobile chip. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8S177Y7886 With this i would highly recommend buying an i7 7700 (max 65w TDP, no 7700k), 8 or 16gb of ram and definitely start with an SSD. Install whatever operating system you prefer. With an i7 7700, 8gb of ram and lets say a 256gb SSD, that takes the price to a bit over 1300$ including an operating system key. Business laptops are simply designed for business, Lenovo Thinkpads, HP Elitebooks, Dell Latitudes. High quality machines meant to kinda be tossed around and abused a lot (theres a reason IBM thinkpads from pre 2005 are still kicking today unlike most consumer laptops from the time). Basically as long as the hardware is there, it'll do SL just like any consumer laptop, but the added cost comes from a large variety of things mainly related to build quality and special features and expanded internal i/o or user serviceability. A thinkpad T470 with a 7th gen i5, 8gb of ddr4 and all that costs nearly double what my Acer Aspire did, and has pretty much the same specs. However my acer is built like a piece of tissue paper and has no expansion options, and the Thinkpad is resilient to most small arms fire and has enough internal expansion options to add more SSD's than anyone will ever use. BUT TO FINISH IT ALL OFF the best laptop for secondlife is a thinkpad G40, as long as youre OK with only using a text viewer

SL doesnt run on 3000 series intel IGP anymore. Its simply too outdated for it. If this is a desktop, add a graphics card. If its a laptop, youre kinda outa luck for SL.

Everything worked out fine, and the 4870x2 wasnt that bad of an experience although it did have some problems with transparent water. Performed about as well as i expected it to.

Every single game that does this, it fails. It's botted, muled, abused and eventually just gets inflated so it's worthless. all a secondary free currency would do is cause people to complain that their currency is worthless

Disable your integrated graphics at a bios level. I'd explain exactly how but different systems will have a different bios layout. Google your machine and how to disable the igp. If that doesn't fix it, try a graphics driver update or rollback to a previous version.

Yelled at clouds all day now I sleep tomorrow I play SL then I repeat the process

Run, yes Enjoyably? no if you're on a tight budget, look into getting an Optiplex 790 and a GT 1030 eBay has lots of sellers that sell the entire system, tower, monitor, keyboard and mouse for like 160$, usually with an i3/i5 and 4/8gb of ram. Already with Windows 7/10 installed. Simply drop in the GT 1030 for another 80-100$ and you have a fairly capable machine, plenty for SL. opposite of high end, but decent performance for under 300$

Oof, Chinese gpu scams got ya always remeber, if it seems too good to be true, it is. the GTS 450 actually could do Ok with SL, it just needs to be reflashed as a 450 if you get your refund and keep the card, look up how to use nvflash to make it a GTS 450 again, keep it around as a spare for now though, go find an actual card, an actual 960, 970, 1050ti, whatever, just make sure it's from an actual manufacturer and is properly priced you should be able to find used 970's on eBay for like 200-240$

Does this happen in any other game? Couple things it could be, it might simply be the driver version, try using a slightly older driver version and see if that's any better. If it's a used card that hasn't been cleaned it might be thermal throttling and causing issues due to being too hot. It could be an outright faulty card, sometimes the voltage regulation modules on a GPU can fail and cause power fluctuation which would cause "sharp" artifacts (white screens, complete system shutdown, windows bluesceens). It may also be a power issue, this may be a dumb thing to ask, but is it getting the power it needs? An R7 250 doesn't need any other power besides what the slot provides, but a 960 should have a 6 or 8 pin power connector. If it's not plugged in with that cable, it may still start, but as soon as it needs the extra wattage it would cause sharp artifacts. If it is plugged in, which I presume it is, it may be the power supply being unable to either provide the needed wattage or it can't maintain it stably.

This is a bit more of a "heres a bit of information" sort of post than anything formal. I got bored and bought a bunch of stupid stuff off of ebay. What i ended up with is mainly CPU coolers from 2004 but i also got a Nvidia Tesla C2050. The C2050 is a GF100 Fermi card released in 2011 for the high end Compute market and cost $2500 on its original release. What is essentially is under the fancy drivers and cutsom PCB is a GTX 470 with 3gb of video memory and a single DVI output. A video output for a tesla is actually a pretty rare thing, these cards arent meant for anything more than doing a lot of math and most Tesla cards made dont have any kind of video output. Recently on various online markets these cards and the slightly more powerful C2070 have been showing up for decently cheap, because theyre being phased out from servers and upgraded. You can pick up a C2050 for about 100$ used on eBay with the original bracket extension if you need it. Overall not the worst of deals, but 100$ can get you a card like a GTX 760 (or sometimes things like a 970 if youre lucky locally) which would be significantly more powerful. I normally run a GTX 970 with my Xeon X3440 and 8gb of 1333mhz ECC ram. SL is kept on an SSD and runs on Windows 7 Ultimate. That system tends to hold a respectable 40-50fps at max settings in 1080p with no people around staring at the sunset on Social Island. Anyone who reads my posts knows that this is my "baseline" to make sure most testing is the same. I slapped the card in there, installed the recommended drivers, which turned out to be 341.21 Tesla Drivers, and started up SL. This tesla is holding about 26fps in the same scenario. Which isnt bad at all considering the card is 5 generations older and came out even before the aging Lynnfield Xeon thats in this system. So, conclusion. Its a GTX 470 with 3gb of vram, theres really nothing too special about it other than that. However if you consider that the 470 only has 1gb of video memory while still being a decently powerful card, the Tesla might be a better option for the odd instance where you for some reason need a 400 series graphics card... Its a similar issue with cards like the Quadro FX 4600/5600 and GTX 8800/8800 Ultra. The FX 4600 has a mere 756mb of video memory but the 5600 has 1.5gb and allows the card to do quite a lot more. Both cards are comparable to an 8800 gtx or ultra. So while an 8800 GTX/Quadro FX 4600 can play GTA V at a max resolution of 800x600 on the bare minimum settings, the actual "GPU" itself is handling it OK-ish, but the video memory limitations are really holding it back. An FX 5600 can actually push up to 720p and even play on some of the slightly above minimum settings to get a stable framerate. The GPU is essentially the same, but theres more video memory. So i want to do here is get a 470, and see what games have an issue with the 1gb of video memory before swapping out to the Tesla and seeing if they perform better with 3gb of video memory. Further on this, should you buy a Tesla C2050 or run SL on a tesla? Well, if you have one or if you can get one for like 60$ its not a bad idea, it runs SL ok, its a bit of a power hog and its hot and loud because ya know, fermi, but its not a bad option for SL. But right now the cards are still priced above their consumer counterparts, like the 470. 100$ for this kind of experience is a massive waste of money. Is there really any benefit to running SL on a Tesla over a consumer card? Well im not actually sure yet. Previously ive tested Quadros vs their consumer counterparts and the drivers do make a minute difference for secondlife. Since SL is laid out more like a 3D workspace than a game with pre-rendered content, you can actually see a benefit from using workstation hardware. Its just that said benefit is extremely small, my Quadro FX 4600 vs an 8800 GTX in SL was a matter of maybe 5-6fps. The 5600 vs the Ultra was about the same ordeal. What im imagining here is that the Tesla would be ever so slightly better than the 470 but only because of the drivers and more video memory (although SL doesnt seem to use more than 1.1gb at max in SI5 anyway). If you would like to see any kind of weird or outlandish graphics cards or computer hardware tested with SL, comment about it. Ive got a large variety of hardware sitting around i can try out.

holy crap guys its 50 cents if youre so strapped for cash that 50 cents for a purchase is a big deal then you shouldnt be buying L$ no, its going to change literally nothing

Can yall stop necrobumping multiple year old posts. Also, 16gb of ram for SL? What? This game uses like 3gb tops, maybe 4 if youre using firestorm or something. Ive played SL on hardware that had 2gb of ram and it still ran, currently on 8gb without any issues whatsoever. Basing your tech purchases off of one metric are why manufacturers still make 5400rpm hard drives, a buyer sees "OOH, 1 TERABYTE OF STORAGE" and buys it even though its a crap laptop with a slow hard drive. RAM quantity isnt everything. Literally anything with a 7th gen i series processor will have HD620 and it will play SL. Even if its a chromebook, flash it with seabios and install Linux, it will run the linux viewer. Theoretically the cheapest new laptop on Best Buy could play SL, just really terribly. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-inspiron-11-6-laptop-amd-a6-4gb-memory-32gb-emmc-flash-memory-gray/6188326.p?skuId=6188326 That APU is garbage but it would run, https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-A6-9220e-vs-Intel-Core2-Duo-E6700/3198vs1668 Though honestly, thats just throwing away money. If all youre doing is chatting while traveling then buy quite literally any laptop you can find and run Radegast

This was seemingly originally necrobumped by OP but on the topic of AMD and SL, ive done a bit of testing on this, and im still doing more. Basically ive yet to really find problems with SL now and any ATI/AMD card that is capable of running the game at a hardware level. Different driver versions, a large variety of cards, different operating systems and other hardware configurations. It just doesnt seem to cause problems like people say it will. Im sure it did, theres plenty of horror stories from years ago but they dont pertain to SL in 2018 at all. A good example here is the testing i did with the infamous HD 4870x2, a card similar to a GTX 280, dual gpu, complete housefire, driver nightmare on Windows 8.1 with semi-modern drivers. And ive done other stuff non posted with more common cards like a 5770, 6750, even the lowly 3450 (it was garbage FPS but didnt really present any other issues).

>gt 625 well thats your problem, a 4770 could be paired with pretty much anything short of a Titan XP buy a secondhand 970 and watch that framerate triple

i managed to get cheese to actually play the game again for a grand total of 10 minutes before she once again got bored with it such is life

Im not gonna lie here, the problems youre describing that are making this difficult are things you shouldve looked into before spending the lindens on the avatar and accessories. I suggest Dark Spot Designs avatars, they have more androgynous options and a variety of body styles compatible with different mainstream clothing styles such as Kemono, matreiya (how do i spell this) or Slink, or really anything if you use the SL body variants.

The hp will give you a good upgrade path for the future and it'll be good for SL as is. The RX 550 is no powerhouse but its leagues better than any integrated graphics right now.

Does the i3 have a 7 or 8 in its name? 7th gen and higher will have HD620 integrated graphics which are about the minimum for a comfortable experience in SL without having to run everything at near minimum settings. you gotta provide more info than i3 dell aio, because there's a lot of different variants of those