AmeliaJ08

VSync in the viewer enabled? I've found it causes weird dips in frame rate/stutters.

Have to say I find this forum deeply santized, it's very heavily moderated and I just don't see a whole lot of anything that is too harsh by my standards. That said there does seem to be some small gaps and weirdly selective inaction but meh. It's not twitter, put it that way. The internet was built - in part - on disagreeing with each other, it's what it does best for better or worse. In more recent times it has been a whole lot of worse though, I find that forums like this were a much better way of disagreeing with each other... but that might just be nostalgia.

It's so confusing in the case of Quadro RTX chips, like this "RTX 5000 Mobile Ada" uses the same die as the "RTX 4090 Mobile"... which is the chip used in the desktop RTX 4070/4080 series. They should really give them more distinct names that don't overlap with the desktop cards.

Yes I would say the same, there's really very little reason for *most* people to want a workstation/Quadro/whatever they call it these days laptop. Even those doing professional work can very often justify saving a lot of money, in the case of this Thinkpad P1 for example the 4090 Mobile version is $1000 cheaper than the RTX 5000 Ada version. Performance will be identical, if anything the 4090 Mobile equipped one might be a little faster. I know a lot of people do need Quadro/pro features but... it's not often a complete deal breaker. I do sometimes recommend workstation laptops when they're a great deal though, there isn't a whole lot of knowledge around Nvidia's workstation cards and on the used market Quadro T2000 laptops for example were a pretty great, high quality value option for people who wanted a light gaming machine since it was effectively the same as a GTX 1650. I think the same applies to many of the more modern Quadro RTX chips, they tend to be in very nice well built laptops so if you can find one at a good price they're often worth looking at.

The laptop it is in looks surprisingly normal! https://techtoday.lenovo.com/sites/default/files/2023-11/ThinkPad P1 Gen 6-Datasheet-WW-EN.pdf I'm surprised, it must be so noisy! are you thinking of getting one of these? $7700 laptop! work expense? hehe

Yes, very well. In SL the RTX 2000 Ada laptop will perform quite similarly to the desktop GTX 1080, RTX 2070, RTX 3060 etc. The RTX 5000 Ada laptop is a monster chip, performance will be roughly equivalent to a desktop RTX 3090 or RTX 4070 Ti. Of course I don't fancy trying to cool down the 120W TDP of that chip in a laptop chassis, whatever machine it is in will be extremely chonky and probably sound like a jet engine. The silicon is the same, for example the RTX 5000 Ada laptop uses the AD103 chip, the exact same chip as various Geforce cards: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-ad103.g1012 SL does not benefit in any way from Nvidia game ready optimization as far as I know, that is to say each of those Nvidia workstation cards (they used to call them Quadro but don't any more so this gets confusing) is functionally almost identical to a Geforce (gaming/consumer line) card, there's usually slight differences with the workstation card usually being a little less power hungry but it's a small difference. The 'professional' features are almost all in the drivers and aren't in any way relevant to Second Life. The tl;dr is yes, they will work well. They're an expensive, professional tier product though and will perform identically to the same product with Geforce branding instead.

Chat extender?

As if we didn't have reason enough to dislike the Legacy HUD! Will try and remember this one for the future.

It seems to be a choice by the people making the mesh bodies, I mean it somewhat makes sense - realistically every adult mesh body on the market is basically a model of an utterly 'perfect' 20 something year old model. It is a strange decision to make for certain mods etc though. Of course this can somewhat be corrected with animation defotrmers, if you rotate the breast bones you can reduce the pointing upward effect but it's imperfect given how this bone is weighted to the entire breast. I think there's a giant gap for a more appropriate middle aged body on the market, it simply doesn't exist as far as I can tell.

Really the extra options that skeleton and animation deformers are currently used for could be brought into the shape system, maybe under an 'advanced' set of controls so individual bones could be translated, rotated etc. Of course the shape system is also the only way to scale SL bones as far as I know, it would be really nice to have complete control over each bone.

Complex mesh items should just publish their API (or whatever the equivalent is in SL speak) so we can make changes with chat commands, would be quite nice and reduce the need for certain HUDs that we're all told to not keep attached but most of us do anyway.

Sounds like a hell of a machine. I'm surprised more haven't jumped on the 4060Ti 16GB, it's basically the 16GB 3070 that everyone wanted and Nvidia denied. That and the only other way to get 16GB and an Nvidia card is a 4080 which is ludicrously expensive.

Nothing has any 'size' so to speak. A few bytes, if that. On a technical level every single thing in your inventory is just the equivalent of a shortcut in Windows, it doesn't actually exist multiple times over. There's one copy of the actual thing on LL's servers and everyone that 'owns' it just has a shortcut to it in their inventory. Of course there's a lot of obfuscation of that fact but every single thing is the exact same size in your inventory, it's just a pointer to the actual thing. The issues some people have with very large inventories is that they are too 'flat' with not enough subfolders, I'm sure there's probably some theoretical max inventory size (in terms of items) but it'll be some huge number that nobody ever really has to worry about. For whatever reason though 'flat' inventories do cause login problems. Your inventory content listing is cached on your computer that is true but it's just a cache of all those shortcuts, not the actual content of them if that makes any sense. I believe the cache is to avoid the viewer having to request the entire listing every time you log in (fetching it is absurdly slow for some reason) but we're talking a small amount of data here, nothing significant.

I'll leave you guessing

The 4060Ti with 16GB VRAM is honestly the most interesting 40 series for me, I haven't been able to play with one yet but it almost seems like the spiritual successor to the venerable 3060 12GB in the sense that people said it has too much VRAM but we all know there's no such thing. Just a middle of the road card but for whatever reason they gave it tons of lovely VRAM. They seem pretty rare though, only handled the 8GB versions so far.

Efficiency has definitely improved but... the newest GPUs in the same sort of class as the 1080 was pump out an equivalent if not more heat. They get more performance per watt but the wattage only seems to keep going up... an RTX 4080 is a 320W card! an RTX 4090 is a 450W card and was originally designed to be 600+W but efficiency took a nose dive so they limited it. There's even 1000W BIOS's available for it and the chip can handle it. A kilowatt! The GTX 1080 is a 180W card for reference Still though with the latest high power cards it's often worthwhile setting an aggressive power limit, they will still do plenty of work per watt and certainly more than previous generations did.

I had gorillas move in next door. I mean quite literally gorillas, they're all playing on tire swings and climbing bars and stuff 😂 They're pretty neat I guess but they make such a noise, I need to try and work out how to make them quiet. I do admit me and a friend were standing on my balcony shooting at them due to the noise.

What's useless about it?

I think we're going to have to face this eventually but right now the regulatory environment in most countries makes this an enormously lucrative business and I know those involved won't want to give it up easily or even reduce their rather large share of the pie. We've allowed a global economy to emerge where we charge ludicrous sums for the transfer of tiny packets of information, there's nothing especially expensive about handling online transactions other than the wrangling that is involved in obtaining the licenses to do so. I don't know how we fix this, cryptocurrency (I know, I know) was one idea but rather quickly being made less and less viable due to how disruptive it can be to those currently making out like bandits.

When some outraged media runs stories about the filth going on in Second Life and specifically names Thunes as facilitating the monetary side of it. Of course actually tracing where lindens are being spent is relatively trivial with LL cooperation, I'm sure that's possible internally but publicly Thunes are going to be associated with every single adult transaction... I don't know if that's an issue to them, it probably isn't right now but it potentially could be especially since we're talking about a global operation here.

I know Tilia was spun off and officially separate but... it always felt there was a link. Isn't LL now utterly dependent on another company who have enormous power to effectively set platform policy? what if they decide they don't want to handle certain transactions (for example adult content)?

Holy moly 😂 The Lenovo Thinkpad line still seems to be reasonable quality, they make carbon laptops that are pretty nice. I prefer an aluminium laptop just because of the stiffness and usually no issue with hinges although I have seen a lot of more recent Dells etc that have aluminium cases but still with plastic hinge mounts bonded to the aluminium, very silly! I do some laptop repair and I have to say Acer are my least favourite but they do mostly sell cheaper models, can't complain too much when the price is very low. Either way though replacement parts for most laptops are cheap and people could probably do a lot of their own repairs, they're not as scary to work on as some think.

Is that even possible to 'fix' these days? most Windows log in accounts are Microsoft accounts (online), it used to be relatively simple to crack a local Windows account password but most people don't use local accounts now. With Bitlocker etc as well I don't fancy that job!

Just found out about something. In the notices of the Maitreya Flat group (I can't remember its exact name) there is a notice with a link to a google docs consultation/poll from Maitreya regarding Lara X Flat. There's talk of a new version removing the dynamic chest and locking it again like with the old flat. Have to say I'm quite against this, I like the customizability that 'dynamic' chest offers and didn't like the locked in settings of the old flat. Apparently creators have been complaining about rigging confusion related to the chest? which I don't quite understand given a 'dynamic' chest is a feature of just about every body. I will say I have seen some badly made stuff for Lara X Flat already, some of it is currently on sale at big events and it doesn't even fit the body properly. Anyway the consultation invited responses and I thought maybe sharing it here might bring a bigger audience. Flat Chest Poll

$1200 laptop + $750 (yikes!) eGPU chassis + $350 GPU + $150 in RAM/SSD upgrades... Of course stuff from 2020/2021 isn't worth that any more. Maybe $800 worth in total used today. I think realistically you could SL quite well on a $500 PC today, especially if you go used.