gwynchisholm

Rare house music from 1989, got the CD today

That’s probably the best description of those types of posts. Human made responses mimicking AI. Generalization in what looks like a proper answer but is actually useless information.

I can hit 11-12gb of usage in firestorm with shadow detail set to max in 4k with my intel A770. That number isn’t too out of line if you’re doing something similar. Though a general slowdown related to that memory usage may be an indicator of other problems related to memory allocation.

It’s more fun to mock them. But other internet circles I’m used to you absolutely cannot get away with just saying whatever nonsense comes to your head as a response to someone’s genuine question. You’d be called out by a dozen or more people for being misinformed. Doubling down on a bad take would leave you clowned on forever. Kind of a downside to a smaller community like this one, your pool for people who know what they’re talking about is pretty small. So when you’ve got someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about but has a 4 or 5 digit post count, sometimes their responses are taken as legitimate on that forum merit alone. That’s harmful, and risks misleading people who need help with something. Those types of posts should be called out in some way. But there’s another layer of difficulty there, who am I to call out someone with that much forum merit and have my call out be taken seriously? There’s very few people to back me up based on knowledge, and nobody is going to back up my meager forum merit. If this place had like 5 times the active users this isn’t a problem since with that many people your pool of knowledgeable people increases and I would be backed up, and people making incorrect posts would be called out by more people on them. It’s sadly the case for a lot of small communities, where join dates and post counts actually matter. Larger communities that stuff is worthless.

Someone making a response to a question that is presented in a way which looks correct to people who are uninformed on the subject in question, but is completely incorrect to anyone who does know the subject in question. People who are really good at pulling a nonsensical answer out of thin air and presenting it, and for people who don’t know any better they’ll take it as an actual answer. The blind leading the blind. Worse is when that completely incorrect answer is taken seriously as a solution. That is probably one of the most harmful things that can occur on more support oriented sections of any forum or community. Someone presenting nonsense answers and being taken seriously.

-enter a place with upwards of 50 people in it -2 seconds into rezzing in get a dm -“hi :3” Yeah that’s definitely how you make new friends online, with the most predatory and off-putting strategy ever of waiting for people to show up and immediately private messaging them a vague greeting. What do they expect as a response?

Lot of pessimistic views on new tech going on in here. We won’t really know much about the use cases for augmented reality until there’s more augmented reality devices and software being used. I find the ability to measure things with my phone camera, view a model of furniture in my living room, or pull text and links from video in real time pretty interesting. A further exploration of the uses for AR will be interesting to see. ”why would I want to watch YouTube on my phone? that just seems like a worse way to watch YouTube” - me 15 years ago seeing I could browse the internet on my LG rumor sider phone

Timeless by Goldie, a two CD house album from 1995 i recently acquired.

I never thought the region crossing thing was that big of a deal, most of the time I don’t even go between regions without teleporting anyway and when I do it’s not exactly a major holdup. It’s a big outlier for most social games to even have connected spaces like this, even if there is a transition, very few other games have anything like that. Most other social worlds use a room or space system where you only go to the one location and navigate to other locations with a menu. So SecondLifes transitions between regions is pretty advanced above that.

How much of a concern is the portability factor? Do you need a laptop for being outright portable, where battery life and weight are a concern? Or do you want a laptop because it’s a tidy all in one and will be using it plugged in at a desk? That can really change what you’d need in a laptop on a budget. As well what a budget would be defined by. On the cheap your best value choices are older used mobile workstations. Thinkpad P series, Dell Precision, HP Zbooks. They can be had pretty cheap much like any used piece of business equipment due to how that market cycles, and depending on the hardware chosen will do fine for SecondLife for very little money. The problem there is you’re buying years old mobile workstations, their battery life isn’t great at all and they tend to be heavy. I have a thinkpad P50 I use to use for SecondLife and it did quite well in 1080p at higher but not crazy graphical settings. It cost me under $300 as a base machine and was around $400 in total with minor upgrades. The downside is it weighs about 7lbs and gets 3 hours of battery life. Though the batteries are swappable. Kinda the drawback of older tech, you can save a lot of money and get adequate performance but you lose some comfort qualities of new machines. If portability is a concern and you’re willing to sacrifice graphical quality, you can get pretty good results from modern integrated graphics, at which point I’d recommend any current Lenovo ideapad, as they’re inexpensive consumer tier machines that will get you good performance for their price. That’s a personal recommendation but that entire class of modern consumer laptop will be fine for SecondLife, and get you good battery life and low weight. Drawback being they’ll be more expensive than an older used machine that would outperform them, but nothing too drastic. Usually in the 500-600$ range is where you’d find something of decent quality like that. Man that’s slightly faster than my commodore Vic 20 from 1981, modern laptops are getting pretty fast these days

I do not believe GMA4500 still works with Windows 10, I believe the last few driver versions for that hardware on windows are running a compatibility mode to be mostly functional. Even then I’m not sure if that igpu is supported by SecondLifes engine anymore. I’ll look into this a bit more, I have an SL510 on a shelf. edit: looking into this more and playing around with my SL510, outright incompatibility with the drivers for GMA4500 on windows 10 is your major culprit. The driver releases out there are from major manufacturers like Dell, hp, or in the case of your SL410, Lenovo. And they’re not exactly graphics drivers like you’d have gotten prior on the machine, they’re more like adaptations to the built in Microsoft driver that let it use native display resolutions and video acceleration. Basically you’re closer to the Microsoft default driver than a proper graphics driver. There are third party modded driver options for windows 10 but they’re hit and miss with different versions of windows 10. Most people find success using them on stationary installs like how Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC works. You may have better luck installing Linux and using SL on Linux, since that will have somewhat more up to date driver support or at least fully functional driver support. Or installing windows 7 and using older drivers for GMA 4500 that were meant for windows 7, but then you do have the issue of viewer support on 7 being questionable. Simply put your Thinkpad as it’s currently configured isn’t up to the task of running SL from a pure compatibility standpoint. The hardware can do it, I’ve played on far less, but unless you run modded drivers or switch to Linux your integrated graphics will not be fully functional, and without that all SecondLife sees is a default display driver which doesn’t have the feature set required to play SL. All that aside, that generation of thinkpad SL series is from 2009. It was not going to play SL particularly well to begin with and I would advise looking at a different machine entirely.

I intend to buy one the second it comes out. I don’t think you’ll ever see anything to do with SL on it. Really expand the concept for a moment, apple is not going to want anything to do with SL on their brand new os on their brand new hardware if they want a virtual world augmented reality experience. Why adapt a platform from 2003 to somehow work with something 20 years newer, it’s not practical, if they saw the idea of AR worlds being popular, they’d make their own virtual world. The tech they’re showing off, if it does what they say it does, is some next level stuff for consumer tier AR, and is extremely interesting.

Trying out assorted debug settings for vram limitations to try and get firestorm to use whatever resources it wants, so far ive got it to ignore the read limit for texture memory (768mb as it reads) and instead it now uses about 1gb for textures in this scene which is insane by the way, thats with texture resolution limited to 512x512, i fear entering any store packed with 8k resolution textures of store display buttons no noticeable change in framerate but it does mean i dont see any blurry textures anymore edit: interesting insight, cranking shadow quality to the max immediately brings it to 11.5gb of vram usage

I probably should’ve specified, a 6gb 780, I forget most are 3gb, Regardless it didn’t top 2gb of memory usage in 1080p anyway. The cards in question for reference, my 780 is an ASL 6gb King Kong GTX 780 My first gen Titan is an EVGA SC model, but both cards are clocked not the same but similarly. Under most circumstances the Titan should outperform the 780 and be closer to a 780ti (which usually outperforms the Titan), but the difference here was way out of the margin i was expecting, upwards of a 10fps difference over the 780. And this can be replicated with a variety of other cards in my collection. A Quadro M4000 outperforming a GTX 970, a Tesla C2050 outperforming a GTX 570, a Radeon pro WX4100 outperforming an RX460, etc. Its usually nothing super massive, but it’s this outlier of performing above conventional expectation as if you were comparing performance in conventional games. I am not an expert on the technologies that make professional cards and drivers what they are, but I suspect this has to do with how they’re optimized with OpenGL in mind, versus consumer gpus where directX and Vulkan would be a bigger focus.

I like the idea of SL moving their core website to the xenforo forums like how some other communities have done. Just merge the account information screens, add a map, marketplace, in world search and such to the top bar. All news items and events can be official forum posts. So it would just become SecondLife.com

SecondLife has a few generalized bits of hardware qualities it prefers. Namely single core performance, ram quantity (dependent on the viewer) and video card performance can vary wildly dependent on a massive amount of factors. The key one is single core performance though. SL is a very old game that’s on a platform which doesn’t use multiple cores very well, and a lot of its graphical rendering is still cpu bound, not entirely gpu bound. The better your single core performance the better your overall experience. I recommend using passmark listings to compare cpu choices favoring single core performance. An older 6 or 8 core processor will be outperformed by a much newer 4 core processor when it comes to SL for this reason. Something like the i7 9700 despite being 8c/8t, is outperformed overall by the i3 12100 which is 4c/8t. And in the case of SL it’s a very dramatic difference due to the superior single core performance of the newer i3. Theres a point of diminishing returns as well depending on cpu generation, the i9 13900 will obviously perform the best, but the difference in its single core performance versus the i5 13400 isn’t really worth it for SecondLife unless you have some other workloads going on at once where you want more cores. Ram, this will depend mostly on your choice of viewer and how you allocate memory to SL. I use firestorm and let it use whatever it wants, at times SL will use upwards of 10gb of ram that way. I recommend 16gb at minimum for any build these days regardless of purpose. More ram doesn’t hurt (outside of rare scenarios where it does), though if your choices are a much faster 16gb kit with low latency, or a much slower 32gb kit with high latency, go with the fast and low latency option regardless of capacity. For a video card, basically anything mid tier or better from the last 10 years will play SL fine from a graphical standpoint. SecondLife is still cpu bound, lighting is the big one that’s not handled by the gpu anyway, and the rest of SL’s rendering is a walk in the park for nearly any gpu. You can’t really make a wrong choice here so long as you avoid the low end. A GT 1030 will do fine in SL, but for the price of a GT 1030 you can also just get a used GTX 1070 which will do way better. And really anything of that caliber will do fine. I’ve played SL on dozens of different video cards and found most limitations with graphical performance come down to video memory at higher resolutions more than anything. I have yet to see a scenario really tap out 8gb though. Closest I got was using black dragon I managed to use 6gb of video memory somehow. If you want a specific type of card recommendation, any hybrid use case card generally plays best with SL in my experience. Nvidia Titan’s, AMD Vega cards, or full workstation style Quadro or FirePro/Radeon pro cards. SL is laid out a lot more like a 3D workspace than a game, and some features of workstation oriented gpu drivers actually do have a minor benefit in game versus the consumer counterparts. This is also why Vega plays well with SL, if you’re on a budget a Vega 56 is dirt cheap and does SL great compared to AMD Polaris or nvidia pascal cards of the same tier. It’s not a super common scenario to come across outside of SecondLife so you don’t hear about that benefit much. I’ve found a similar result with nvidia as well, where I had a first gen GTX Titan punching well above its weight, outperforming a GTX 780 by a decent bit, despite being nearly the same card on paper. Sometimes drivers do matter.

obscure 90's drum and bass CD's

Kinda makes me want to bust out the old core2quad and install 32 bit windows 10 to see how the last 32 bit viewer versions hold up

The last people I could see this affecting are mobile Core Duo users. Not Core2Duo, Core Duo. A brief line of 32 bit laptop processors from 2006. That would be the last usable and common 32 bit hardware out there. It supports some relevant instruction sets and you could install windows 7/8/10 on a core duo era laptop, and have it not run awfully. Those are the only people who would potentially have a 32 bit system still in functional use today. So I imagine the number of people still using a core duo is way less than anyone still using a core2duo, and even those people are nearly nonexistent even in countries where tech lags behind. And of those people I don’t imagine many of them play SecondLife since their hardware overall wouldn’t be very good at it.

I’m surprised this wasn’t done years ago tbh, the hold up on 32 bit anything wasn’t the hardware, but the operating systems. Primarily due to the relevance of windows XP, since nearly nobody ran 64 bit xp. With vista being unpopular, people held onto 32 bit xp for a long time. But that ended like 5ish years ago even for the holdouts on xp, nobody else was still using a 32 bit operating system. Maybe some low end windows 7 netbooks? The majority of people stopped using 32 bit hardware 15+ years ago.

Well it’s not really equivalent to a gaming laptop. It’s a mid power tier apu system, which we don’t really see in laptops anymore outside of a few rare examples and definitely not with this AMD Z1 apu. It will be interesting to see what it’s capable of, they’ve gone a strange route with throwing battery life out the window with the 1080p 120hz display and running 15 to 30w power modes on the apu. It kinda takes the portability aspect out of the equation. Half the reason the steam deck is tolerable is because it’s a low power system with a low power 720p display where you won’t notice poor graphical detail anyway. As for its use in SecondLife, I could definitely see it being pretty good for that minus having to use an onscreen keyboard. The controls could be bound pretty quick like any controller with SL. But that big limitation will be the lack of a physical keyboard. If you’re someone who uses voice heavily I would assume it would be perfectly serviceable as a portable SL machine.

Old thread but this is the first thing that comes up when you google anything about this so i figured id post here so others find it as well. SL on Arc runs about as well as youd expect its tier of GPU to run on OpenGL, specs: Using a fairly detailed but not super complex place as an example with no other users, since regardless of what hardware you have, other users will kill performance Completely maxed settings on the most recent version of firestorm, in 4k, with the exception of render distance being sub 200m is how i usually play, or 64/32m when indoors. Note that imgur compresses these images. With shadows: Without shadows: 33fps with shadows, nearly 60fps without shadows The limitation is less the gpu and more the CPU, still, even with an 11900k its just not utilizing hardware very well so the CPU bound lighting tech is having a bad time despite whatever hardware you have. And besides the weird way SL reports the video memory on cards with resizable bar enabled, it works fine, no crashes no sutter. I would still recommend something like an RTX 3060ti or Radeon 6700XT for this kind of performance since those cards will just do better overall for everything outside of secondlife. Intel ARC plays extremely well with DX12 and Vulkan titles, and punches above its weight, 16gb of video memory only helps that further. However for OpenGL youre not seeing anything special. And for DirectX 11 or older titles you see some pretty heavy limitations really quick that the tech just isnt designed for. From my experience with secondlife and a large variety of hardware from the actual bare minimum to even be present in game with something like Radegast, to current gen high end, the limitation is no longer hardware at all, its the games use of it. I have an i5 12400F based system with a GTX 1080 that also plays SL in 4k at max settings and its nearly identical, beacuse the framerate problems come with having a billion avatars on screen and shadows. Turn on impostor avatars and turn off shadows and you can triple framerate on basically any hardware. You can still comfortably play SL on later Core2Quads at pretty high resolutions. I have an Arc A380 as well if anyone wants to see that, but i dont have an A750, id be happy to test out more hardware or show off results from different locations.