Bitterleaf Menges

It is always sad to see something you greatly appreciate disappear from the Second Life, but to suggest, as you implicitly do, that Linden Lab should support efforts that their originators and users are unwilling to fund themselves is misguided. But, in answer to your question, I for one do not think Linden Lab cares ONLY for profits, however they are not an nonprofit organization.

I have a Nvidia GTX560ti, which I count as an affordable card, and it runs SL perfectly with shadows and ambient occlusion and 4X anti-aliasing. I'd wager you'd get decent performance out of a GTX460 and similar priced cards.

I run the new viewer 2 with shadows and ambient occlusion (I don't really think Depth of Field is any good unless you are doing machinima) with no problems and I get a minimum of 25 frames and often 40+, so I'd claim that my computer runs it without problems/lag. I have an i5 with 8Gb RAM and a GTX 560ti. I did experience grave problems running SL both with and without shadow, etc. at first until I removed my antivirus program and installed a free light weight one. To get the best result with shadows I recommend you play around with adjusting them in the debug settings to achieve a better shadow quality. Ambient occlusion is another matter. It is quite grainy and I have not found anyway to amend this. I still prefer it on.

I run SL on a 3.3Ghz i5, with 8MB RAM and a 560ti that I recently bought. When first i fired up SL I was shocked to see that I could only get 12-15 frames/sec no matter what I did with my graphics settings. In desperation I tried EVERYTHING to figure out what was cripling my machine. The culprit was my ANTIVIRUS programme. I was running Bitdefender at first but now i have gone over to AVAST (free edition) which protectionwise should be sufficient for most normal users/gamers. After I switched I went from the afore mentioned low framerate to 25+ depending on the region I am in with EVERYTHING at MAX! So, try removing your existing antivirus programme and installing something lightweight instead.

@Gentle I am afraid I must correct you, at the risk of bursting your bubble. Using the results of this survey as a basis of your claim that 20% of SL's audience has some sort of disability is simply erroneous! Second Life is NOT what is referred to with the term: Casual Game. Without getting technical, the term refers to games such as Bubble Shooter, found at http://www.bubbleshooter.net/ and other (often) web browser based games. Commonly they require very little commitment from their audience, deliver almost instant gratification and does not have a steep learning curve. The article Gentle refers to can be found here: http://www.infosolutionsgroup.com/pdfs/disabled_gamers.pdf A definition of the term "Casual Games" can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casual_game

I think the general opinion is that this sucks, and as someone who is in the process of starting up a project where the budget for sims has already been fixed I certainly agree. But lets drop the melodrama and stop predicting the eminent death of SL, -while this is surely an unfortunate move it wil not kill education in SL or SL as such nor will it lead to a massive exodus. For my part I am simply forced to downsize (and pay my tier well in advance), so this will not lead to more dough in Philips pockets, and I would wager that this will be the predominant strategy for dealing with this problem rather than a migration to OpenSim which is IMO hopelessly unstable atm.