[sldev] branches/shadow-draft missing llrender.cpp

[Darien Caldwell]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lawson English" <lenglish5 at cox.net>
To: "Karl Stiefvater" <qarl at lindenlab.com>
Cc: <sldev at lists.secondlife.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 4:13 PM
Subject: Re: [sldev] branches/shadow-draft missing llrender.cpp


> Karl Stiefvater wrote:
>>> Uh ok.   o.o
>>>
>>> While there may be a few who cling to old hardware, I don't think the 
>>> majority of people would be up in arms over this. It's perfectly 
>>> reasonable for next generation rendering to require next generation 
>>> hardware (or even this generation ;) ). Calm down, have a donut, and 
>>> keep up the good work. :)
>>
>> heh... you'd be surprised how many people get upset about these sorts of 
>> things.
>>
>> here's an example of a prominent SL journalist arguing that windlight is 
>> a BadThing - because it creates a "digital divide" between the haves and 
>> havenots:
>>
>> http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/04/is-the-windligh.html
>>
>>
>
> Honestly though, I can empathize. I keep getting "whiteouts" with my Mac. 
> I don't know anyone else who gets it, so I'm assuming its just MY Mac that 
> is the problem for some reason (it's over 3 years old, PPC architecture), 
> but if I ever run into someone else with the same issue I'll jira it. 
> Regardless, I can see why people feel they're getting left behind. SL 
> isn't for older comps, and things are going to get worse as time goes on, 
> I suspect, at least until  NV8800-level graphics is supported in low-end 
> laptops.
>
>
> Lawson

But I think the point everyone is missing is, you don't have to turn on all 
the fancy bells and whistles that windlight and (lets give it a cool name) 
DarkLight shadow rendering provide. you can uncheck a myriad of boxes and 
have the old style rendering with the same performance as before. At least 
that's the argument that has been put forth on many occasions.

Has anyone really verified that going back to the basic rendering without 
all the fancy shaders is now worse performance than pre-Windlight? I'm kind 
of curious now.
                                   - Dari