[sldev] Re: SL Target Audience

[Eric M. Tulla (BigPapi Linden)]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> On 2008-05-28, at 09:46, Thomas Grimshaw wrote:
>> have you turned your graphics settings down to match the quality of 
>> the old client?
>
> You can't. Turning off the shaders leaves you with graphics that are 
> arguably worse than they were when I started in 2005: under Windlight 
> the Linden trees have been made crude and pixelated, and water doesn't 
> even have a texture map for ripples... let alone something of the 
> quality of the pre-Windlight water.
That means you're biasing it in the other direction.  If you keep the 
renderer at a level that is greater than the old one, of course it will 
be slower.  However, the entire point of this discussion is how the 
windlight renderer (without the fancy stuff) affects *low end 
machines*.  Low end machines do NOT have the capacity to render all the 
pretty stuff at anything close to an acceptable frame rate.  As such, 
any benchmarking on those machines NOT at the lowest levels is 
fundamentally flawed, since only at the lowest level are we targeting 
acceptable performance for those hardware configurations.