[sldev] Re: SL Target Audience

[Gary Wardell]

Hi,

Ok, what is the working definition of:

-  a *low end machine*

-  an acceptable frame rate

While my machine is definitely NOT a "Maximum PC Dream Machine"; it does run pre windlight acceptably to me.  It is also better
then the minimum machine on the compatibility list.

However, when I ran the windlight viewer with the default settings the graphics had virtually no detail at all.  As I recall it
defaulted to Low.  When I tried custom and bumped things up to the older viewer the detail was comparable if not better, but the
fps was abysmal.

So that kind of leaves me wondering, why "upgrade" to something that is unusable, when what I have works fine, so far?
Also, why should I _have_to_ buy a special high-end gaming machine just to run SL at the same level it ran before?

Gary


> -----Original Message-----
> From: sldev-bounces at lists.secondlife.com
> [mailto:sldev-bounces at lists.secondlife.com]On Behalf Of Eric M. Tulla
> (BigPapi Linden)
> Sent: Thu, May 29, 2008 11:05 AM
> To: Argent Stonecutter
> Cc: Second Life Developer Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [sldev] Re: SL Target Audience
>
>
> 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.
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