[sldev] Re: SL Target Audience

[Barney Boomslang]

Hey,

>
>>
> Please calm down.  We're not blaming anybody, twisting words, or ignoring
> facts.  We're trying to have a dialog explaining the reasons we made the
> design decisions we made.  And we're trying to collect more facts about how
> these design decisions have impacted our community.


Well, it has nothing to do with calming down / heating up. It's just that
the statement that machines that are not having good FPS with at least
middle setting in Windlight are not capable of nicely rendered environments
that is wrong - as your own older versions showed before you introduced
Windlight. Showed it on the Mac, that is.

To make it simple to understand: to get the same framerates as with the
1.18.5 based clients under the 1.19.1 based clients, I have to set my
graphics settings to "low". Not even "middle" will do it, framerates with be
lower, usually around half of what I get with 1.18.5 based clients on the
same machine, a first-gen MacBook Pro with two cores, 2G ram, 256 MB
graphics ram.

I'm trying to understand what you meant when you said, "Now to get a
> framerate that is near what I got with pre-Windlight, I have to turn the
> look of the world into stoneage-ugly."   Do you have any other specific
> complaints other than that the original ripple water was removed?


see above. to get the same framerates with 1.18.5, I have to use "low"
setting on the graphics panel.


> I'm not really interested in the debate about whether a particular revision
> of macbook pro is low-end or not.  Clearly the hardware is not low-end (if
> I'm correct, it falls under the recommended area on our system requirements
> page http://secondlife.com/support/sysreqs.php).  However, the Apple
> OpenGL driver implementation is simply more difficult to support, and it is
> continually an effort to improve performance on Apple.  We take this effort
> very seriously.
>

Well, that is the whole point of all this discussion and the spawned
threads: your own code performed better before 1.19.1 with regard to
performance. That's what a lot of people wrote in here in the last hours and
what is complained about all around.

I get quite a bit feedback on the different clients I build for people
(nicholaz patched and henri patched clients for the mac) and allmost all are
happy to hear they can pop back into the older ones still, because of that
problem: windlight requires using worse _visuals_ to get the same FPS.
Rippled water is one obvious one, everybody notices it right away under the
"low" setting.

"low" is not identical to pre-windlight, "low" under windlight is much less
appealing. And that's what people get annoyed about: that lindens comment in
a way that seems to suggest they are running underpowered machines when
obviously it is the code change that made the performance worse.

None of my Macs (the two I see as  non-outdated being the MacBook Pro and a
last-gen white 17" iMac sporting the same GPU as the MacBook Pro) delivers
the same FPS under 1.19.1 "middle" (the suggested setting) as with 1.18.5
(and I had some settings cranked up to max on 1.18.5!). I do tests usually
on my sim Lummerland, because it's a low-lag environment and I control
changes there, so actually can compare apples to apples without involving
any oranges ...

bye, Barney
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