Oh God! I'm gonna be obsolete!

From Robin in the Hotline, re: texture problems:

"We're looking at this right now -- many people who were able to run Second Life at the minimum spec (or sometimes below) are now having difficulty. If it turns out we need to change the spec we'll let everyone know."



coco

You gotta be kiddin me?

The minimum specs are computers that are like, what, 3 years old now?

A video card that can run SL costs about 50 bucks at the most. Most likely 30 now.

LF

Maybe they should up the minimum spec on their servers?

Well I have pretty cool spec and its still running badly, so I would hold off on your purchases for now.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=697013&CatId=694

A Geforce 5200. Top of the line? Not even close. But it runs SL just fine.

40 bucks.

Lf

That assumes you know how to put in a video card .. or have something where swapping video cards is possible.

I'm running 2 7800 GTX's on SLI config, still having probs, I really can't see it being spec.

I run a single 7800 GTX on a 3.4 Xeon and it works great. Interestingly I also run SL on my laptop, a Toshiba M200 tablet, and it works great as well, though not as smooth as the Xeon machine...

Seriously, it's a matter of plug and play at this point There's one place you can put a video card in. It snaps snugly into place, you put the case back on, connect your monitor, et voila, download new drivers, and you're done. Hell, sometimes Windows XP downloads the drivers for you.

Putting bits like video cards into your computer is no more difficult than changing a tire on your car.

Lf

So why does there seem to be such a split between those its running well for and those its not. Anyway, client side aside so to speak, the sims' performance are all over the place.

The fact of the matter is that your client produces most of the view into what you call "the world." The server's, other than The Central Asset System All Hail The Central Asset System, generally have no trouble performing their required calculations and transmitting the numbers to you. It's your own RAM, processor and video adapter that have to process all that data and draw an ever evolving interpretation of what the world would look like to you if it really existed in the first place.

I'd like to see you change the video card in my laptop....

I am running a low spec machine and I don't have a problem at all...
My VidCard is not quite bottom of the line, but the rest of my system is, and the card is in the trailing side the midrange (The machine is a full 2.5 yrs old...)

I have Anisotropic Filtering ON
Local Lighting ON
Far Clipping OFF
and Shadows ON

Still no problem.

I have not enabled shiny yet.
Since hte shiny is kinda canned instead of using specularity, I figured "meh!"
Maybe I should try that.

If I get problems, I will report.

Even though I agree that it doesn't take much to acheive the minimum specs (I run an Athlon 2500+ & GeForce 5500 here)...

There have been *many* people I've tried to convince checking out SL, only to learn that they're running with an imbedded/shared mem graphics card that's unsupported/insufficient.

Previously, my argument for 'trying' SL was - "Look, its free - what can it hurt?"

If they have to go out & purchase a better video card in order to try SL - the TCO is no longer free, and it kills my argument. That's the issue I see here with specs that are higher than 'average'.

Especially when that imbedded graphics card is already doing the job fine for everything else they do currently with their PC.

Travis,

This is an excellent point.
Especially with a lot of newer systems having embedded grafx, the "Grab'n'go" computer is the wave of the current market.

I think LL needs to decide pretty soon if they want SL to be the playground of the 733+ crowd, or available to all.

The current framerate issues are NOT an issue of 'spec'.

I have a P4 3.2, 1gb PC3200 DDR, GeForce 6800GT -- and i'm getting FOUR OR FIVE FPS now.

Liam has an Athlon64 3500+, 1gb PC3200 DDR, GeForce 5950Ultra - and is getting the same four or five FPS.

Before, we'd get 16-20 in social areas and 20-35 in unpopulated sims or up high.

If our machines are "below minimum spec" now, what on earth is minimum spec?

Playing with a laptop here too - no graphics card upgrade possible. If I had to give up playing while lying in bed/lounging on the couch, and instead had to sit at a desk hogging my hubby's computer, I'd likely retire again.

That said, I'm on the lowest end of the Mac specs (32 Mb VRAM, Ge5200) and I can live with the way things are right now.

I am on a 3.4 ghz Pentium-D, with 1 gig of PC2-4200 DDR2 memory, and a PCI-Express Geforce 7800GT with 256 megs of memory. The result - 4-5 FPS.

And will you be buying everyone one of these cards??? because to a lot of people 30 bucks is a lot of money.

And for those who have the stupid Video Card welded to the Mother Board????????????

Updating the specs might be a good idea BUT there are still grid wide issues not related to our hardware that are still happening. Textures loading slowly, time dilation... the list goes on. A new patch is slated for this week... we shall see.

Hate for people to have to divert funds from the slave collar budgets, indeed!

I agree. I believe that its very possiable to make things too good. I also don't see why there was need for an update past the inclusion of Music on the Land. Video takes up too many resources. I think when we had music that should had been where the Updates stopped and the move then should had been to fix the bugs and problems that exist even to this day.

Say What???