Suggestion for 'curing' lag.

You missed the point or choose to ignore it - SL favors AMD (maybe) and NVIDIA, the user needs an NVIDIA card just to get decent performance, maybe only one the 8xxx series of cards is sufficient.
Hence the user would need to build a separate PC if the user wants to use an ATI or possibly higher than NVIDIA 8xxx card for other games/applications. Intel/AMD may also be a significant factor - the ATI issue is at least well evidenced.

The fact that the user has to have an NVIDIA card is a huge issue, anything like this that excludes a large portion of the potential userbase is.

A games studio spending $50million to create a game could not exclude ATI cards for example.

Understand?

Yeah but most of the time there is benifit in going to a $200 graphics card from an outdated dinosour card worth nothing.

Yes, in this thread I'm referring to the dire performance with brand new current generation ATI cards amongst other things, I own one of these new cards and I'm satisfied with its high performance in the other games/apps that I use.

That's more of an ATI vs Nvidia issue. Hardly a SL vs the world situation. (=_=)

I, for one, got sick and tired of ATI "performance" the moment PCI Express came out. Be it games, CAD, full screen video, and so on. So, if LL is favoring Nvidia, in my eyes, they're merely keeping up with the successful portion of the industry. Technological Darwinism, maybe? The mother of invention, I gotta say. (^_^)

Please, name an ATI card that's "excluded" from compatibility with SL? Sure.. You'll probably see a performance hit somewhere due to incompatibility. Nvidia ain't completely free from issues either. Avatar clothing layers, anyone? (^_^)

Such is the bane of the PC industry. Hardware companies make their own technologies, and the software creators have to pick one over the other when coding their apps. Something has to give. A compromise has to be made so at least some segment of the industry can excel and the best single product combination can deliver the highest performance. (^_^)

We're lucky we have it so good. Consider console gamers. Exclusive games come out all the time, and if you don't own the other console, you can't play it. At least, with PC, you can settle for a laggy experience. (^_^)y

I can't imagine any circumstance in which a remote SL would be able to manage more than a few frames per second for any but the fastest modems, and every time anything major changed in view you'd start seeing seconds per frame in the double digits.

That would be "no". Just about anything you buy today, so long as it's not using embedded graphics or an Intel GPU, will run SL somewhat decently. You just need to get one of the open source viewers based on the 1.18 source tree before Windlight.

Nvidia seems to do OpenGL support better than ATI. ATI cards will run SL well, though. So will Intel CPUs.

I get pretty decent performance on an iMac with an ATI Radeon 2600 Pro, which is hardly a top of the line card.

That's all well and good, and if SL wants to target itself primarily to that segment of the population, that's fine as well. But a wide group, namely those of us with mortgages, taxes, car and insurance payments, or kids to raise and send to school, aren't as eager to keep buying computer parts every few months . Not saying SL shouldn't advance, but there should be some thought to the speed at which it happens and the effect on the userbase as a whole. I'm on the E Amish end of the scale admittedly, I'm running an almost 5 year old machine, that has seen no changes save for a memory upgrade, but a lot of less luddistic types are also frustrated by SL's hardware demands and quirks, and they 're the types who may go to some length to upgrade for SL's sake, while I pretty much won't, so there is a risk of losing them as customers.

Spending fifty dollars for a new video card after five years is a pretty minimal investment.

It's possible that this issue affects the 4xxxx generation the most since its the newest, either way LL needs to improve performance with ATI cards, surely the OGL perf of new ATI cards is more than sufficient. If it turns out ATI cards have a longterm OGL issue then using something other than OGL in SL will have to be looked at or just continue excluding a large % of users and potential users from a much better experience.

It has to be at least 20-25 fps in a complex situation for it to be near 'decent' apparently some of the nvidia cards are achieving this in SL.

Yes of course SL cannot support dinosaurs and crappy connections
brand new parts are cheap as chips.. and I'm afraid the few % of users who cannot afford a few hundred dollars will always be excluded... for a very long time to come at least.

OGL is the only cross-platform API available. Switching to something other than OGL will eliminate Mac and Linux users.

OK, you're using a completely different definition of "decent" from me. I have an nVidia card and I only get 20+ FPS in a skybox, and I consider 8+ FPS "decent".

Second Life is unlikely to get better results than this no matter whether they use DirectX or OpenGL, without locking down user-generated content like There or ActiveWorlds does. And after they did that, well, it wouldn't *BE* "Second Life" any more.

I see, its fairly certain that ATIs OGL perf is sufficient especially on current gen cards.

There's a huge amount of users/pot.users that disagree with 8FPS being decent - as said SL can perform better on certain hw configurations - it should work this well on much more current and near-current hw.

Upgrading a bottom feeder video card does not cost a few hundred dollars.

You can buy a 512MB Nvidia 8600GT for less than fifty dollars. I saw a shelf full of 8800GT cards at Best Buy for $103 this weekend.

I was referring to buying a new platform instead of using a Pentium 3 1.0ghz with 364mb of ram for example

I can understand that, but realistically the only way to get better performance than that with anything but a bleeding-edge system (and thus overcoming the difficulties by brute force) is to use the same kind of controls over the build that let centralized systems get better performance than SL.

* Limit the total number of textures in each sim.
* Limit adjacent sims to using a subset of a common multi-sim texture pool.
* Wrap each build up in an opaque skybox instead of letting you see adjacent builds.
* Drastically cull distant objects, and force builders to provide summarized versions of their builds to be used beyond (say) 50 meters.
* Limit clothing textures to those approved for the sim you're in.
* Eliminate the torus, or limit the use of the torus to a small number of unique instances in a build.
* Limit the number of prims visible in a scene to a number comparable to the number of unique meshes visible in other games.
* ...

You get the idea...

They have plenty of other fascinating pastimes they can enjoy instead of Second Life. Like churning butter or hunting mammoths with Commodore 64 guy.

Sure, supporting old-ancient hardware and crappy connections isn't the goal of this thread anyways as some might jump to assumptions.

Those things may help but I disagree - realistically speaking LL could improve the code etc so it runs better on more of the sufficient hardware out there, that is one of the points of this thread.
At least it could be brought somewhere near equal rather than the drastic shifts between different current generation hardware - I'm not referring to network issues here.

Example: using the same net connection a user gets 10FPS with an ATI card in a specific situation, plop in an NVIDIA card and they get 20FPS in the same specific situation.

Actually.... Most of those things Argent listed ARE the optimization techniques that game makers use to keep games running at a high clip. While at the same time, running on code that very closely matches the SL client. The optimizations are graphical, and designed by pros. But, in SL, graphical optimizations are the responsibility of the resident builder. Of which, most of us either don't know or don't care when we make the things I do. (^_^)

ARC witch hunt, anyone? =^-^=

I don't disagree in that sense, I've stated what I think in that post and again in this.

- Second Life has significant holes in its hardware support for near current+the current hardware generations, fixing this will improve performance for many users.

as a side note the USA and maybe some other places have it easier than other places in regards to hardware prices, e.g. in Europe paying 1.5x-2.0x for the same video card is commonplace - still supporting crappy hw & connections is something that SL cannot do and should not be the focus of attention.

Well asking the user to use a gamespec PC to play a game rather than an office wordprocessor is hardly bending backwards, SL isn't some 1990's graphics game, it works a computer pretty hard. The ATI vs Nvidia thing is common on other MMO's too, one of them always performs beter than the other.
I suspect there are many content creators in SL running low spec machines and wondering why they can't sell anything, because they can't see flaws in their work others can see.

No - it's asking the user to try and figure out what hardware SL properly supports to avoid falling in one of the holes in SLs hw support and to then build a separate PC for this purpose if he/she wishes to continue using different hardware that works better for other purposes.
No one here is saying that you should be able to run SL on old hardware etc... well maybe 1 or 2 - but not me.