A much better graphics engine!

A few things...

Avatars are not rendered with the same number of polygons over varying distances. It isn't until your camera is close to them that you start seeing facial features, etc. From far away, the head is a simple sphere with a texture on it.

SL uses JPEG2000 for texture compression. You might put an 800x600 texture on a surface, but you're not going to see it until you've been staring at it for a while. SL takes forever to send high-res textures, and sometimes it doesn't do it at all, so you're looking at the same blurred texture for 5 minutes. This was really irksome back when the event board was a big screen type deal at the welcome area rather than being an integrated part of the viewer.

The idea of static BSPs for static builds is interesting. I would like to hear what LL thinks of this idea. On the surface it sounds like a fantastic idea, but it might not be feasible or practical in SL.

Finally, I think it is interesting that different coders have different opinions re: graphics cards. I wonder how much of this is religious and how much is based on people simply using different feature sets.

Lindens, hire these two!

For our small company, it was feature sets. The game we were working on was heavy, HEAVY on the programmable pipeline (shaders).

In fact, nothing on the screen used a single fixed function call.

We never had a single problem with ATI, but with the Geforce, ETC, we did.

Other examples include the fact that the Geforce3 drivers (or card?) when queried about certain capabilities, lies about what it's capable of, and then when you enable those features, it fails to render correctly. That kind of thing. With the ATI, we found that if it says it can do it, it CAN. So eventually, after much switching about from driver to driver and card to card, our developers settled on ATI cards (9700 or 9800).

There is no loyaly though. If the next gen of cards from one developer is horrible, we'd all switch to a different one.

HOWEVER, there is always room for improvement. ATI could do with a dose of stability in its drivers, and I can't talk much about the FIXED function pipeline because we didn't use it at all - just thousands of shaders of every type. And we didnt encounter any glitches or wierdnesses with the ATI - but plenty with the GeForce. (Another example - Geforce says it supports 8 texture stages. It supports maybe 2, in special circumstances... unless you start using a special extension only for Geforce cards, which we aren't prepared to do, since thats against the whole point of DirectX).