Will SL Ever Have Better Graphics/Load Time?

There are 2 purposes of this thread.
1. A discussion about whether or not SL will ever have better graphics.
2. A gallery thead for posting cool 3D graphics.
Please do not post 2D artwork. The purpose is to see what cool 3D graphics (character modeling/environtmets/objects/buildings) ae out there.
I have included a few.


Regarding load time.
Things take longer to load in SL because it is a dynamic environment. This means that playres create everything in SL in real time.
In most games, the environments are static. Therefore, things load faster because they are already prebuilt as part of the game.

The question remains: Will SL ever have better graphics and faster load times? If so, how can they do this?

I got these images from the internet. I'm sure there might be better images out there, but these are pretty good.

are really, really good! but, what's the setup for those... surely long render times. i'd swear those look like radiosity renders... even doing raytrace is still so hard to do on the fly.

-mmmmaybe- in another twenty years (to reach the level of those images - seriously, we've only had ten years now, at best, for the industry to really tackle this). i figure in ten we'll reach consistently good raytrace levels (with special-order add-on graphics cards; still doubt they'd be stock at that point). another ten to reach that radiosity level of on-the-fly reality.

what is even sl's top render environment (or that is, graphic card's capabilities to handle) - gourade (sp? phrasing?

patience, young paduwan. (sp? phrasing? lol... i'm just not -that- much of a starwars geek anymore. paduin? no wait, that's more like 'lawrence of arabia'...

The problem with dynamic renders of that detail is the simple fact they're beyond most modern-day PCs. Sure, you can tell them to render all of the data staticly or as part of a scene, but unless you have a major rendering cluster set up, it can easily take hours, if not days, to complete.

Now, they have said they'd like to work on generalized texture layers and prelighting of scenes in an earlier town hall. We also have early renders of Second Life 2.0 to work with.

Fortunately, the hardware is getting there. Look at the next generation "consoles" this week. The Xbox 360 alone is said to sport three parallel 3.2 ghz processors and an amazing amount of rendering capacity... for $400 (leaving out the terrible "basic" pack). Similarly, the PS3 will sport seven parallel processors in their "Cell" unit at 2.18 teraflops.

Now, I'm bringing up the console systems because they're setting a low bar for high-end computer hardware, and to some, will be a computer. My prediction is this will drive comparable hardware prices down in the long run, and make more realistic rendering power more viable.

But that sort of thing will take years, so be patient.


Padawan.

I think things will stay the same. Because as the technology advances, so will the desire to squeeze more out of it. Resolutions will increase, rendered area settings will increase, complexity will increase.

Just think about how well Flight Simulator 2004 runs today, vs. the original SubLogic Flight Simulator from the 80's. With it's settings at the higher levels, the 2004 version runs about the same speed as the original from 20 years ago.

The load times are on the order of minutes instead of seconds as the SL1.x design had a single bottleneck that has long since past its design expectations. The asset server simply cannot keep up with a tenfold increase in concurrent population or service tenfold as many sims as it had a couple of years ago. Linden Lab has been working hard to overcome this design limitation but it we will likely not see sub-minute load times for complex scenes again until 2.0.

I am also hoping that the developers working on SL2 are also applying more effort toward reducing the amount of data needed to be sent to the client. There are some indications from the SL2 rendering demos that indicate that they are indeed working toward that. There are also a number of other valid suggestions that have been made which would aid in the scene load delays that have been rejected by Linden Lab already (e.g. point-to-point teleporting and size based texture upload charges) which would help the situation immediately. But 'tis their decision to make. I find it puzzling that they'd not instantiate these easy suggestions that would improve the experience for all at the expected loss to a few telehub land "investors" and then simultaneous wonder why their conversion rate from trial to paying customer is not as high as they'd like it to be. Or why they'd be giving out free accounts which similarly make scene load times for all sit far below what their promotional videos suggest, but again, 'tis their decision. Oh well.

I've already seen significant improvements in load-and-render times on the 1.7 grid. The new interest-list algorithms seem to be a big help. Remains to be seen how heavy loads will go, but the whole feel of it is much better.

The most powerful graphic processing hardware in our machines, the GPU's programmable hardware vertex and pixel shaders on our graphics cards, is being almost completely unused.

Consequently our main CPUs are having to do an inordinate amount of low-level graphics pixel pushing alongside the ton of other work that needs doing in any online client. And it follows from that that there is only so much quality graphics that the CPU can deliver, simply through lack of time.

So if you're calling for better graphics or lower rendering loads, focus on the lack of support for GPU shader programs and you might get somewhere. This applies as much to the current client as to the next generation one. Without shader support, the future is limited, no matter how nice the prototype SL2 client rendering times appear at present, because it's the GPU that's seeing the huge advances in speed and capability this decade, not the CPU.

Just to clarify for the uninitiated (for Morgaine's post), "GPU" stands for "Graphical Processing Unit."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit

Or, in English, it's what makes Video Cards work.



Since this term has become more widely used (as opposed to just "video card", I feel the need to note that.

Continue.

hmmm but don't computers and games generally get better with each successive generation?

It's more likely than not, that at the next paradigm shift in computer graphics tech, SL will be superior to todays version..

Not true, on my 4400+ X2 AMD cpu and 6800 Ultra, Flight Simulator 2004 runs smooth as glass with all the sliders maxed and is scary real looking. High end results tend to need high end hardware...

As far as rendering goes, you have to remember each scene has to be able to be rendered in at least 17 frames per second, those pictures likely took hours each to render even with super fast machines.

Disclamer: some random thoughts and ramblings ahead

Some games have used "baked global illumination textures" to give more realism to the game without taxing the GPU with a bunch of slow to render soft shadow lights, This can be implemented in SL but since we make the models and textures it would be up to us to make them.. which is no walk in the park specially while being tied to a primitive based object system (as opposed to a more common polygon based system that has so many outside tools to assist us) So getting the textures just right in game on curved shapes would be a veritable nightmare..

I understand the the idea behind having all primitives, that way objects are just formulas, instead of positional data for every point, vertex or polygon. So in theory it reduces data traffic, storage and maybe even lag. In practice.. I have seen boots that have so many primitives that lags my display just to zoom in to look at them.. I know people hate limits.. but if the limit for body attachments was reasonable they would have to make use of creative texturing to create boot straps instead of 20 primitives..

Being an accomplished 3d modeler-animator, I really wish I could import my low polygon, UV mapped, subdivision surface objects I can so easily create with my favorite 3d app.

I'm kinda new to SL, has that been discarded completely? Is it planned for a future release?