Graphics Cards

Whats with Sl and its use of graphic cards?

I see in the options that you can check if you have a AGP graphic card.

but what if you have a faster newer PCI graphics card with bells and whistles?

Ive a pretty damn good machine but SL just seems to ignore everything I have and chug along at a modest pace.

I understand that it must be compatible with a wide variation of computers etc but currently you seem to be ignoring pcs from 2005 onwards.

I understand that PCI cards may not be as widespread but they can only get more prolifant!

I run lots of games such as high graphics intensive Battlefront 2, Half Life 2 etc without issues but I seem to suffer greatly with SL only.

I'm on AMD 64 dual core 4200+ , 1GIG ram , PCI 6800 graphics 256mb - 300gb HD etc..

OR

is it purley down to bandwidth and if you have everything on high you have to download lots more " stuff ". If this is so .,.. why ? why cant the client be the games engine?

im on 2mb adsl in uk.

SL badly uses graphic cards at all, most is done by your cpu , even light in SL is apperantly software base <.<

You do mean PCI-e card right?, pci is dirt old, and grr....

battlefront 2,
half-life 2
(enter any game you want)

are not more graphical intensive as SL is, never will be, they also cheat, hiding things you dont see, we're all hoping for better support and more fps, it can get awefully low , hey this isnt a fps, so 10-15 is acceptable.

SL draws everything like a little kid not sure what it want to show, hey its growing : p


SL
has millions of textures , care to mention one game that has so many ? , always wonders how much it has now : p

Textures on games are usually heavy optimized, SL' just bandwitdh hungry, max since now is 2048x2048 (death)

1 Avatar in SL can have more polygons then entire map of halflife/doom3/bf2 (take your pic)

< x2-4800, 4gig ram, 890gig hd's, 6800gt pci-e
and SL runs like crap for me to trust me :~p

my older pc runs SL nearly identical except near toruses ~.~ and barly with local light.
64-3500+ , 2gig ram , 200gig, 6800gt agp

yer so i guess in SL it renders EVERYThing in the sim you are in when really it only needs to render everything you can see.

i guess this would only cnange with a totally new client and if the current client is earning $ why change it.

depends on what your seeing, if im up in my skybox with nothing in view fps will skyrocket. now if im standing next to bling queen with 100 attachments flickering like a strobelight, hair made out of 95 prims thousands of total polys with a 1 megapixel image on each prim ect you see where it adds up quickly

Don't forget Draw distance. From my expieriences, having your draw distance set to a large number(like 500), can have a big effect on your FPS.

Yeah, a big part of what makes SL so graphically intensive is the userbase. The majority of people that build in SL are not game designers. They don't know how to design things with a low poly count in mind, and they by and large don't care.

Not to mention. prim based building is not ideal for creating low-poly models. All around there are objects and builds with thousands (very conservative estimate) of unneccessary polygons.

LL counts builds by prims, yet a single prim can be anywhere between 5, and several hundred polygons

Plus, look around, in SL most people like to model every tiny little detail in their objects. In games, designers will use texture maps to create detail.

Add on top of that, scripts listening to the chat channel, slowing the servers down, and avatars with more little metal spikes and rivets than an entire Hot Topic inventory, particle effects everywhere, so much of the graphics being software based, and it all adds up to SL, while not being nearly as pretty as many high-end games, being much more of drain on your computer.

Maybe there are ways to curb this, though. Maybe if LL switched to mesh-based box modelling, and held low-poly contests, or generally made it to each user's advantage to be as low-poly as they could manage, a limit on texture file sizes (or a much lower limit if there already is one that I've just never encountered even when accidentally uploading textures at twice the resolution they needed to be), LL supplying 'developement kits' with lots of emphasis on low-poly building and optimized textures, and some tools to help, ecetera.

Who knows? If people toss enough suggestions along these lines out there, maybe a couple of them will actually be feasible enough to gain support.

About some of the above topics, if you haven't seen it yet (it's been doing the rounds), I'd heartily recommend watching Philip and Cory's recent presentation, now available @ Google Video.

More is explained--and it's fun too, the visuals!

Well, before lower the width-height limit of the texture, please improve the method of optimising and encoding of image. Current JPEG compression forced me to use 1000+ pixels texture to get a sharp and clear texture surface. Well, I don't know any other better compression method that can have both Quality and small Size. It's kinda trade off -- as well as each new function implemented, it effect the speed and fps.

I hope LL can make it so that invisible surfaces (surface with 100 transparency) won't be rendered though, if it still does. Count prims by 'visible' surface (surfaces which is not 100 transparent) is okay to me, but no by poly place o.o

First, as somebody pointed out, you presumably mean PCI Express (PCIe), which is the new fast standard, not PCI, which is the old slow (slower than AGP) one.

The reason that there is a checkbox for AGP support is that some machines had defective AGP interfaces and/or motherboard drivers; using AGP on those systems leads to unstable operation. You get the option of turning off the use of AGP to avoid problems.

PCI Express is a better-designed standard, and the implementation is stable. Second Life simply uses it automatically if you have it. There is no need for a checkbox to turn PCI Express support off, because it doesn't cause problems.