Make Sl ATI Friendly?

hi i was wondering how many of you out there are fed up of poor fps on sl using ati cards just because lindenlab employee's use nvidia cards.( what i'm asking if lindenlabs could make an ati version of the client or even have three versions one for nividia cards one for ati cards and the final one for miscellaneous cards.

P.S please please please please linden labs please try an ati card out and see how bad it is for us. thank you all for your time.

Hi this is the link to the proposal http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=1025

I have a Radeon 9800 on my desktop at home and it runs SL beautifully, probably also owing to the Athlon 64 and fast 1 Gig RAM. I won't insult you by asking if you have the latest drivers, but could there be something else in your setup that may be causing the slowdown? Some settings like Shiny/Bump can have a disproportionately bad effect on your framerate. What resolution are you running in?

Also be sure to turn off local lighting and shadows. I've gotten reports from people with bleeding edge cards that having both active will utterly ruin your frame rate. I wouldn't recommend having either on unless your system specs dwarf the recommended specs. I've got a 9700 Pro and I get 14-20 fps with both turned off and only 512 megs of system RAM.

I wonder if Deep Blue could run SL with full graphics at 30 fps. >3

well i here's my sys details.....
gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 athlon 64 motherboard
athlon 64 3000+ winchestor core 90nm
2x 512 ddr400 ram
pci-e club 3d ati x800 gt 512mb

P.s i do have the latest driver's plus i've used 3 driffrent window's o/s xp proffesional, 64bit xp proffesional and windows vista all around the same.

and oh yea i run sl in a window cause that helps my frame rate.

As far as I understand, the problem with ATI cards (when there is one) is they don't fully support OpenGL (an open standard), but they do really well on anything that uses DirectX (a microsoft standard). So rewriting SL for ATI cards would probably involve re-writing it to use direct X which is not going to happen (hopefully)

well if that's the case i don't think i will be forking out £150 around $300 for a graphics card that does support open gl but i'm not convinced. every single game i've play'ed run's wonderful it's just sl that rattle's my brain and if linden labs knew this they would have probarly made it direct x and open gl it would have been just a matter of selecting which one you wanna use in the pref screen and i'm pretty sure they want it to be as open to the market as possible almost everyone i've spoken to uses an ati card with the same problem and yes i did speak to a linden that told me they all use nivida cards, to me that's only half the market like my dad alway's said to me while i was at school "you've got to expand your horizon" anyway i did'nt want to sound mean i just wish they would fix the prob.

Well here's the thing, OpenGL has better performance capabilities than DirectX. DirectX is just an attempt at a unified graphics library (and for the most part, it's succeeded). The stance in either direction makes a lot of sense but supporting both is costly and not financially sound:

OpenGL is faster, cross platform compatable (the biggest thing), and free to implement (hence, open).

DirectX is not that expensive for developers to use, easy to program with, and covers more than just graphics (it also does sound, network interfaces, and game controller support).


DirectX however is ONLY for windows and Microsoft has made no attempts to port it to other platforms. I doubt very much it would catch on anyways given how firmly OpenGL is entrenched in every other OS in creation (except Amiga). ATI's look upon DirectX as the answer to an API interface is financially sound, after all the majority of the computer market that they sell to runs windows. They needed a better driver set and they made a choice. nVidia on the other hand bought out 3dfx, the guys responsible for making OpenGL in the first place, because they saw the potential for greatness. 3dfx was floundering at the time it was bought anyways, if they hadn't bought it out someone else would have (ATI perhaps, and wouldn't that have been a funny twist of fate).

If you knew anything about quality you would go with NVidia. No problems on my GeForce 6600LE, averaging at 20 fps on heavy load with all options turned on.

Actually as far as quality goes ATI's cards for the past two generations have beaten nVidia's in terms of cost and performance. In fact, the card I'm using now (the 9700 Pro) marked the beginning of ATI's surge ahead of nVidia. Which isn't to say that nVidia cards are bad in their own right, they do their job just fine. This is an issue regarding driver support though, but dispite it I still get 15-20 fps with bumpmap and clothing active and full details (just no lighting or shadows).

If you want something more concrete than me claiming ATI isn't the crap you proclaim, there are a number of hardware sites (like Tom's Hardware) that will do card to card comparisons in nauseating detail.

Addendum:
More specifically, I find this interesting.

2.8ghz Intel LGA775
2GB PC3200 RAM
256 MB 8x ATI 9600 AGP card.

AGP option grayed out.

Everquest 2, Planetside, Auto-Assault...ALL run with perfectly acceptable (35-60FPS) performance at balanced settings.

Second life, if I turn everything down ALL the way, I am lucky to get 15 FPS.

Horrible...=/

Basically I have SL Installed, but it just sits there, and I wouldn't ever consider paying for it in this condition.



Someone dosen't know anything about a quality response either.

I am told I have a super Mac.. (ask my GF in SL).. lots of memory - my standard fps are 14-15... some faster in new sims.. I once got 40 at a Hiro sim.. (we was not so many at it building at that time) and in Ansheland its from 14 down to 4... depending on what sim and what corner..

I have tryed SL on my fathers older PB... and all was hard... to hard - no fun...

/Tina using Mac - dont have any other...

The way I see it, if in SL you are around 20FPS, you are fine!

I have a ATI X850XT, everything on but local lighting and shadows and always around 20 FPS, so fine.

Up in the sky with a few people 70+ FPS, down on the ground around lots of builds with some people around 15-20FPS..

Because SL cannot do any optimizing of the graphics it will never match other games (DOOM, Everquest, etc..) as those games can compress and other features to speed up the drawing of their objects, in SL I can change it as you are looking at it, so can't compress it, or optimize it as those others can.

So if around 20FPS, you are fine in the SL world.

The issue is the graphical optimization. If there was a way to set an object as a static land ornament, the servers could crunch the numbers and come up with a much more efficient design to send across the wires and instead of seeing a castle with roughly 400 prims (and anywhere from 12 (cubes, the most basic of prim) to 64 polygons per prim, perhaps more) you'd get a few server joined meshes which would speed up your frame rate greatly (being able to combine 8 cube prims that make up a long wall for instance would free up 48 polygons as they combine into one long block).

Actually ATI only shines lately on games designed for it.

Fewer pipelines than the nVidia equivalents and the shoddy Catalyst unified drivers are credited with the blame.

Even ATI admits they dropped the ball bigtime on the last generation of cards.

I have two 7800GTXs in SLI mode and I experience 40-60FPS in most areas, lowest i've seen it drop was 20 FPS and that was the first time I ever dropped into a room full of dance pads at peak hours while textures were loading.

So in other words, if I could download the textures faster I'd have perfectly smooth gameplay.

One 7800GTX will get slightly lower performance, dual core processors help a lot, and the new 7300GS is a cheap card that will still get around 30-40.

Let's think about that for a second though. TWO video cards in SLI mode gets you 40-60 fps. I think you should be doing a comparison on one to one or two to two between yours and ATI's equivilant, personally.

For ATI based laptops, drivers are the biggest issue. Manufacturers don't update their drivers and ATI won't release an official driver for OEM laptops.

So, if you don't have the latest drivers because you have a laptop and can't find them: Try http://www.omegadrivers.net. My wife's laptop simply wouldn't even run SL without these.

Omega drivers are king, even for nVidia. But that's rather disturbing to hear about, the laptop driver support.

PLS.. tell me more.. I am a close to non educated in comps.. Is this something that I shall use instead of the normal drivers?.. Only on a laptop or the huge ones to?... Yes I am on Mac.. only Mac...

...please....

As a Mac user.... hmm... CAN I by two cards and put it in my stationary one....what cards shal I by and how do I do it??..

I have a G5 dual - lots of memory - the huge silver one.. from last year...

im wondering if its actually down to SL using AGP graphics cards regardless I have a PCI graphics card and fps dropps way low with everything on.

I hav eno issues with other games which are way more graphics intensive such as battlefront 2, half-life 2 etc.

sys: amd 64 dual core 4200+ , PCI 6800 256MB , 1GB ram, 300gb hd etc..

Im a FPS gamer and play SL as a bit of an outlet but the way it handles graphics is a bit disapointing ...

Friend of mine has a Mac, with a ati card, i can litterally kill her fps with right hair and my vid card wont even sneeze seeing it, definatly something wrong with ati or mac client, SL isnt very friendly on Ati's but she tried a gforce and got even worse then ati's

Ati better on mac's? o.O

What makes these games, "way more graphics intensive, " than SL?

Higher res textures, layered textures (in some cases), true reflections, higher screen resolutions, greater model complexity, extensive use of local lighting, pixel shading... Shall I go on? >]

All SL has going for it in this case is extensive local lighting, but that's more an issue with lazy people who use "light" as an object material. I suppose if you counted clothes, tattoos, and skins as seperate layers though that'd be layered texturing...

Im just stating the obvious..
but i wont get into that...
what you problem is isyour cpu (im NOT an intel fan, and most serious gamers arent) andyour AGP graphics...
If you are willing to spend some money, go to PCIE graphics, with a new mobo, and an AMD CPU