01-16-2006 04:57
I am proposing that a scoring system be officialy created for Second life to classify the hardware on a given users machine, and save the data. The information would basically be based on the Second Life client first determining what processor and video card the user has (like when the hardware check is done at startup) .. the hardware check cound be kinda smart, like "SiSoftware Sandra", in identifying certain things.. and it should be able to identify (in the least) all the video cards listed here:
http://www.pricewatch.com/m-37.htm
(PriceWatch.com list of Video Cards available for sale from variou vendors)

The score would be something like 1-10 or 1-30... Whatever. At "1" it would mean that this is a hardware profile that makes Second life's current clients run very slow and choppy and bad quality. At te high number, it would be the best, smoothest, perfect, fastest and smoothest Second Life experiance. (anything beyond that would rate a 10+ or 30+, and would be kept as a footnote)

The point of this scoring system would be for SL developers to keep statistics about the hardware that the majority of users have when they connect to Second Life. Kind of like the list of "which browser types and versions have viewed this web page" data you ay have occasionaly seen on some web sites. Linden could determine what hardware most people are using. As the majority score goes up, SL could more comfortably upgrade the server and client in ways that put a stronger graphics load on the client.. with the intent that eventually, some day SL's graphial capabilities for the average user would be so advanced that we wouldnt have to worry about the kinds of prim limitations, lack of dynamic lighting and shadows, etc. that we have now.

I thought of this because I was wondering how Linden would decide when to allow more prims and introduce dynamic lighting and shadows and lower limitations of numbers of objecs and stuff. This is the only way I can think of that is "fair and friendly" to SL customers.

Maybe they already do this, I dunno. It seems pretty important. :)

(Also, I noticed that SL runs rather smooth on a 2 GHz machine with a NVIDIA GeForce 4 family card.. but increasing the card speed doesnt help as much if the CPU power is more like 1.5 or 1.0 GHz. .. So what if the majority of users have something like a GeForce 5600 famly card, but the clients run smooth on a much less powerful card? It means its time to upgrade the amount of things SL can do... and SL could help promote a (hopefully inexpensive) video card that is best for the current implimentation of the server/client.)