Concerned about Windlight

QFT

if i turn off athmospheric shaders and water reflections it runs faster than the old client and looks similar.

I did some tweaking in windlight and now it's actually faster than the regular client,lol.

Exactly. I could go buy a new computer if I wanted to, I can afford it just fine. However, I already have two perfectly fine ones that run great. Why would I do that? I'd rather spend that money elsewhere.

MID range... ICK!!!

Against the recommendations of the app, I pushed mine up to ultra. I don't have the best graphics card or processor, but it all seems okay for me. Blows out my wireless router before my computer has any problems. And yes, using a wireless router also goes agains LL's recs. LOL

I have a new puter that handles WindLight great now and I still think it's unnecessary fluff, it doesn't even deserve to be called eyecandy since that implies it's somehow "pretty" to look at. Anyone who thinks WL clouds (or lighting for that matter) are "realistic" needs to get out more and look at a real sky.

Even before WindLight was released Pastrami was admitting that WL was slower than the regular viewer even with all the new shaders turned off and that only a small fraction of SL's userbase would be able to benefit from WL, the only solution for the rest would be to turn details down and lower draw distance.

LL's only solution so far has been to cripple the WL viewer, delivering a worse experience than with the regular viewer, only so they can end up with something they can claim is "just as fast".

The land mesh always rendered fine, even if it was beyond draw distance and had no visible prims, now it's just jagged and even if you're in the middle of the mainland, it'll still look like you're surrounded by void water.

Draw distance on the regular viewer and the WL viewer just don't add up. I can see more prims with the regular viewer set to 96m than I can see with WL set to 128m and the main viewer will chop thing off less agressively at the outer edges. With the current RC I couldn't even find a transparent pose ball that was 5m away from me, I had to be right on top of it before it would render. I know rendering less prims means higher FPS, but that's a rather sorry and annoying way to "increase" performance.

The experience with "older" cards has also been deliberately crippled so that turning on "Basic Shaders" in preferences still won't give you ripple water, water reflections or glow even if your card can handle it perfectly.

All those months of efforts could have gone into an actually useful project. "SL, now with fluffy recolourable clouds" isn't really going to attract anyone who's currently not interested in giving SL a lookover.

Oh and Havok4 WILL help with AV lag issues. It will prioritze much better and it has solutions for heavy load on the server (like lowering details on AVs in the distance, minimizing bling, etc.) It should help quite a bit.

That's really how it's supposed to work. There are some combinations of graphics cards, driver versions, and shader settings that can make WindLight look perfectly dreadful and/or behave badly. And it may well be that, despite best efforts and a really long testing interval, there could still be some previously supported graphics cards for which there just aren't acceptable settings: those the WindLight team really needs to be made aware of, and soon.

And it is surely the case, as Dana explained, that some client machine graphics environments that had an optimized code path in the old client won't have that in WindLight, and so may in fact perform worse at comparable quality settings. (I have a sense that this is particularly a problem with certain Mac combinations--Apple seems to have needed a lot of OpenGL hand-holding by the WindMark folks, so one sees a lot of Mac bugs resolved in the jira history for WindLight, but there's bound to be performance stuff left unoptimized, and possibly still pending Apple fixes.)

As for the aesthetics... beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I'm pretty sure that if I started SL with WindLight, I'd scream bloody murder if LL proposed to revert to the old client in order to support more hardware and run a little faster on older graphics cards. And it would sure make me a lot less interested in waterfront property!

That's good news! Woe was you yesterday, pre-tweak.

I find this interesting. It seems the first technical summary of windlight that is not complimentary.

It's all about Tweaks.

Sure, My system could handle Windlight with every setting maxxed out, but then the client suffers from some serious lag in busy areas.

So I spent time tweaking things to achieve the perfect balance between performance and looks.

It's quite common for many gamers to turn down certain settings to get better performance or have an edge on other players.

Once they implement the Havok4 Physics engine, things should go even smoother. *fingers crossed*

This is a great thread ... I'm bookmarking it for when I finally get around to doing some Windlight tweaking. However, only a tiny percentage of SL's general populace have the benefit of access to this thread.

Does anyone know if LL is planning to make different "profiles" of Windlight settings available for Preferences? You know ... "Integrated graphics laptop" ... "Nvidia 68K and up" ... "Powerbook" ... well, probably those aren't the right categories, but you get the idea. Could something like this be helpful?
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Fair enough, but couldn't you say LL is then choosing to piss off a percentage of it's long time userbase? We can't get accurate numbers here, but how many users do have the middle of the road equipment that are having similar issues. As a few here have shown, just Turning Off Windlight isn't an acceptable answer.

I'm not naive enough to think SL has to stagnate, and I don't expect to be able to usee any old viewer, but shouldn't there be some backwards comaptability? Is it too difficult to maintain even the last Non Windlight Viewer?Or does that become impossible due programming or whatever? Do other games update several times a year and totally obsolete, previous versions?

I can almost see planned obsolescence if SL were a true Game, but if it wants to be the global communication platform it is dreamt to be, shouldn't there be a balance between progress and keeping as many users as possible moving with it? You don't have to fiddle to use the current internet, just open your browser. SL is more involved than that , granted, but shouldn't the hoop jumping and tweaking be as minimal as possible as to not alienate the regular guy, who isn't a computer hobbyist or beyond? Or has LL decided their business is not important?

I don't spend most of my time looking at the sky admiring the fluffy clouds which is probably why I'm not terribly impressed .

If WL is a "major update" I honestly fail to see the "major" in it in anything I do in SL and certainly nothing that was worth a reduction from 10-15fps to 0.5-1.5fps or spending 120€ on a new card vs the cheapest 30€ one.

A big bowl of choc-chip cookies for whoever can tell the difference between "WL-enhanced" and "plain" and explain why the subtle difference qualifies as a much-heralded and necessary "major update":






(I won't argue that people who boat around SL will much prefer WindLight skies over the regular skies, but that makes WL a very narrow targeted "update" and not worthy of all the hype it's been getting, or all the other ways LL crippled the viewer)

This is a good point.

Pushing the "look and game-play" of Second Life to keep up with technology is fine if your goal is to be a amazing Virtual World.

But they have already stated that is not the main goal. The main goal is to be a template for an emerging 3D internet.

Businesses and the average Internet audience have computers that lag behind. Thats just a fact of life.

It sounds like they will *ALWAYS* need 2 clients.

One to keep those with better systems happy

and one for everyone else.


And no they shouldn't expect the userbase to come up with the lower-end client. for a couple of simple reasons

First - they are actively trying to cater to Business, the Internet community at large, and even the General Public! (CSI anyone?)

Second - the users who have the knowledge to come up with low-end clients are more likely to be in the "High End User" group

What about Onrez? Is it using WL also?

They've always known they were targetting a minor portion of their users though:

(Nov 13th 2007 - 1-2 days before they released WL again after pulling it the first time)
Another quote:
(He's being a bit disingenuous here in my opinion: the same "performance" - FPS - at lower settings than you're used to means that the viewer performs *worse* than it used to. Same FPS at lower settings, or lower FPS at the same settings is a worse SL experience)

I have a 4 year-old laptop with an unsupported graphics card (low-end NVidia Quadro) so I definitely don't think I am "cutting edge" when it comes to hardware.

I played with the Windlight First Look, mostly to find out if I was going to have to budget for a new computer... initially it was horrible - like others said, turning all the features off looked worse than the old one, and cranking them all up made the thing run at about 1-2 FPS.

Then, on the advice of a tecchie friend I went into the settings for my graphics card - they had an "idiot slider" (which is highly appropriate for me) which I could set to "Performance", "Balanced" or "Quality". I had it set to "Quality", because we all want the best quality, right?

I slid it back to Performance and then went back in-world. WOW, what a difference. I could crank up the Windlight settings and still get 15-20 fps with the current Release Candidate - that was as good or better than I used to get pre-Windlight. OK, so I couldn't set it up to "Ultra" but I can set it to "Mid", then customize the stuff I care about, like draw distance. And while I might be able to tell the difference between "Performance" and "Quality" if I compare them, the Performance settings with Windlight turned on looks MUCH better than the "Quality" setting with it turned off.

I also find that the new Windlight client crashes less than the old one. My problems now are with my internet connection, rather than with the software.

Upshot: I don't need a new laptop, and I am one happy Kalderi

So see if your graphics card has some sort of settings like this that you can tweak with.