Is Local Lighting still broken?

Asking becuase it certianly doesn't work as it used to. To elaborate a bit:

SL Settings on both systems:
Network:
Max Bandwidth: 300
Disk Cache: 500

Graphics:
Performance:

1. Anisotropic Filtering: on
   
2. Local Lighting: on
   
3. Shadows: off
   
4. Disable Far Clip: off
   
5. Shiny Objects: on
   

Avatar Rendering : Bump Mapped & Cloth
Terrain Detail: Some

Advanced Graphics:
Cache: Large
Memory: 256MB
Object Detail: MID
Tree Detail: MID
Avatar Detail: FULL
Avatar Vertex: On
Draw Distance: 128
Fog Distance: 2.0
Drop Draw Distance: 10
Bump Draw Distance: 1
Max Particles: 1024
Outfit Composite: 5

---------------Test Systems--------------------------------------

Test system 1:
Client: Mac 1.7.4
OS:10.4
CPU: Dual 2.5Ghz G5
Memory: 2GB
Video: ATI RADEON 9800XT 256MB
Connection: Cable 4MB ds / 768k us (rough avg 2MB ds)

Test system 2:
Client: Windows 1.7.4
OS: Windows XP Pro SP2
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 FX FX-57 2.8Ghz
Memory: 2GB
Video: ATI RADEON X800 XT 256MB
Connection: DSL 1.5MB ds / 256k us

---------------Tests & Results--------------------------------------

The results were nearly identical on both systems, even with a graphics card rated at nearly 4 times as powerful on the Windows machine.

Using the above settings the average client FPS from a dead sim to a busy sim was roughly 3.3fps, 0.2 being the low, and 6.4 being the high. At 6.4fps, SL is barely usable, at 0.2, I had to relog to a quiet sim to recover.

Lowering draw distance to 64m would increase fps to roughly 8 to 9 in a dead sim, but had no effect in the busy sim.

Keeping the lowered draw distance and disabling local lighting caused the fps to jump as high as 25fps to 40fps! over 4 times the frame rate!

Increasing draw distance back up to 128 only brought the client fps down by a few points, nothing noticable.

---------------Notes--------------------------------------

With all that out of the way, I would say that local lighting is still a broken feature. Or are these systems below minimum spec...

Fox

LL is broken, its way way way slower then it was before, incredibly slow,im even looking at ground to get fps up some by avoiding avatars, didnt do much.

look at screenshot, one is with LL on , one isnt, same place, same sim,

incredible

I have a preamble about Local Lighting. It is great beauty, that all-too-disappointingly, comes at a great price. And as it looks, a greater price in 1.7 than 1.6.

I especially felt the crawl today when I went inworld to do some tests. During these tests, I started out in a friend's abandoned skybox. It crawled a little, but it didn't feel terribly concernful. Then, I derezzed my sample light prims, and headed to Sandbox Island.

OYYY with 30 Resis in it, it crawled! Even before I had rezzed my light prims, SL froze and stuttered and went down to, like, 1 frame per 10 seconds! GOODNESS NOOO!!! I do not recall this being the case before under similar load. Infact, I remember crowded parties at Gravity Space Station—Local Lighting highly recommended—where yes, my framerate was low, but I could still move around reasonably. And yes, in the sandboxes too, I never experienced anything so bad.

Next, I went to the abandoned, underused Plum sandbox. And rezzed several test prims. Something about the glow itself does appear nicer and less forceful in 1.7 (I wish I could compare more directly), but... as you can clearly see... THE SQUARE JAG in the middle of the frontmost green cube, it's like the light's intersecting incorrectly and it can't quite figure how to resolve it?

Very unnatural.

Here's another one from overhead, where you can see an almost boxy outline where there should be smooth shading. Local Lighting works inconsistently for me aesthetically in 1.7—so not only performance is more unstable—and relogs didn't make a difference.

If Local Lighting could be "mastered" to a much greater degree, more of us would have it on and it'd make an incredibly beautiful difference in the world. Until then, we do things like bake textures, which is creative, but it isn't the same.