You don't need an nVidia or ATI graphics card

This has probably been said many times in other threads which I haven't read, but several forum searches haven't found me those threads. My message is this: although the current SL system requirements at http://secondlife.com/whatis/sysreqs.php seem to suggest that you must have an nVidia or ATI graphics card, SL does work with other cards.

For several months I had been looking for a fairly cheapish laptop which would let me break away from the confines of my desktop PC. When the fantasy took hold of me it was summer and I imagined sitting in the garden, wirelessly Googling stuff and writing nature poems. It's a bit late for that now, so for the time being I will have to be satisfied with Googling in my living room and (these two are mutually exclusive) writing alternative nature poems while sitting on the toilet.

My major quandary was: (i) very cheap laptop; or (ii) laptop capable of running Second Life. All of the laptops that had dedicated nVidia or ATI graphics cards seemed to be twice the price of the cheapest laptops. In the end I settled on option (i), with the understanding that I would still have to do all my SL stuff on my monolithic desktop PC. I ordered (from eBuyer) an IBM R50e ThinkPad (not the bottom of the barrel, but a pretty solid, basic machine), which arrived yesterday. It doesn't have an nVidia or ATI graphics card, just something that I assume to be onboard graphics, called "Intel Extreme Graphics 2 for Mobile" in my notification bar and "Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller" in Windows System Information.

I installed SL on the laptop just to see what sort of error message I would get when I tried to run the client -- so I was very surprised to see it load successfully. I might even have managed a whoop. The graphics are rendered just the same as on my desktop PC, if a little slower; with some Preferences tweaking everything runs pretty well. If you intend to fly SL aircraft at high speed I can't recommend this machine, but if, like me, you are happy to use your laptop to pootle about in SL, chatting here and there while scripting an inanimate scramble-hosting cow, I think something like this would serve you well.

Amazingly (for me at least), though this is a laptop, this is the first computer I've owned which hasn't required several days of noodling to get everything working properly. Everything just seems to work well, even the wireless stuff. Next project: Ubuntu.

What bothers me, if anything, is that with later versions of SL (1.7, 2.0, etc.) or Havok (2, 3, etc.) the requirements may change to those that are posted now, leaving us Intel card people in the dust bunnies.

Yeah, I have a budget Dell laptop with a no-name graphics card (er, probably some cheapo Intel thing) and it works ...

Barely.

There is some magical configuration that SL agrees with and it's a luck of the draw -- I know that some people have issues with Intel and their specs are very good.

Googling on the toilet sounds like it would require a lot of clean-up.

It's a shotgun lottery if you can get your system config to run with unsupported cards—heck, it's hard enough getting supported cards to run sometimes with so many factors in a computer!—but if you figure out that magic, as Lo alludes to, all the better.

I wouldn't recommend it for those who aren't into experimenting though... hair-tearing is not a good sign of sanity!

SL managed a hack for for the Extreme chips that increases your odds of getting it to work. What they did was turn off some things when your client senses you are using the chip. They aren't supported but the techs found a way to at least give you a fighting chance of getting it to work.

Congrats on winning the lottery as was said earlier.

Aha! Thanks, Kathmandu: makes some sense now. As an Ubuntu Linux neonate, I know that there's a web page that lists all of the hardware profiles that people have managed to get to work with Ubuntu. Is there any similar thing for SL? If not, shouldn't one be started in the wiki?

The minimum requirements are what supports SL.. Anything not on them is open to getting borked in the future, and if something goes wrong and you email support, they may blame whatever component isn't up to scratch until you change it..

Thats the way I see it anyway..

If SL developers are hacking code now to get bog-standard IBM graphics to work with SL, that suggests to me that it is their intention to support those standards officially later on, once they've got the software support stabilised. I don't see why an informal list of working machines/graphics cards shouldn't be provided now, with the proviso that they are not officially supported and might stop working in the future. If it's not appropriate to the SL wiki, I'm happy to add it to my own wiki farm-type-thing.

Hmm, if its possible to do.. Its so touch and go that I'm not sure you could document it lol..

When you say they are hacking this code now, intel extreme 2 compatibility was introduced with 1.6 i believe. While it works its not supported, basically because its such a low end chip, like a few other graphics cards below the minimum spec will work but the will be awfully slow so you cant really email them and say this doesnt work its laggy etc. I had a laptop with a 7000 based ati chipset that works with sl but only gives like 2fps, which isnt pleasant at all, and in the future with html and havoc 2, extra prims who knows what will happen to the intel chipsets performance.

Enough of the litigation culture already! I have no interest in emailing SL support saying that my SL experience is laggy -- it's bound to be; I'm just happy that the laptop setup I have works at the moment, and I want to share that with anyone else with a similar existing/potential setup who might otherwise have thought that they had no chance of running SL. Just an open "It works now, it might not later" sort of thing.

You can pretty well bet LL isn't going to officially support the Extreme chips any time soon. SL will work with any video card that meets the performance levels of the minimum requirements. They aren't being elitist by only supporting the two major players, its a matter of them being the most likely to play the game. When I say hacked, I mean there were some functions in SL that would not work with the Extreme chips so they turned them off for the computers that use those chips and that alowed a larger number of marginal computers play the game.

Bottom line is if that bargan basement video card has specs better than the minimum and it sticks to the OpenGL standard then there is a darn good chance it will work. Unfortunatly, the way they usually save money is to cut out features and skimp on the OpenGL requirements.

We do not support Intel chipsets.

If you want to ensure that you will be able to run Second Life now and in the future, you must meet the System Requirements.

If your computer doesn't meet the Minimum System Requirements and a future version "breaks support" and Second Life doesn't run on your computer, we won't be able to support you.

As such, I can't honestly say you DON'T need an nVidia or ATI card.

You do need an nVidia or ATI card if being able to play Second Life update after update is a priority.

This is the difference between "does it work" and "do we support it." The program might be running, but if it doesn't, or if it doesn't in the future, that is not something we can fix.