32 Video Memory no longer supported?

One, I feel stupid for saying 64bit, I meant 64MB... I looked up a paper I wrote down of the minimum requirements, before I was considering even getting secondlife (Anything I have to pay for, I researched in depth.) For some reason, I've written 64MB on it. So I wonder if Lindenlabs changed the website or if I made a mistake copying it down. Hmm.

heres some PC GeForce4 AGP 64mb cards under 30$...

http://www.centrix-intl.com/?DirectBuy=yes&ItemPartNumber=05H175&source=froogle
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006N3FGW/104-3786937-8332751?v=glance&n=172282
http://cgi.ebay.com/GeForce-4-MX440-3D-64-MB-Video-Card_W0QQitemZ8721372199QQcategoryZ40161QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I want to remind you OCTAL, that many families would rather use the 30 bucks to feed their families and that there is ONLY one virtural world requiring a higher card.

AND ALSO please remember that not only will you have to upgrade the card on some computers but the power supply, the Ram and in some cases the Motherboard.

Whatever, just trying to help.
But I get the feeling you would say the same thing even if I found a 5$ video card for you....

I understand.

I don't call an update an improvement if it causes the requirements to change and forces many to buy new computers.

No I have a nvidia 128 MB Video ram card. I have friends who have 32 mb cards and if they made them for 5 bucks I am sure they would go out and get one, provided that they did not have to replace virtually the entire computer just to upgrade. Which would mean 200-500 bucks plus 5

No need to feel stupid, we all make mistakes, but I joined back in March and the website says then what it says now....

I dont get it, the only thing they would possibly have to upgrade is the power supply, which is doubtful since most of the cards I posted have low requirements and would run with a 300W power supply, which is like the bare minimum any PC comes with anyway. Why would you have to change your RAM, hard drive, MoBo (unless its not AGP, in which case you are hosed anyway), or anything for that matter just to run a new graphics card? When I upgraded from a 32meg to a 64meg card three years ago, I didnt have to change anything.

I think SL is great and I want it to reach as many people as possible. But lets face it, only 10% of the world has access to a computer, much less owning one. Even at the low prices I quoted above, it would be ludicrous for someone making a dollar a day to even contemplate buying one. In a first-world country like the UK or America where over 50% of the population has a computer, even the poorest of them with the 1998 slot 1 Mobo and a Pentium II 300mhz with 256 megs of Ram and a 32 mb voodoo board would look like gods to that guy making a dollar a day in the salt mines.

I agree that SL needs to be upfront about its hardware requirements, but as you plead your friends case while you surf on your 128mb card, have a little perspective.

I once had a computer that would not let you increase the ram. I have some friends who are in the same state. To increase the ram would require adding additional Ram slots and then improving the motherboard if it did not have the points to sauder the wires to.

I am not doing this for myself its for my friends who cannot afford a new computer. A few may be able to upgrade to 64MB but many cannot .

I'm one of those people who can't upgrade without taking out my entire motherboard. I thought secondlife ran fine for me and purchased the software. Since the update secondlife is not the product I originally paid money for. Even if I get a better computer I'm never renewing my membership after the horrible performance many on macs have had with or without a lot of video memory.

Also, I've talked to some people with 64 video memory they are having the same problems, as well. Guess they're gonna need to update too.

Personally, I'd love to know what sort of hardware most of the Lindens choose to use to access SL, that they think performance is at all reasonable. From all the posts I have read, you'd need to spend a lot of money to really get 'good' performance out of SL 1.7 or higher.

Anybody out there getting 45 fps or better for themselves? 30 even? Not just for the sim, but on that top meter, for what your agent is getting?

* Listens to the circkets chirp *

I would like to hear from some of you who think SL 1.7 performs 'just great' on your computer. What sort of fps performance are you getting for your agent? Back up your claim with a screen shot of your stats panel! What sort of computer and graphics card do you have, to get that? How many thousands of dollars would a mega-system like that cost, purchased new, today?

What is realistic? What hardware does SL really take to get great performance? I'd like to know.

OK.... everyone knows that SL is a resource hog. You are not going to be able to run SL in the future with a marginal system, especially with a 32MB card and only 512MB of RAM. As SL advances to meet the demands of the howling masses for better performance, LL is delivering what we want - but at a cost. Heck, my top of the line Toshiba laptop with a 64MB nVidia card and 1GB RAM struggles sometimes.

I have found the latest update 1.7.2(4) to be outstanding. I have yet to crash (versus the previous 1.7 clients/viewers - log, crash, log, crash) and performance stats are great. 20, 30, 50, 60 frame rates, 1.00 Time Dilation, 44.8 Physics, 45 Sim FPS, etc.... all looks good.

Here is a clue. Mac G5, Dual 2.0 PowerPC processors. 2GHz motherboard bandwidth, 2.5GB RAM, ATI 9800 Pro (256 VRAM) and a 6Mbi/sect hard wired broadband connection.

It is no secret that both Micro$oft and Apple have made tough strategic decisions in the past to leave those less fortunate systems and users behind in favor of a new OS and/or hardware. Why should Linden Research, Inc., be any different in their efforts to advance the development of SL?

Forgot to attach the screen shot with Stats....

just a thought, a few prefs to set that can help your fps....you probably already know but doesnt hurt to repeat...

draw distance = 64
fog = 2
Max Particle = 1024
Local Lighting = off
Disable Far Clip = off
Max Bandwidth = as high as you can go
Avatar Rendering = normal (no bump)
Resolution = if you have a 64mb card, probably no larger than 1024x768

and turn off anti-aliasing on your card settings if its on!

Well I think there is a deeper problem at work here. I have a 256MB Radeon card.. and today I witnessed something I have never had before. My screen started to get all flickery.. not just the game window but the entire desktop. I minimised the game and everything was fine.. then I went back to playing again and everything was good again. Then a few minutes later I noticed the flickering again and suddenly my card "seemed" to die on me.

I wasn't ready to shout blame at LL at that point, till after I decided to see if I could get basic VGA happening with the card so I could at least do My business stuff over the weekend till I could get a new card. I booted my machine and found that everything was fine and dandy. Loaded up the game again and it was all ok.. until I noticed the flickering again.

Same thing happened.. I minimised it and it went away, returned to the game again and the flickering started again after a few minutes before eventually dying again. Since then I have tested it with other games that use either OpenGL or DirectX to display their graphics and I have not had any problems with it. I have looked for newer drivers, checked dxdialog reports and all that to no avail.

The only time it does this is when I am playing Second Life, and it only just started after the 1.7.2 patch yesterday. It would seem that the video card buffer is slowly but surely being corrupted and that only a full reboot of the machine every 10 to 15mins of playing will help. This is not just an issue about available Video RAM, it is a much deeper problem but a problem that I am not too surprised about seeing.

It seems this game goes from good to worse, then they spend 100's of man hours fixing it only to get it back to 99% of what it was the time before the major update.. then the next major update the cycle repeats. Yes.. there are all these new features, and yes I like a lot of them (not all of them) and they are just doing the best they can do.. don't get me wrong.. I love this game.. but you can't deny the facts.

^ding ^grats Gaz Hornpipe you got the same flickering i have, for some reason after 1.7 i gotten wierdness if i cant log in on SL first few times, sometimes (rare) screen start to flicker and do odd things even when i close SL, but if i get it , i have to restart cause it "sticks".

hey! So do I!





???? Actually I can name a few people who can. But thats life- or Second Life?

Well, leaping in here, I had a emac, with the aforementioned dreaded 32mgs of video ram and SL up and until 1.7 ran...'ok-ish' not stellar by any stretch, and there was a lot in world I had to pass by simply because even prior to the 1.7 release I was averaging about 5-9 fps.

Now, I love my macs, been using them for forever, grand machines if you can afford the top end of the series and even if you cant they do seem to manage far better than most pcs with similar resources. That said however, I've been needing to upgrade my system for a while now (and unless you own a power mac, apple simply doesn't support upgrading videocards) so with some poking at me by a loved one I bought a pc yesterday. A little over a grand worth modest amount of memory on the video card (128mgs) and a decent (or so I'm told) mid-range processor and amount of ram.

SL for me is a world apart now, its scary how different it is, the smoothness of AV movements, texture loads... some of my favoured builds are now just so much more than they were before its just wow (nexus prime for example). I miss my mac, if I had the where with all to get a high end power mac I would, but as far as upgrading one's system I'm here to say it does make a tremendous difference if you can afford to do so.

...oh and my average fps now as compared to before? 34fps, and SL is even more than I ever thought it was.

Tod69, you're not being helpful, kindly leave please and stop trolling. The issue we're trying to discuss is whether or not Sl needs to change their system requirements.

Oh, just read about your problem in the hotline, maybe you should update your computer too.

Well dear, considering others having the same problems with routers, it's not Client Side, it's Server Side. SL is the ONLY thing that causes this problem while other MORE intensive online games have no problems. Besides, I was able to buy a computer with more than 32 MB of Inegrated RAM. Dual SLI 7800s to be exact. 2.2 Ghz 64-bit Dual Core CPU, 2 Gig RAM. Saved over a year but was well worth it. Nothing I cant run. Maya, SoftImage, Avid Video, Mental Ray, Renderman. Yep. They run well. Even Photoshop.

There really is no help for your situation. The program has advanced past it's previous minimum specs which do need updated. I'm running SL right now beside me on my laptop. It has 64 MB Integrated memory and is running slower than on the desktop. So yes if you plan on running SL then you will have to get better video. The most anyone can tell you other than that is to try turning the graphics stuff all the way down. So yea they really DO need to update the Minimum Requirements.

computer gaming is a hobby, and not a cheap one, you all shoulda known this.

Computers are not cheap but considering the usefullness and entertainment value you can get from one, computers are dirt cheap compared to other hobbies/activities. Seen how much a set of SCUBA gear costs? Good pair of snow skis? There are golf clubs that cost more than $34,000. A really nice flatscreen TV can cost $5000 and all you can do with it is watch video...
Photography can get up into the tens of thousands one you get set up properly.

It's all relative I suppose.

Yeah, I'm gonna get a new laptop. I've been looking at some of the sager laptops, and they seem to be good at handling this kind of game play.

Something, I've noticed is that Radeon graphic cards don't seem to work well with Sl, no matter what kind of memory you've got, so I'm gonna avoid that graphics card in the future.

Exactly! I am a diehard ATI fan, I'll be the first to admit (Hey, I have to be, they sponsored my gaming team for awhile.. free cards = big fan). But, in my current upgrade path, one of the things I am doing is switching from my 9800pro 256 to a 7800gtx. ATi has long used non-standard openGL drivers, unfortunately, this has caused some issues with ATi's driver stability with several applications, SL being one of them.. Linden Labs, instead of working on work arounds (like most do) simply disabled AGP accelleration for the ATi chipsets. Perhaps this wasnt the *best* fix for everyone, but it certianly was the *Easiest*. As for my "minimum" requirements to Run SL halfway decently:

Athlon 64 3200+ or greater
1gb RAM or greater
9800pro 128/ GeforceFX 5500 128 (preferably greater)
a wicked-fast internet connection (and no, sattelite dosent count).

For you Mac users.. I'm sorry.. but the Mac Mini is on the same level of performance as the 299 system from Dell. Its just not enough. It may have been enough.. but they keep adding new features, and new features come at the cost of higher CPU/Video/Ram requirements. If you cant afford to upgrade, my apologies, perhaps you would like the Sims instead.

I've been in computer gaming for over 10 years now, 3 years of that as a "professional" (ie, sponsored, sent to lan parties ect). If there is one thing that EVERYONE should realize, its an EXPENSIVE hobby.. you have to constantly upgrade to stay on track to play whatever is latest and greatest.. I think much of the confusion with SL stems from this:

"But, its still Secondlife, its the same game"

Well.. it has the same NAME, that's about it.

The game is evolving, if your hardware dosent evolve with it.. well. Darwin's theory comes in to play.

Survivial of the fittest, baby.

Oh God . . . On the other hand, this thread is full of lots of good advice, such as:

"At the same time, it's becoming more apparent that there's a 'Recommended' set of hardware that provides the best possible experience. I'd eyeball my own recommendations as a 1.6GHz processor, 512MB system memory (preferably more), and a GeForce FX 5200 or Radeon 9700 or greater (with 128MB video memory or more). Content creators or those intending to run other programs at the same time should probably aim a bit higher, especially as far as system memory is concerned."

And other advice people have given in this thread.

I do think they need to upgrade their minimum requirements, and also do the RECOMMENDATIONS part, for those who may be buying a new computer and want it to work with SL especially.

On the other hand, seems a lot of people's computers DO meet a lot of these recommendations, and still have a lot of trouble since 1.7. So for that reason (not to mention lacking money), I'm not going to run out and buy me a new computer that suits 1.7.

Also, they shouldn't have put in 1.7, since it's worse than 1.6, no matter how "looking forward" they are, unless they care more about getting basic players than getting players who don't leave.

And they will leave for ALL those other games that they CAN play with a reasonably new computer.

And this is a good time to put in a plug for my invention, which I invented a few years ago. (And as usual, by "invention," I mean, I thought it up - now somebody else create it, lol.):

Game-specific computers. Like Nintendo or X-Box or something. (I'm not real technical.) In other words, if we want to play, say, SL, the Lindens offer us this hunky-dory computer set-up, which is itself upgradable, which does nothing but play SL (and access the web.) Want to play a particular game? You buy the unit that plays it, too.

People would buy that! Even if more expensive! Lots of people care less about money than they do about having to be computer geeks to play a game. I don't know why companies like LL haven't started doing this already.

No more problems with all this compatability for this and that and minimum requirements and recommended requirements nonsense. The customer no longer has to deal with this headache, and even then, probably get it wrong.

Ditto for all games - WOW, DAOC, you name it. As computers progress, the prices for getting a computer unit designed to play that particular game will become more do-able.

And it's certainly more do-able than buying a whole new computer every time one of your games - SL - decides to do a new version.

coco