32 Video Memory no longer supported?

Oh I hear you, I don't understand people who want to rush out and buy a computer tailor made for Secondlife. First of all, there are plenty of games out there you might want to play besides Secondlife. I haven't had any trouble with Wow, or any other games I've played, just SL, because it's different, it's user made, so it's always going to be a little iffy, I think. It's not a wise investment at all, for a game that's always going to screw up sometimes no matter what you do and no matter what kind of hardware you have. I've heard people with the greatest gaming computer systems say they have lag so bad they can't move. Lol. So, yeah no one is uneffected by poorly executed updates, even the most advantaged computerwise. Plus, one of the graphic cards that most games support really well is ATI, but SL kind of makes that crap, so it's hard to judge what you should and shouldn't buy for a serious gamer. I'd trade SL for the performance I get with it any day. ATI makes most games look great, and I wouldn't want another graphics card (even if I could replace mine).

Unfortunately nobody makes a PC that will run a decent system.

I have a Mac mini, and I have a PC. All the PC does is run Second Life... despite its far superior specs, the operating systems available for it are either far too unstable, unreliable, and insecure for me to depend on for anything I care about... or won't run commercial software like Second Life. It's not a graphics powerhouse, but my Windows box locks up with graphics hash just because I'm trying to run SL and SL preview concurrently (which it does... despite the fact that I have twice the RAM and twice the CPU and 8 times the video RAM) and I could do that (albeit slowly) on my mini.

Maybe it's walking circles about it, but when the Windows box can't move... that's all it needs to do.
Yep, buy a cheap Windows box as a game machine, and use the Mac for stuff that actually matters. A few hundred bucks for a toy computer and a KVM switch and when SL crashes you can go back to your decent computer while it's rebooting.

The most I've ever seen is around 20, and I'm usually under 10. Some areas the frame rate's no better on my P4-2.4 GHz, nVidia 5600, and 1GB DDR than it was on my G4-1.4, Radeon 9200, and 512k Mac mini.

I've been told that SL doesn't do any culling of the object tree other than limiting it to the field of view and the fog distance, and reducing detail on the mesh they generate for more distant objects, which is why you can be looking at a blank wall and getting 1.5 FPS because there's a disco with 30 AVs all wearing particle emitters on the other side.

I ran 1.7 Preview and still occasionally run 1.7 on a mac mini with 32M video RAM.

It works, I can bop around and talk to people and see their avs as detailed as I like... if I don't mind letting the frame rate drop below 1 FPS... and i can drop the detail and get frame rates as high as 6 or 8 FPS in an uncluttered area, which is high enough for flying most planes. 32M is usable. It's limited and limiting, but it's definitely usable.

I think LL would be better leaving the minimum requirements alone, and specifying a "recommended" system.

Hey!

I'm in a nitpicking mood. As with all my posts; please don't take offence to this - I'm just amusing myself.

Last time I checked Radeons don't do raytracing, it's done by the processor.

My old housemate's Mac used to crash all the time, I can't remember the last time my PC crashed (and, yes, I'm running XP). It's got a lot to do with how well you look after them (admittedly Macs seem a bit hardier, but I've found that when they go they really go). If your PC's as bad as you say then either there's a hardware fault, it's set up wrong or you seriously need to rebuild Windows.

This *does* sound sooooo snotty..... There are ppl out there who do not enjoy your obvious luxurious lifestyle, and who do not have the means to buy/upgrade/whatever their pc as often as you are supposedly able to do. Get a grip on yourself, and stop comparing the whole world to your own experience and situation. Remarks like this are so unhelpful and just plainly arrogant.

How long ago was this and what OS was he running?

If it was Mac OS 9 he was running a completely different OS. There's more differences between OS X and OS 9 than there are between Windows XP and Windows 95. If he was running the first two generations of OS X then he was pretty much running beta software... the API and OS didn't settle down until around 10.2.6.

As for Windows... for the past 7 years I've been supporting Windows boxes for a living. I know how to make them run as stable as possible... the problem is that I don't consider many of the things you need to do to be acceptable. There are things that I do on UNIX-based systems, routinely, without concerning myself whether they might crash my computer, that are really "edgy" for a Windows box. Maybe I'm an abusive computer owner... I don't care. UNIX (including Linux and Mac OS X) doesn't need to be routinely reinstalled. It doesn't need me to reinstall all my apps when I do get a new machine or a clean install. It doesn't freak out if I decide to move part of the file system to another disk drive... even if that part of the system contains Apple-provided files. It lets me run multiple instances of applications, even if the application doesn't directly support that. It lets me lock applications into part of the file system. I can go on and on, but the things that I need to do to make a Windows system run stably are simply ludicrous.

My daughter had a PC, and every six months I had to go in and reinstall it because ofthe accumulated crud on it. I got her a Mac, and it didn't require any more attention after that. It just worked. It kept on working even after she ran out of disk space and went in and started deleting things from "/Applications" (the equivalent of "\Program Files\" that looked too big. She'd even removed some stuff from "/Library" (the equivalent of some of teh directories under "\Windows\System32". And hadn't had any problems... I only noticed because I logged in to her Mac one day and couldn't run some of the stuff she never used.

If an OS can't handle that kind of abuse, I don't want to have to depend on it. Windows is fine for games, but it's NOT at the same level as UNIX.

My concept of time is terrible, sometime during 2004 I think. I just remember it because he'd get extra pissed towards coursework deadlines. It was a version of OSX though, I wouldn't have been so supprised with OS9 - I've seen that go bad more than enough times. In fact, now I think about it, I've only seen 2 OSX Macs go wrong (both unusably so, so I guess it was something major).

For the record I think Macs are really nice (well, except the standard mice and the pointer behavior - I guess the latter's just what I'm used to though). I'd own one myself if I could afford 2 computers, unfortunatly I can't so I've got a PC because it's more useful (and cheaper). I guess it was just the way your post sounded so over the top that made me feel like replying.

Just out of curiosity, what kinda stuff are you talking about doing to make PCs run as stable as possible? I've never done anything other than just set it up normally...

See, that's just it. The only reason I have a Windows box at home is because I could put it together more cheaply out of spare parts than I could get a Mac that would run SL... it's more or less useless to me except as a Second Life console.

Set it up behind an external firewall (don't trust the client firewall).

Install a mozilla based browser or Opera and change the Internet Explorer settings so that accessing non-local files is more or less impossible. This is fairly tricky, because you still need to be able to run Windows Update.

Delete the Windows media Player and Outlook shells.

Only run a few (less than 10) applications at a time.

Do not install or run any application enhancers.

Do not install or run any user-interface enhancers.

Don't run any servers (eg, file/print/web/...).

Don't use instant messaging applications.

In your mozilla-based browser, turn off any options that allow it to launch plugins third-party applications from URLs (the list of applications the URL bindings allow is far too lax). That means I don't get to follow "secondlife:" URLs, but it also means I don't get to see the results of someone exploiting the "help" hole or whatever it is this week.

On my Mac, I just run stuff. I typically have 20 or 30 applications open at a time, maybe half with active documents, using a multi-window desktop to help organise them. I've had up to 4 concurrent webservers running at different static IP addresses, plus a local Wiki and an SQL database server. I have maybe 40 application enhancers/contextual menu plugins/services, and 11 menu-bar plugins. I've never come close to this under Windows without SOMETHING conflicting and dragging it down.

Just noticed that bit of your post. My FPS usually varies from around 6 in a really busy area to around 40 on a fairly empty one. It hits 100 if I'm staring at the sea and has occasionally dropped to 1 around extra laggy builds.Wow! If I was that conscientious I'd never get anything done! (I'd also miss some things I use a lot, but that wasn't what we were talking about )

You'd also miss out on the opportunity for excellent viruses and spyware.

[I wish there was a "dry humor" smiley]

The latest Internet Explorer exploit allows someone to run any code on your computer without your having to do anything but visit a webpage, there's example code widely posted, and no patch.

lol! IE does suck bad.

Thats why I dont use it. I dont recommend it to my customers either. I tell them to use Firefox. So far I have not encountered any problems with it (yet, give it time) other than having issues with PDF files.

Actually, I should tell people to use IE! The more that use it, the more $$ I make removing spyware & viruses from their PCs

Hell, even if it wasn't swiss cheesey security wise I wouldn't - it's just not as nice and lacks (what I consider) basic features.

Argent, just thinking, have you got a link to some news about that exploit? I've been trying to convince my dad to use Fx for ages without success. Then I get blamed when I'm visiting and his network dies...

Thanks.

LOL!!! Another IE Attack? Geesh!! Well, this is what M$ gets when you integrate a browser into the OS. And Java/Java Script = Evil and Not Evil. Like anything else- used for good or bad. Odds are most people have it turned on in IE.