System 'requirements' need to be changed

I happen to run second life on a slot 1 450mhz pentium3, with 512m of ram, and a 32mb geforce2 stuck @ 2x agp cause thats all the faster the motherboard supports *grins evilly*

Just because it can run, doesn't mean that it can run well. If I really wanted to, I could probably finagle Windows XP to run on a 486. Doesn't mean that it would run well. (and before anyone says about how the installer blocks trying on machines that do not meet the minimum specs, there are ways around that).

I have a 1.13ghz P3 here with 512mb of RAM, etc that when I launch the client, the entire machine slows to such a crawl, that it takes me 5 minutes to type in my name and password. My G4 mac mini well exceeds the OSX client requirements, yet averages like 5-15FPS. I normally play on a AMD64 2800+ with a gig of RAM, and I vary between 8 and 20FPS, with the CPU at 100% the entire time the client is running (which, is kinda funny, because I can easily watch movies, play music, and other things in the background with zero performance issues to SL or to what ever I am doing). Doesn't matter what OS I use (have ran SL on Windows, OSX, and Linux), performance sucks no matter what the hardware. There really isn't too much of a difference between my G4 mini and my AMD64, despite having four times the dedicated video memory, twice the RAM, quicker hard drive (one of the mini's bottlenecks), and a much faster CPU.

In an earlier post, a more clued-up Games/Linux Guru mentioned that the 100% CPU indicator is not because SL USES 100%, but because it never gives up the cpu...

Apparently there is power left for other things, in most cases without slowing down SL or the other application.

i dont think they need to be lowered but yes sl will run just fine on old hardware, ive got the following for fun

amd athlon 1.3ghz thunderbird, 1gb ddr 333 ram geforce2 gts pro agp 4x (128mb ram) and it usually hangs around 30fps np, 20 in crowded settings 1280x1024

also

intel pentium III 550mhz 384mb pc 100 ram geforce2 gts agp4x (64mb ram) and it hangs around 15fps or about 7 in crowded settings @ 1024x768

HOW? simple the hardware choices such as the really fast clock speeds on the video cards, both mainboards are stupid fly with all the bios settings available, lots of ninja cooling (heat kills speed) and tons of tweaks in windows (probally be abit faster with linux) along with basicly every option in SL turned down or off

again hardware choices, my normal machine atm is a

amd athlon xp 2200+ (1.8ghz oc to 1.9ghz)
gigabyte vt600 (with the via kt600 chipset)
2gb ddr 400 ram
geforce 6600GT (128mb) agp 8x

and at 1280x1024 with every option turned on and all sliders sitting at about 75% i get 45-60 fps

Well, I have a P3 1 GHZ, chipset intel solano 815E, 512M Ram, GeForce FX 5200 with 128, Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1, main system running over ide disk, cache system over old scsi disk in a interface adaptec AHA-2940U.

Well, I can run it fine, but I have troubles with Acceleration. I don't know if is SL or hardware problem because in Windows and Linux SL crash with the same symptom the debug system don't release OPENGL system and I must restart X in linux or restart the computer in windows. I couldn't detect what causes the problem, but usually crash when there are lot people around or when I start to edit many things. I suspect that is a memory problem than program. Happens something similar in linux when I work with beryl active for longer time (I always run SL with beryl disable)...

Opinions? Suggest?

This should go across all platforms........redo they basic requirements

The Linux minimum system requirements reflect the slowest system I've personally run on where I found the positivity of the SL experience to at least marginally outweigh the negativity of the performance. This is of course subjective and fuzzy.