First Look a few days later

Now that we've been living with it for a few days, how is First Look treating everyone? I downloaded it last night and had no issues. In fact, I crashed less than I usually do and the mainland seemed less laggy. Was SL just having a good night?

I am waiting until it is mandatory...

I'm in Raymond's camp, have been using it for several days without any serious issue, even on an older RADEON 300/550. The performance in my mainland store is substantially improved over the 1.13 client. The network utilization issue I saw in the pre release version is non-existent.. in fact it uses less bandwidth when idle than the old client did.

I'm happy all around.

On my poor old nVidia MX440 machine the new version gets maybe half the FPS of the old version, and that's with less eye candy than I used to use on that machine.

On my better machine with an ATI X800 it gets better FPS than it used to. Stability is roughly the same. The latest version doesn't get nearly as good FPS as the first versions of First Look did on this machine, but better than non-First Look based version.

I have no complaint about the performance on the sad old MX440. That caliber of video processor is just not meant for 3D graphics. It does ok for browsing and other non-demanding applications. The better card I had for that machine burnt out and there's no real reason to spend money on upgrading it. The money would be better spent upgrading the other machine with more memory and a better video card.

They damned well better, cause SL is borked.

Well if they are they should have warned us right? april 4th was the downtime and it appears it broke before that time.
lets hope they fix it soon

The only negatives I've seen so far relevant to the optional viewer:

Some land textures never seem to rez fully. Might be my own fault for using explicit land textures keys that I googled up before we had our inventory contained a "library" area with terrain textures.

(would this thread be more appropriate for "Current Version Feedback" ? )

Did you try turning off Vertex Buffer Objects? Although they are big winners on modern machines, they can slow down the client on some older hardware. For example, enabling them on my laptop (Radeon XPress 200M integrated graphics) slows the already poor frame rate by 10-20%.

So, you ask, what ARE vertex buffer objects, or VBOs? In OpenGL, the most basic way of drawing anything is to do a bunch of function calls, one per vertex. If you draw the same thing often, the next step up is to use a display list, which is an array of partially-predigested graphics calls that are stored in main memory. VBOs are the next step beyond that -- essentially, the display list is moved to video card memory so it can be read more quickly.

But some older cards don't really have the feature, so the driver emulates VBOs in software, for no net gain or a loss. (The driver claims to support VBOs so that software that REQUIRES them won't break.) And integrated graphics systems don't HAVE fast video card memory, so again no gain or a loss.

scattered reports of "particles not rendering at all" (customer complaints). So far nothing related to HUDs.. but Alpha Texture sorting seems (by all accounts) to be very broken in 1.14 with fences 10m away showing through alpha'd textures in front of them.

The "pay child" bug is reportedly fixed, and I have noted a slight increase in sales following that.

I'm still using 1.13 until they pry my cold dead fingers off the mouse.

LOL! Must confess, same here. I found testing the First Look viewer an interesting experience and tried to contribute to that effort with bug reports. But if something didn't work, I could just log out and return to the standard viewer and get things done. I don't want to end up in a situation where I have to LIVE with a new bug rather than maintain a casual acquaintanceship.

Still crashing within a few seconds - even with new version. Fully updated drivers, everything, it kills the video drivers on the computer almost completely, knocking it back to 32bit color and less than 800 x 600 resolution. Only a total restart works.