What video card / OS combinations DO or DO NOT work with Windlight?

What video card / OS combinations DO or DO NOT work with Windlight?

If you are doing just fine with Windlight (or as fine as can be expected with an early Alpha release of a First Look viewer), please post what is working well for you.

If you can NOT use Windlight with your OS and Video Card combination, please post what is NOT working.

I am looking at having to buy a whole new computer, because Windlight doesn't work at all on my old Mac Mini, and there is no way to upgrade the video capabilities on it, short of a full computer replacement. I don't want to spend $600 to $800 or more to buy a whole new PC desktop computer, only to find that my brand new computer and video card still doesn't work with the new SL.

So far, I guess that to keep it affordable, I am looking at buying a 2 GHz+ PC with Win XP Home or Win XP Pro, 1 GB RAM, and an Nvidia video card with 256 MB or more of video ram. But which ones will work? Thanks.

It "works" on my dual-2GHz macbook with intel graphics (which isn't supported..?). Looks pretty but the performance takes a big hit.

Mac os, I haven't tried it in windows.

Right now, Vista users with latest drivers and 7xxx series cards are unable to see the clouds. They render in greyscale panes and change from light to black as the cloud density and movement of the sky changes. Hence the "flickering black sky" look.

This bug affects some XP Pro users, and possibly also Linux (according to one report in the forum)

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-911

vote for this bug on jira to make it a high priority to fix! I'm also amused that when you google "windlight clouds" this bug comes up second on the list.

wait a bit, there's still a lot of bugs on many cards, even good NVIDIA cards, short of some of the 6xxx and 8xxx ranges, and 6xxx is on the edge of going out of date and 8xxx is a bit expensive.

It's going to be at least 2 to 4 more weeks before I can earn enough additional money in SL, transfer it out of my L$ balance into PayPal, and transfer it from there into my checking account. Between what is in PayPal now and what is en-route from LL to PayPal, I'll have barely enough to get a minimally acceptable PC now. And I want to get something that isn't obsolete as soon as I fire it up! So I'll earn some more and make another transfer or two before I act.

The system that is highest on my list right now, available through an employee discount program at work, says "256MB nVidia GF 6100 Integrated Graphics" for the video card info... Not sure I want an integrated video card, though, so I am still looking.

Windows Vista 32-bit
ATI Radeon x1650 (Latest drivers, 7.5 catalyst)

Enabling vertex shaders immediately crashes the viewer. Without vertex shaders the viewer does not crash, but the clouds are gone, leading to a rather boring sky and an ugly solid-color horizon. On a possibly related note, I am also unable to use Avatar Vertex Program and Ripple Water, despite that the Radeon x1650 should very easily be able to do those things.

Considering Windlight looks to be nothing more than some moving clouds and fancy colours, I see no-reason why it should be pushing boundaries so hard. Furthermore, it should be an OPTION, I don't even like it that much, the old sky was fine for me. For how many years have people been crying for performance, stability and compatibility only for LL to consistently ignore us and cripple the game for more and more people without really improving it?

If they took ALL their teams now and assigned them to go through the code with fine-toothed combs looking for areas to fix and improve the performance of, we could have an SL viewer which runs at 30fps+ for the majority of users in a few months. Yet years later they still can't act with any bloody sense. Squeezing FPS out of a program may not have much 'wow' factor, but I reckon a damned sight more people would be impressed by a viewer that runs WELL rather than one that looks slightly better at the cost of half of what little frame-rate we do have.

P4/2.8, nvidia 7600GS, Win XP Pro works, but there are lots of problems that are likely not video card related...

1) It looks like I'm in a blue fog. This can be improved by reducing the haze, but there's no way to get a bright, clear day. I can't reproduce the teaser snapshots I've seen.

2) The sunrise disappears into the horizon. The sun is a vague bright spot in the haze. Reducing the haze just makes the sun even less distinct, and if I remove the haze the sun disappears entirely. So, there's no way to get a yellow glow to accompany the sunrise, or to actually see the sun. Blue/white glow it is.

3) There are controls for color, but the sky controls (including the above-mentioned haze experiments) re-set themselves randomly so it wasn't worth my time to experiment.

4) Midnight lighting looks like bright moonlight reflecting off snow. The clouds are way too bright at midnight.

5) The nightime lighting in the preferences doesn't do anything any more.

what does this have to do with my advice to wait because of bugs on pretty new cards, both ATI and NVIDIA? I don't want to derail the thread, but Windlight is more than that. It's a whole new lighting model, one with a LOT of bugs. It's not hitting our viewers anytime soon because quite simply not many people can see its features compared to those who can, and those who can't, way too many of them SHOULD see the features, and the reason they don't is because of teh bugz.

so buy a new computer based on other criteria, not just SL. Generally SL does better on NVIDIA cards (because ATI is teh suck when it comes to OpenGL), so bear that in mind when shopping for a computer. You might want to see if you have an option to take XP over Vista, too, simply because a lot more programs than SL just don't function well with it. Though I like my Vista system a lot, I am falling back on my XP system way too much, and I have considered if its a good idea to fall back the operating system on my new box.

One problem (major) that Windlight has, is that the lighting is too intense, and you see that indoors. SL has a limitation that you don't have a difference between indoors and outdoors, which you do on other game platforms such as Torque - where the outdoor lighting models can be different from the indoors and you move through a kind of portal.

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/tgea/features/doorway/

that's an example of this feature in Torque Game Engine Advanced. Maps are missing in SL, and SL would really need this in order to implement realistic lighting models. I really don't know how they could put it in. True physical lighting doesn't really exist in games yet, only 3d rendering apps.

That would necessitate a whole new SL, pretty much, and I feel kinda bleak on the prospects for it there.

I'm not buying a new computer just to play SL with Windlight, I'll leave before I do. LL shouldn't be adding 'cutting edge' features which break things or cost performance when the parts of the game that ALREADY exist are in rough shape at best. My computer quite happily exceeds the minimum specs (or it did, I can't find the bloody requirements anymore, nice of them to keep them visible =/), and yet each update LL seems to insist on making the game worse for me.

If this feature stops people playing, then exactly how worthwhile is it? So I can make the sky green now if I want, but I can't actually get above 10fps or speak to any of my friends whose graphics cards turned out not to be compatible?

Dell 400XP, 2G RAM, Nvidia 7900 512MB, Windows XP Pro. Current Patches and drivers.

No noticable Lag or reduction of frame rates.

I bought a new card a ati x1650 pro and firstlook works great but i know of a lot that it doesn't work well at all

When did you morph into Ceera?

was I talking to you originally? I went back to the original topic, that's all I did. What doesn't work with Windlight, and what tips on a computer should someone buy for SL right now.

Computers get outdated for programs, it happens. C'est la vie.



Don't you think you're acting a bit like Chicken Little? Windlight isn't ANYWHERE near ready yet, its not working right on MOST cards. I hate to repeat myself but...

its not working on most UP TO DATE cards either! That's why its in beta testing. I like the First Look program, it's very useful to be sure of what's coming down the pipe and put my input in before something just gets sprung on me unknowingly. So it doesn't work now. That was to be expected.

something else you might want to consider -

OpenGL still has a lot of problems with cross platform support, with advanced lighting models.

Right now LL is working heavily on the backend of their system. The shortterm situation is that there's a lot of crappy bugs (the Group IM bug, for example) due to this decentralisation effort. The situation is they are working on both the backend and the graphics systems - both of which had to be updated badly. My performance has actually improved with the new render pipeline improvements, and sims are getting a lot of load taken off of them as SL decentralises into web services.

In the long term this effort is going to make Second Life much better, but in the short term these bugs suck badly.

You are not alone.

Pretty soon, a new graphics card probably won't help either. Is it worthwhile to support anything less than a 64bit processor? There are lots of features in a 64bit machine besides just being 64bits or just a step up from 32bit.

In a 32bit machine, you are limited to 4GB max. In a 64bit machine, you can have 64GBs of memory. Lots of textures and other data can be stored in memory and never hit the harddrive bottleneck.

You mean SL might turn into something similiar to Vanguard, only with less cool graphics but a prettier sky?!?!?! =o

heh

Well at some point people DO decide to upgrade their computer if it's 2, 4, 6, 8 years old and it's ususally because of some catalyst. So upgrading because of windlight isn't as odd as it might sound. Or maybe they are upgrading anyway and just want to make sure that SL still works since windlight is being forced on us all.

Anyway, my Rig:
Core2Duo 8700, nVidia 8800GTX 158.43 drivers, Windows Vista.
Everything functions as advertised, all SL options and Windlight (including clouds) all options n the nvidia control panel, AA etc maxed or nearly maxed, all settings in SL turned on.

I now crash unexpectedly with a video driver failure about once a week. With 1.15 it was about every 4 hours. With 1.13 and earlier it was NEVER.

I've tried the "Windlight" skies and had no problems. Just gotta set the sky to something more pleasant than default.

System Stats:

AMD Opteron 170 (dual core 2 Ghz)
2 Gig RAM
GeForce 8800 GTS (v158.22 drivers)

No crashes, nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe I'm just lucky?

And to note: I run every current "high-end" game with ALL settings & resolutions MAXXED!! Sweeeeet!

The thing with SL though is that it isn't like high-end games, where yes a 2 year old machine is too old. SL is at its core a glorified chat client, that lets you socialise in virtual settings rather than JUST text.
IM clients add to their experience with new features like video chat and stuff, but the requirements for the basics (text-chat) don't really change version to version.

Really SL should be striving to be like that, obviously graphics are an important aspect of SL too, but new graphical things either need to have a negligable performance hit, or automatic LOD, or some way of turning it off. In this way we can continue to use the basics unaffected, but can use extra features if we wish.

Works fine here, no performance hit. Graphics driver version 158.45.

Only problem I have is that during daytime it's a bit too bright: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1037

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (Overclocked - 2.8GHz)
GPU: XFX nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX 768mb GDDR3
Memory: 4gb DDR2 PC5300 667MHz Dual Channel
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit



In theory you can have up to 8TB of memory in a 64-bit system. Anything less is an OS limitation (128GB in XP, 16GB in Vista Home Premium, 128+GB in Vista Business or higher)

I run Windlight on :

Intel pentium 4 3Ghz. 2CPU's
Windows XP sp2
2 gig RAM
Ati Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB Omega Drivers 3.8.330 (based on Ati Catalyst 7.1 drivers)

SL runs smoothly, though image is hard with to much contrast. Might be the Windlight settings. I havent been experimenting with it to much. I dont see weather changes, its either night, day or a Windlight preset, dont know if that should happen?

my comment: Windlight hmmm, not very enthousiastic about it, all this eye candy doesnt really add anything to SL. I hope I can turn it off when it is implemented in a new client release.

Mine sure as heck doesn't, but this PC isn't good for running SL in general.

I run win2000 still on this PC and I have a Raedon 9550. When I try the new viewer it crashes instantly anytime I have enable vertex shaders enabled, and from what I understand that allows the clouds to appear? I think?

But it runs okay with that option unchecked. It never crashed or anything when it was unchecked. However the sky looks like crap. Sometimes half of it is black while the other is blue, sometimes the sun is blue or some other abnormal color. Guess I'll have to update this PC if the above isn't fixed by the time it's out. D:

I'm loving how there's much less lag now though. ^.^

I love the feature in general, but I wish I didn't have to go out and buy more stuff to upgrade this PC just to make it look better when I rarely play anyway. It'd be nice to get the experience most others have and see though. I think it's one of the best features LL has ever added. Now if it would only look right on mine.

System Specs:
WinXP Pro SP2, GeForce 6800 GT OC , Forceware 93.71 drivers, 2 GB system memory, AMD64 3500+ (2.21 Ghz)

Initial Impression:
WindLight in SL is functioning with no apparent graphical artifacts I can see. The graphics shaders also adds a touch more realism to objects and the landscape, not just the sky. First Look client is noticeably slower (lower framerates) than the main client. Not sure if it is the client itself or WindLight.

Glitches:
First Look client crashes as soon as 'Edit Terrain' is clicked.

Criticism:
When the moon is out, its nothing more than a bright and hazy spot in the sky. When you try to remove the haze, the moon disappears. Windlight is treating the moon exactly the same as the sun when it shouldn't. The moon needs more visual definition, i.e. craters and valleys, not a spot light. Perhaps one of the Linden developers could add the option to overlay the old moon and sun graphic over the spotlights that currently represents the main celestial star and satellite in First Light.

Other Thoughts:
Nvidia Forceware 94.24 drivers just came out May 31 for GeForce 7 series and older Nvidia video cards. Nvidia Forceware 158.22 (May 17) for GeForce 8 series owners. Need to test those out.

128GB for XP? lol!

I find it hard to not hit hard limits with less than 2GB. You have 4GB, so I'm sure that helps.

Anybody who gets a new system, I recommend to aim for 16GB.