Dnate Mars

You can't have all the new things for everyone. The best stuff will always be for the people that have the money to spend on new equipment. It is something that people need to get used to, not everyone will be seeing the same thing in SL in teh same way.

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Gonta Maltz

Haha, just because one guy is working on high-end graphics features for a way-future release doesn't mean they're abandoning all of SL's audience except for the FIC and rich 1337 computer hax0rs.

Don't be so reactionary: SL can still be run with basic shaders off for people with ancient machines (abacus), or it can have a major facelift just by turning them on (which the vast majority of people can)

Additionally the "next internet" is not going to be just one company, offering a single, homogeneous platform (that looks like a game from 2003) That's why there's different grids, software-initiatives, SL-clients with different rending engines, and why LL is putting effort into the Architecture Working Group. bla bla.

Jessyanne

At some point progress makes some things obsolete. Can't exactly expect every car manufacturer to offer 8 track players right? To be up and coming, and expand and explore and cut yourself as a technologically advanced leader, you have to continually push the envelope. If there's any doubts that Second Life isn't trying to cut a new path, then exactly where were they 10 years ago? Progress happens. You cannot expect everything new to make accomodations for people attempting to go 0 - 60 in 6 secs on a Schwinn

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Joannah Cramer

While this is true, the situation at hand is slightly different -- the "progress" is made while deliberately ignoring hardware that's perfectly capable of pulling off effects in question for reason no other but "oh but it's going to be eventually obsolete so why bother".

To use your analogy, it's like having car manufacturer take time to install music players in their cars ... but only in the newest lineup, while last year models are left with no sound source whatsoever. And then telling you to "lol, just upgrade you cheapskate nub".

Love

Can you prove that? Because I didn't necessarily read that into his post. What I did read is that it would take more effort to also support the 7xxx cards, and the feeling was that it wasn't worth it.

Morgaine Alter

I cant wait. it stinks to isolate anyone if that what happens
But I have been drooling over my new 8800M GTS all week.

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Brenda Connolly

Sure, progress and innovation is necessary. I'm sure I'd be horrified if I saw what SLwas 3 years ago. This isn't about one new feature or even about moving forward at all it is about the attitude that LL has generally shown on technical matters , one that tends to marginalize a portion of it's users. They are the world' worst communicators as a whole, nothing can get me to believe otherwise.

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Joannah Cramer

Can i prove what? That the option of supporting the earlier hardware is deliberately ignored? If that's what you meant then what i meant in turn by saying it was pretty much what you said yourself -- 'they consider it extra effort and feel it's not worth it'. Which in turn is what they said themselves. I interpret it as deliberate (intentional) skipping of support for older hardware. Since that comment came straight from the horse's mouth, i'm not sure what i'm supposed to prove

Love

You said:

So I asked you to prove that this guy has decided to not support a card for no reason other than it eventually being obsolete. I'd say that not supporting it because there's extra work involved, and isn't deemed worth the effort, is quite different than what you said.

Miriel Enfield

The other downside is that baked shadows plus rendered shadows (dynamic shadows? I'm not up on my terminology) could lead to things looking overly shaded. Or worse, give them contradictory shading.

Gonta Maltz

There are significant architecture changes between 7 and 8 series nVidia cards. Shader support, openGL version compatibility, etc. Just because the specific conflicts haven't been detailed doesn't mean that the line is being drawn is arbitrary: it's probably for dozens of reasons.

Joannah Cramer

Well, i'd say he doesn't want to support it because of this:
Note, the chipset being _already_ "beyond obsolete" (earlier in quoted post) and it being phased out are the only reasons he actually provided. So i'm not going to second-guess if his reasons are maybe something other than what he said.

And incidentally about the extra work argument you provide as alternative explanation -- this extra work is only a factor if one insists on creating separate render paths for 8-series and older hardware. While it's perfectly possible to create robust solutions aimed "just" at older hardware that would also perform just as well on the newer cards, with no additional work. Hence i'd guess you don't actually see him use that as argument in his reasoning.

edit: and to look at it from another angle, this alternative of "maybe they aren't supporting it because they see it as extra work not worth the effort"... the very reason why they 'don't see it as worth the effort' is the chipset being phased out/obsolete. So it still boils down to the same thing, doesn't it..?

Love

I don't know anything about coding for these cards, so hence my questions. I suppose it's the same thing. It all depends on how you present it. The way you said it suggested that he doesn't want to do it for a trivial and pointless reason. The way I said it suggested that perhaps the extra work just wouldn't pay off in his mind. See, the way I read what you quoted him as saying is that he has limited time to invest coding this, and he wants to maximize the time put into the newer card at the expense of supporting the old one. My feeling is that the more time spent optimizing, the better. If true, then he can spent time getting both to run OK, or the same time getting one to run well. But I grant you there's a ton of assumptions in that.

But honestly, this whole issue is a mountain out of a mole hill. Sure, shadows are pretty, but my sense over the past few months is that people would rather prefer stability.

Huns Valen

I don't know whether or not it's a big deal to do this on a 7xxx series, but holy god, could he possibly have phrased this any worse?

I don't know about you guys, but I upgrade my video card once every 2 years. I get whatever's the #2 (paying 200-250 rather than 600.) Right now I have some 7xxx series. It runs stuff (Source engine etc) fine at high resolution and yields good to great FPS. If Valve can draw shadows on my card, why can't LL?

8xxx support "generous"? That's so irrational it borders on hilarious. Did this guy really sit down and think about it, or did he just make the decision in a split second based on his personal preference concerning how often he upgrades his own systems? It's just so badly put together that I'd have to assume the latter.

Supporting "old" tech is "pandering"?
"Overreaction machine"?
"Cheapskates of the world"?

Right, because we're all demanding this feature on our Voodoo Banshees and Riva TNTs.

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Penny Patton

I'm of two minds on the 8xxx issue. On one hand, he has a point in that SL, despite not looking as nice as the newest games, requires more power to render due to it's streaming nature, and user created content.

Videogame companies generally only hire professionals, who design graphics optimized for the game experience. Often, if you never see the other side of a wall, there is nothing on the other side of that wall, not even the other side of that wall! Polygons are cut wherever possible, and scenes designed to look good within what the player's camera will show. Even what you see is carefully designed to look the best in as few polygons as they can manage. Texture maps are generally much lower res than the average SL texture. Lighting is also carefully managed. Every aspect is made to run well, while looking good.

Ever download user created maps for games, and where the game itself will run perfectly fine with a high framerate, the mod community map runs at like half the framerate? SL is like that, but even worse, since everything is made by the community, and there is far less control over the end user's experience.











On the other hand, RealXtend seems to do shadows without a big performance hit, or requiring an 8xxx nVidia card. Just sayin'.

Eata

Steam hardware survey

I count that as about 20%, which includes the low power ones that probably won't manage it. Assuming the other also contains some high power cards only around 30% of Steam users, a dedicated gamers service, have Geforce 8 or better graphics cards. I have no idea what the comparable ATI card is so the number would be higher again. I would like to see what statistics they have for SL users,

I would love to see the shadows and other high end graphics stuff but I really think he needs some attitude readjustment. If you aren't going to do X back it up with a solid explanation and then people will understand and support it. You can't say "your shit sucks, upgrade"!

Verkin Raven

If you don't buy a $10,000 Alienware every week, you're dragging down the progress of technology, you cheapskates.

Silly whiners with their ancient QX9650 CPUs and 9800GTX video cards crying for developers to hobble their software to support their dinosaur crap...

(This post will automatically stop being sarcastic in a few years.)

Aminom Marvin

ffffffffffffffffffffffffff

I gots me a ForceGee 8800 GeeTee 516 megarams card. I hope it will be able to work with that without bogging down my framerate too much. If it does, time to get new card :O

Does anyone know how well this works with sculpts? Or how I can test it? I'm particularly interested in how it works with my complex stuff.

Brenda Connolly

Nicholaz Beresford has a nice missive on this at his blog:http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.c...-optional.html

Penny Patton

Ja, the Lindens seem to love lumping various settings together. I've got more examples.

While Avatar Imposters may be turned on or off, when on they are lumped into the Avatar Detail slider. Meaning, the lower you set avatar detail, the closer avatars must be before you see the full av, and not a pixelated sprite. In the end, this means if you want to use Av Imposters to boost performance, but would not like avatars to turn into ugly sprites when they're more than 3 feet away, you have to crank Avatar Detail. Anyone else see the problem?

For a long time, Windlight and then RC users were subjected to a horrible graphical glitch relating to alpha textures. Alpha textures would turn into solid blocks of pixelized garbage unless they were really close. This turned out to be a performance boosting feature that LL was looking to include in Windlight. Torely even stated that they were considering lumping this "feature" into the object detail slider, with no option to turn it off. So in order to not have alpha textures turn into horrible eyesores in excess of 5 feet or so, you'd have to crank object detail.

What the hell is wrong with these people? How could anyone think these are good ideas?

Joannah Cramer

In a (rough and simplified) nutshell, it goes like this:

There's some 'traditional' ways of doing both per-pixel lighting and the shadows ... it generally involves taking information about a scene located in 3d, and generating flat image on your screen out of it, combining info about the objects colours and how the lights in the scene affect them as you (or rather the gfx card) goes. For larger number of lights (larger than openGL 'limit') multiple drawing passes might be necessary and combined into final image ... sort of how you'd stack multiple layers in 'overlay' mode in Photoshop over the first layer.

Since these techniques were developed when only older gfx cards were available, they work on these older cards. They also work on the modern cards, as these are backward-compatible.

However, the more modern gfx cards have become powerful enough to handle different than the 'traditional' way of rendering the image -- first only the colour information is taken into account and drawn as it'd appear on your screen... and then all the lighting is applied in separate drawing pass, treating the image generated during the first 'colour drawing' pass as sorf of pseudo-3d relief map rather than complete scene in full 3d. Imagine if you will painting over image in Photoshop with burn and dodge tools, and it's quite similar.

This 'new' mode of drawing is called deferred rendering (or sometimes deferred shadowing, or deffered lighting) It has some advantages over traditional approach... e.g. it becomes cheaper to include effect of multiple lights as long as they cover small areas of the image on your screen. It has also some drawbacks, like rendering of transparent surfaces becoming more complicated. (as the relief image you're drawing your lights and shadows on loses that info compared to full 3d scene data)

The bottom line to all that is, the deferred rendering while newer is not exactly the silver bullet, so it doesn't make too much sense to focus strictly on it and discard the older hardware in the process -- if just because the traditional approach might (depending on nature of rendered scenes) actually work out better performance-wise, also on the new gfx cards.

Aspen d'Grey

I read over the email, and I saw one key phrase that everyone seems to be ignoring:

Still-in-development. Now, that could mean that this could be the next First Look, or that it could be about as far away as Havok 4 looked last year. See my point? By the time this IS released, the 8000 series nVidia cards may very well be dinosaurs. The 7000 series will almost certainly be completely obsolete (at the level the 6000 series is now- try and find one on Newegg.), and even the 9000 series may be playing second fiddle to the 10000 series. (Assuming the numbering scheme stays the same.)

Heck, DX11 might even be out by the time this feature makes it into a public viewer.

From THIS viewpoint, his argument does not only make sense, it's the only logical way to adress the problem if you want the feature to be cutting-edge when it is released.

Joannah Cramer

The 8-series cards won't be "dinosaurs" for next 2-3 years. And the 7-series will be relegated to status of 6-series by that time.

If they are really playing with 'high end' feature that's supposed to appear that much in the future... i can't help but wonder still if that time wouldn't be better used on something more practical, instead. Who knows if SL will ever be around 3 years from now on?