What Second Life Looks Like With Features Turned Up Full

Second Life doesn't play nice with my AlienWare at the moment, and at times like this, I like to look at what Second Life can look like when it's running at graphically optimal heights, as here:

To get SL to look like this, the YouTube videographer, "boodleboy" had a pretty sweet system running the popular third party SL viewer Firestorm: "CPU - Intel Q6600, Palit Platinum GF 460gtx,4GB RAM, 64bit Ubuntu," he answered when I asked. "Capturing software limited performance a bit." Though he just uploaded it, the actual video was shot last year. Wonder what the latest viewer would look like on the best possible system.

If you've seen a more recent video with more updated eye candy, please post links in Comments!

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Comments

[highendmachines]

Try this on a sim with less visually coordinated builders. Its not so pretty.

[HeatherDawn Cohen]

If I had the gumption, I'd shoot my SL experience on my comp. I can run SL with full features most of the time. \o/

[Sunshine K]

Running Firestorm on a Toshiba lappy at full sliders..no issues.

Building a new puter with the following: EVGA Classified SR-X mobo, 64 GB RAM, 2 GTX 690's and Corsair cooling...will be happy to supply VDO once up and running..about 2 weeks.

[Scarp Godenot]

Hold it. Sunshine! TWO 690s? Holy crap. That is like the nuclear bomb of graphics....

Color me impressed.

[Orca Flotta]

Was just about to say that boodleboy's setup isn't that impressive. GTX 460 and 4 GB RAM is decent for SL but in no way a gamer or graphic artist system. Vid looks nice nevertheless.

@ Sunshine: 2 GPUs is just overkill. SL is mostly single threaded and GPUs in SLI mode will prolly make more problems than necessary. Stutter will occur, I'm quite sure.

[Pussycat Catnap]

This looks no different from what I get on my 2011 iMac running the official V3. :p

- Pretty much any V3 viewer, official or TPV, will give you this. Your system will determine what FPS you can reach doing it.

In a setting like the one in the video, I'd be in the ~20fps range.

Turn off things like depth of field, and I'd gain back another 5-10 fps. Turn off shadows, and I'd be in the 40-60fps range.

It doesn't take an amazing system to get this. But a nice low population locale, like in the video, really helps.

What's fun is to do this in a crowded club - which I often do - and then capture images from it. In that environment, with settings like this, I will get from 5-15fps (quite a range, as the other avatars around me can either hurt my FPS a -LOT- when doing this, or very little).

[Pussycat Catnap]

The real impact on what you will see, that will give you this or not - is less in the settings being dialed up, and much more in choosing the right windlight settings for sky -and- water when you turn up those settings.

SL on Max settings can look like junk if you run the wrong windlight. And SL on medium settings looks this good, minus depth of field and shadows, if the right windlight is used.

[Adeon Writer]

Having a good computer is not nearly as important as finding an area of SecondLife made with close attention to detail, scale, lighting, texturing, conposition, and resource management.

And then for making a video like this, good Machinima skills are also handy.

A good computer really isn't vital so much as running a viewer made within the last two years. (I.e., everything except Imprudence.)

[Pussycat Catnap]

Yep: Add Adeon's comment to mine.

Good location, good choice of windlight, and modern viewer.

All three more important than the machine, and even more important the actual graphics settings you choose. Once I realized how much more impact windlight had over graphics settings, I made a custom day cycle to run when I have graphics turned down - to get still stunning results before I enable shadows, ambient occlusion, and depth.

(I'm still tweaking this day cycle, so not yet ready to pass around. But you can really improve your SL just by grabbing Torley's windlight presets, and slapping a few of them into a day cycle; with almost no detriment to performance.)

The things that want a hefty machine are:

- camera distance setting.
- number of avatars to render at once.
- those settings in the hardware popup, maybe.
- shadows
- depth of field
- running 378 scripts in your freaking hair while dancing at club 'sluts4U' on a frog-face avatar. :p

(Ambient Occlusion seems to do no harm to my FPS, but to get it you have to turn on shadows first.)

- Of these, to get the movie we see here, only shadows and depth of field mattered.

The rest was good location choice, good windlight, and good choice of camera angle / focus timing.
- Issues of filming skill, not hardware.
(and it was still a mostly -still- composition, so more photo composition skill than cinema skill.)

And of course, it looks more impressive because he did not use the last item in my list up there of heavy hardware demands. :p

[apmel]

Just Jet Skiiing around New Brighton in SL recorded with Fraps without editing on a PC running MS Windows 7 Premium 64-bit SP1 Intel Core i5-2310 CPU @ 2,90GHz,4,0GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 using

Linden Lab´s v3.3.4 (264214) Second Life Viewer set to Ultra.

http://youtu.be/3n6Y7dsFoHg

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

Has something changed recently so that SLI (using multiple graphics cards) actually helps Second Life?

One thing that might make the environment look worse than they did at the time this video was made is that Second Life client code has had the "global illumination" code removed. I really wish they'd bring it back; it makes a big difference.

[Shug Maitland]

re. 2 690s - The 690 itself is two GPUs internally SLIed together. I agree with Orca, SL will choke on that graphics setup.

[Pienaar]

Here is one of my videos in ultra settings. I think that especially the second half has some nice shots: http://vimeo.com/48665835

You mention above all the hardware. What is equally important is the viewer. Boodleboy uses - like me - Nirans viewer (I can see that from the images). This viewer has many strengths but the most important is the "tone mapping" which makes the scenery look more realistic. The right windlight settings make a scene look good. The right tone mapping makes it look realistic.

Here a link to Niran: http://niranv-sl.blogspot.de/

[ZZ Bottom]

http://niranv-sl.blogspot.pt/#!/2012/10/nirans-viewer-20-reboot-2185.html
If any really wishes to see Sl as it should!

[jjccc]

OK watched the video which is very jerky and very low quality in my opinion this location has nothing on it and should be able to get far better results if you post the location ill go there make a video and show the difference. Genero tv and other outside influences say that second life video are low quality, this video actually shows this to be true, if video makers in second life want to be taken seriously in real life as film maker they will have to up there game as this video even though its a test video does not met average standards even though the machinima will probably disagree. By the way i make crappy videos so what do i no anyway