Here's What an Optimized Second Life Scene Looks Like, Even on An Old PC

Remember that Star Wars-inspired roleplay area I mentioned last week, the one by Second Life graphics optimization expert Penny Patton? NiranV visited the place over the weekend and took these raw screencaptures with his Black Dragon viewer running on his old PC, and goddamn they look great. (Click to emiggenate.)

"THIS is exactly what i'm talking about," Niran enthused in Comments. (Because Niran is also a passionate critic of bad optimization plaguing SL.) "I went there to see it myself and I was getting 40 FPS minimum everywhere I went, [with] deferred, shadows, screen space ambient occlusion, volumetric lighting, screen space reflections, everything on and with an almost 9 year old AMD FX. That is pretty respectable. The place also looks very nice and even with quite a bunch of animesh around, I've never seen my framerate hitch at all."

To translate that into English, he turned up all the graphics setting and effects to maximum and it still looked and performed great. Another pic and more comments after the break:

"The place doesn't look like any of the latest triple A titles but it really doesn't have to. It looks quite nice and unlike most of Second Life, doesn't look like 2007 garbage cobbled together. The lighting is decent, lots of material usage, the texture usage was decently low and it was perfectly used to mask all the super low poly models around.

"I'm quite happy with what I saw and I wish this would be more common. SL could be so much faster and look nicer too."

Many more pics here. Penny's place may not look as high end as the very latest AAA games, but it certainly holds its own with AAA games from, say, 5-7 years ago. Which like Niran says, is more than enough to put Second Life on par with what the current market wants and expects. If only optimization was put at a premium.

Click here for the teleport link to this location, but first check the guidelines to get the best experience.

Comments

[Candy68]

And you know what that place is all built with mash the stuff that you’re a bitch and about on a Regular basis

[NiranV]

@Candy68

What has this build being built with mesh to do with the fact that there are lots of complaining about bad mesh practises and content optimization?

Mesh != bad.

[Summer Haas]

I've heard some real bad things about that mash too. Make sure you stay away from that stuff. NiranV and PennyP are just trying to get us addicted to those speedy framerates. It's a real slippery slope we're headed down.

[Zan]

This one time I tried joining your discord and I got booted with no warning.

I was hoping to find more resources on optimization.

Wompwomp.

[Wagner James Au]

Sorry, others have also had that problem! Where did you click the link so I can update it?