{"id":2331,"date":"2012-11-23T18:24:13","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T18:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2331"},"modified":"2012-11-23T18:28:58","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T18:28:58","slug":"ok-what-have-they-done-to-the-graphics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2331","title":{"rendered":"Ok What Have They Done To The Graphics?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I loaded up Second Life using the beta viewer, which is not at all unusual. However there was a required update, which downloaded and installed.\u00a0When the client started again, up popped a message along the lines of; improvements to the graphics subsystem have introduced a change to your graphics preferences.<\/p>\n

Hmmm thought I, what’s this all about? So I took a look at my preferences and found that my graphics preferences have been changed from hight to ultra … wait a minute? What’s this all about? I don’t want to overwork my graphics card, so I went back to the standard release of the viewer, fired it up and found my graphics were set to high, which is what I expected. Pressing reset in my graphics preferences, which sets your settings back to the reccomended position depending upon your detected hardware, kept my settings at high.<\/p>\n

So now I’m confused, I uninstall the beta viewer completely, download it again and hit install. This time I just get a message informing me that if I’m new, I need to create an account. I continue and start, no message about changing my graphics preferences, which it seems was due to it being a new install and therefore not being required to inform me of a change in my preferences, as there were no old preferences to change in the beta viewer. However my graphics preferences were ultra, I pressed reset, my graphics preferences remained ultra.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now I’m confused, the main reason being I don’t know what the bloody hell has changed for my suggested graphics settings to be ultra. I checked the release notes for the beta viewer<\/a>, there might be a clue here:<\/p>\n

HTTP-based Communications<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A new scheme for performing HTTP operations is introduced with this release. It is intended to reduce crashes and stalls while performing HTTP operations and generally enable performance and reliability improvements in the future. In this release, it is being used by the viewer’s texture retrieval code. Our expectation is that it will provide consistent and predictable downloading of textures. As well as the usual problem reporting, we’re also interested in confirmation of improvements where this release improves your experience.<\/em><\/p>\n

Is this the improvement they’re talking about? Is this why my graphics preferences have changed? Well there are a couple of potential issues with textures in there:<\/p>\n

SH-3533 <\/a>– smoke test the merge of 3.4.2-beta1 + drano HTTP viewer with a focus on textures.<\/p>\n

DRTVWR-209<\/a> – Phase 1 of new HTTP library with texture fetch integration.<\/p>\n

Aha, more information to investigate what’s going on? Alas not:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jira No Entry<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Honestly! These bloody Jira changes. So the next question, does anything feel better? The answer seems to be yes, textures do seem to be loading faster, but there again I get the feeling that maybe it just seems like that because I’m hoping my graphics card will work nicely in ultra mode, you know, like when you’re a kid and get a new pair of trainers and go outside to see if you can run faster in them.<\/p>\n

The thing here is, at the back of my mind, I’m still thinking that I don’t want to overwork my graphics card. However, I’ll most definitely welcome an improvement to graphics and texture loading speeds, it would just be a tad better if I could readily find information to inform me that what I’m seeing in terms of system messages, is along the lines of what I’d expect to be seeing.<\/p>\n

The beta viewer can be download from the main Second Life downloads page<\/a>, you’ll find it just below the current release viewer.<\/p>\n

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