Kirsten Viewer S21(7a) Review Continued

I’ve been able to use the viewer for a time now. My experience with it follows.

Download & Install

The download (29mb) and install is standard for the KirstenLee Viewer. It uninstalls the previous version in the process. The cache and settings locations are retained. The settings are kept.

Anna's Many Murders

Anna's Many Murders

Experience

No reboot needed. Viewer cranked up and ran well. In my cottage I get 27 to 32 FPS. In Celtic Myst I get 17 to 21 FPS. This is with Lighting & Shadows + Ambient Occlusion enabled and Sun/Moon shadows off.

Turning on Sun/Moon shadows in Celtic pulls me down to 8 to 9 FPS. I can turn them on and off without any problems. The screen winks and that’s about it.

Disable Teleport Progress Screens is in Me → Preferences → Viewer. Its at the bottom of the left column of check boxes.

I traveled to Bryn Oh’s Anna’s Many Murders, which is an awesome build. Worth your time to visit it. On entry Bryn’s greeter gives you note cards for Imprudence, Phoenix, and Kirsten’s viewers. One can click the card in inventory to change the Windlight settings to what Bryn thinks is ideal for his build. There is a special card just for the Kirsten viewer setting. So, if you have been looking for a place to test the viewers render power, this is the place.

Bryn suggests turning on Sun/Moon shadows if your computer has the power. Personally I didn’t see any place that would be helped by shadows. The build is rather dark. A considerable part is in doors.

I tried shadows in a couple of places. It pulled me down to 9 FPS. I could not see a difference in the render. So, I’m assuming without a sun or moon up it is kind of pointless to have them on for this build. You’ll understand if you visit. SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bryn%20Oh/68/207/186

When leaving remember to reselect your default environment settings.

Using the S21(7a) I was running into minor slowdowns. I would drop down to 4 or 5 FPS for 30 seconds or so and then return to 10 to15. (The region has lots of animation and is complex) The region FPS was staying at 44-45 and dilation above 0.98 and 1.0 most of the time. There were 6 to 10 people in the region. May be their coming and going… however, the slowdowns were minor and not persistent.

I also took the viewer shopping for a couple of hours. I got 15 to 30 FPS depending on how much stuff was downloading. It was pretty nice shopping experience. I was in Elegance Ballroom, a  latino dance club and dress styles.

After 3 hours the viewer was fine and working well. The memory meter was crawling up slowly.

Chat is still a mess, but that isn’t a viewer issue. I’m so tired of typing in a comment and then being told it can send the message.

Summary

The viewer is stable and works well. It does appear to have a slow memory leak. When I closed the viewer it was using just over a gigabyte of memory. But, 3 hours of use worked ok.

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