#SecondLife Viewer Snowstorm

Today my viewer updated to the Snowstorm RC. I have it set to use RC Viewers. So, I’m using Second Life 3.7.11 (291465) Jun 25. The release notes are here.

Summerfest '14

Summerfest ’14

I went over to Summer Fest 2014 to try it out. First, the cute little pacific island theme used at Summer Fest makes it a really fun build to explore. The foliage is awesome. The buildings have a weak LOD, but if you have your viewer’s LOD setting turned up, they are OK. I don’t I prefer performance in this case.

The viewer runs faster. I was getting 20 to 40 FPS at the Fest. But, rendering is still a problem. Oz Linden said at the Firestorm Q&A that they are working on changing the viewer to allow it to use more of the video RAM you have on your graphics card. I doubt any of that work is in this viewer. But, possibly. So, that may be why we are seeing this problem.

The main viewer and this Snowstorm RC both have the problem of texture thrashing. The textures render sharp then blur and reload, sharpen and repeat. It makes taking pictures a pain.

I think the problem is worse in this viewer than in the main viewer. Again, I don’t see the problem in the Firestorm viewer.

I don’t expect to see texture thrashing in a GTX560Ti with 1GB of VRAM.

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