Second Life on Old Laptops
As Linden Lab prepares the last round of bug-fixing before launching the brand new SL 2.0 viewer (will it run on Apple’s iPad? lol), I did a few movies showing off how good Snowglobe actually runs on way old laptops.
This is pretty much a personal discussion I’ve got with NetAntwerp, who refuses to believe that LL’s viewer is able to get reasonable performance on old hardware.
NetAntwerp remains unconvinced. You decide!
Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:
Powered by Where did they go from here?
Loading ...
Snowglobe is the only SL viewer I've been able to run successfully on my older pc's. The other viewers' have long since surpassed my older pc's ability.
I'm on a 4 year old Toshiba laptop, 1.6GHz Celeron CPU, 1G memory and with ATI 200M Express graphics, never supported by LL and since early last year not by ATI.
It was just shear luck it ran SL in the first place, many similar Toshiba models, Satellite A-100, come with SL incompatible cards.
Admittedly performance is poor, top FPS I have ever seen is 20+ FPS in mouselook mode on an empty sim and yes it drops like a stone in busy areas. Single figure FPS are a fact of my SL life, a fact I have got used to, a situation that has taught me a lot about lag and performance.
I also use Snowglobe, but don't see an appreciable performance benefit comparedd to 1.23 or Emerald or any other viewer. I prefer it for the built in language translation and faster Map draw.
I am not at all surprised to see the numbers shown in Gwens video or her claim that SL runs okay on old hardware,
my crap laptop even made it into Blue Mars!
What stuns me is that after 4 years its still able to run SL as good as, if not better now than it was 4 years ago.
Some would say that shows how little SL has progressed, I think its a tribute to the engineers at LL who have been able to improve SL, with additons like Havok 4, Mono and Windlight (yes I can partially use windlight but only if I plan on not moving!) and yet still allow low spec users to survive in world.
Using old slow hardware is not for everyone, its a different SL world, not as rich and immersive as many more fortunate get to experience but at least its possible to experience and participate even if it is slow, flat and laggy.
I for one will certainly appreciate 30+ FPS when I upgrade to a new PC
Last year, I ran SL on a 2002 laptop. It ran fine. Looked good too — obviously way more cartoony than on a high-end machine, but perfectly reasonable to look at.
I blogged about running SL on low-spec netbooks here: http://stindberg.blogspot.com/2009/06/running-s... – and in the meantime Boy Lane had made a version of his Rainbow Viewer especially aimed at netbooks.
SL's been running fine on my pumped up, three-year-old MacBook pro. I'm always carping in NWN and my blog about how it won't run on my students' laptops well (PC and Mac) but often they refuse to plug into a hard-wired connection. I do fine on wireless, especially since I tried this–being no technie, I just listened to some unverified advice–I plugged in the AC adapter.
The speed bump is considerable, on wireless or wired connections. Now we'll see what happens with SL 2.0.
I liked your article very useful to me. I will come back and read the article again.
More info on the web site long nightgown
Your website is beautiful and useful. How do I access your site often. Come visit my website at addlink addurl and Linking to websites
great post, Thank for sharing
I bet it won't run on these old laptops http://vintagelaptops.com