Graphics Cards

For Second Life to be useful in education it needs students to be able to access it, both from open-access computers in the uni and from their own computers. Unfortunately, when the specification for the uni computers was set it was not expected that students would be doing anything so frivolous as MUVE, so the graphics capbilities are very poor, and most students will be using basic laptops as their own computers, so again will not be exactly cutting edge for graphics. It looks like a lot of these problems are hidden because the people developing SL in universities are the tech enthusiasts who have high spec computers. Up until this week I was using a Radeon X300 graphics card, but then my viewer started to crash randomly, and having updated drivers and ploughed through the SL wikis I found that this card has "known issues": known but not explained. I have now upgraded to a Radeon 1550 with 250 MB, and it is lovely: I can see for miles and the sea ripples most attractively. However the graphics requirements "REQUIRED to run Second Life successfully" listed on the SL website website are limted. In particular, there is no guarantee that SL will run with Intel graphics. When we roll-out Second Life for courses we will find out whether this is a problem or not. V exciting!