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Black Dragon Viewer Now Lets You Take Second Life Screenshots in 12,000K — If Your Hardware Can Handle It!

Black Dragon SL viewer ultra high res

The Black Dragon viewer for Second Life is beloved for making the ancient and venerable virtual world look like a modern AAA game, but the latest update, "Enhancing Dragon" takes that to an entirely ridiculous level. As creator NiranV explains on his blog:

Finally because some people have been nagging about this i've raised the maximum snapshot resolution to 12K. Yes. 12K. 12000×12000. This is mostly for GTX 10XX cards and I doubt that you'll get too many shots in with lower cards before the Viewer decides to poop its render pants and explode in a giant mess. 

Click the pic on the post if you don't believe me. (Though clicking might also cause your browser to poop its pants.) 

Also, only try this if you have an excellent GPU. As NiranV warns:

"Only a select few can take snapshots at 12K, most people will just outright crash. GTX 10XX should do. I mean my GTX 1060 can handle 12K, although not 12k x 12K, just ratio appropriate 12k x 6k." Have a card less than that, he recommends keeping the graphics down to 4K. (Which is already more than enough for most people.)

And no, turning down different graphic settings will only defeat the purpose — as would trying to take a pic in a poorly optimized Second Life sim:

"Whether the Viewer will crash or not on 12K or even lower resolutions depends solely on the hardware and the place you are at," as he puts it. "Also lowering settings would not only make the pictures worse at 12K… in fact, you have to turn them even further up to compensate for the higher resolution. If you are taking a picture at a place that already runs like fucking shit, you're probably not gonna even manage to get the 6K done.

"Ultimately everyone has to try it out themselves."

Where's a place in Second Life that doesn't run like fucking shit? NiranV (and I!)  recommend this Star Wars-themed area by optimization goddess Penny Patton.

Share your results in Comments! And while you're at it, click here to consider supporting via Patreon future updates to Black Dragon. Because who else but NiranV would ever bother with upgrades such as this?

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5 responses to “Black Dragon Viewer Now Lets You Take Second Life Screenshots in 12,000K — If Your Hardware Can Handle It!”

  1. Fed Up Avatar
    Fed Up

    Why?

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  2. Fionalein Avatar
    Fionalein

    on “Why?” By “Fed Up”:
    It’s Niran, he needs no reason. I bet if you tell him something is unresonable that’s just one more reason for him to do so…

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  3. CronoCloud Creeggan Avatar
    CronoCloud Creeggan

    While I do have a GTX1050 TI, and a GTX1650 arrives today, 4K is generally good enough for screenshots. This is just e-peen excess.

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  4. Torus Avatar
    Torus

    Just a friendly suggestion to the author, you should consider hosting your blog on a platform that is mobile-friendly. It is very cumbersome to read on a phone. I can’t speak for others, but know I would certainly read it more often if I didn’t have to zoom in and scroll left and right through the post as I read. Other than that, keep up the good work!

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  5. NiranV Avatar
    NiranV

    @everyone
    The endless conundrum whether i should do this or not…
    I did it because people wanted it and it was literally a 10 second number change that doesn’t impact the Viewer in any way and doesn’t add any bloat and fits into what the Viewer is aimed at.
    I told people that its quite pointless but some peeps were like “but more pixels!” but what do you need to pixels for? “More pixels!”. Yea well that’s fine and all but what for, 4K + FXAA is perfectly fine. “But i already run the Viewer at 4K natively, it looks like trash.” Wait what how do you run it at 4K and it looks like shit. You are essentially seeing what we see when we take a 4K shot and downscale it to fit our 1080p screen. Even worse, i use a huge 40″ TV screen, this thing has a crazy bad pixel density, i can count every single pixel thats how huge they are and you are telling me seriously that your what is it, maybe 27″ PC monitor which automatically already has a smaller pixel density and thus less aliased image if you are using the same 1080p resolution as me, looks worse even when on 4K which is easily double the pixel amount in the same space? How the hell does that even work?! I mean if you are not satisfied with double the resolution on a smaller area then honestly you’ll never be satisfied with no resolution. Heck if anything i should complain, my TV is freaking huge, i can count every single pixel on screen, imagine how bad my aliasing is when i turn off FXAA. When i take a picture at 4K and scale it down to 1080p its perfectly smooth and i can tell because i can count every single pixel, if there was aliasing ANYWHERE i’d immediately see it. “BUT MUH PIXELS!”. Yea well i guess your pixels.
    And then i unlocked the resolution limit and everyone started complaining. WHY?! YOU wanted it, first you complain that you can’t take pictures at resolutions higher than 6K and now you’re complaining that i did change it and allow you to take snapshots up to 12K? WTH.
    Honestly i don’t get it, no matter what you do, people will always complain, every time… and people are seriously still wondering why i “seem” to be ignoring most people’s feedback. Like… THIS is why.

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