What majority? Cite your sources, please.

PBR is a painful update, but a needed one - the Blinn/Phong model doesn't really support lighting properly, it's more work for creators to 'fake' textures and bake in lighting effects that have too much an uncanny valley because the effects don't MOVE as the avatar moves, etc etc. Keep in mind that PBR as a rendering system has been a staple for gaming tech for 15+ years now.

What needs to happen is for people to learn how to use PBR in their builds. They need to understand what reflection probes are for, and how to set them up. They need to understand how lighting and environment is supposed to interact with it (and why the legacy EEP stuff doesn't play well with PBR and is thus a Bad Idea to deploy.) It's on the builders and creators to make the shift; if they don't, then their work won't look good. That's not a bug, that's a process change.

I disagree.

PBR is a long overdue step in the right direction for the longevity of the platform and I have experienced nothing but positive outcomes from the moment it was released. PBR is also the solution to a lot of rendering pipeline issues, which is the entire reason the gaming industry adopted it to begin with, ~15 years ago. I also feel that LL is addressing the growing pains adequately enough by opening multiple ways to log in and play (mobile, browser-based) to help the crowd that has outdated hardware, as well as having improved the overall performance of the main viewer significantly in the last year alone, and continues to strive for better.

While I agree there are areas of the platform that are still severely lacking in some TLC, PBR is not the enemy, nor is it useless.

The majority of residents and creators are very not having problems with PBR. The ocean shader needs a fix. That's... about it.

The viewers are now more performant than ever, since the introduction of PBR. The best part is, you don't have to use the ORM workflow. You can stick with the old BP/specnorm materials if you want to. Heck I do that sometimes when I'm just doing Tron graphics on prims. Just don't be surprised that having to add a whole extra mesh just to do an emissive properly isn't as performant as just having an emissive map in the same material.

I'm with Pet and Cube on this. I remember the pain and suffering we went thru with the first mesh, and even worse with the first mesh bodies (remember when ALL clothes fit EVERYBODY?). In the meantime, computers have gotten much faster and more capable.

I'm a creator who jumped on PBR the day the PBR-capable Firestorm came out in Alpha. If sales are any indicator, a whole lot of avs are enjoying the new design capabilities that PBR gives us.

(I also remember lots of kvetching about SL being behind the industry in the visual quality of the experience. Unlike gaming companies, when LL does a big upgrade, the system has to accommodate billions of objects created by many thousands of residents and somehow make the whole thing not come crashing down. I appreciate what a challenge that is for LL's engineers, along with the 3rd-party-viewer developers that make it all possible.)

Agreed. PBR seems to have caused more problems for users than anything else. Not really seeing the improvements they keep saying are happening. So many other things need addressing as SL has not been properly nurtured for the past 15 years and I hope someone up top realizes this soon and changes course or sells the company to more capable hands.

I will have to disagree on the grounds that with PBR, performance and aesthetics have seen a significant improvement.