What it means when they say "optional"

Over the last few days there was a bit of a lively discussion on the sldev mailing list, caused by a Linden dude who, when inviting people to test a high end experimental feature, wrote some posts with some weird overtones about graphics cards. The issue is discussed here on the forum where Kitty Barnett's and Matthew Dowd's posts pretty much reflect my ideas of the issue.

However, the discussion went on a tangent as it aways does, about how Teh Laboratory handles additions which are meant to be optional and how they affect those who want to opt out of those. Atmospheric rendering came up, being pretty close to the topic discussed and how Linden Lab says that if you disable the blissful sky, the 1.19.1 series of the viewer should run better than previous versions, while many people say it runs worse (which is my opinion too). Kitty Barnett made comparisons which were indicating the latter. I made some quick tests here with similar results.

Now today comes an interesting comment from the Lab which is interesting. What it essentially says is, that except for the lowest end, in WL there are no settings which exactly match the older viewers. Of course you can turn off the sky, but a bunch of new features come in a packet (Preferences, Graphics, Custom, Basic Shaders), which will either hit your performance or which will leave you with noticeably less appealing visuals. I.e. with mid-range machines, you can trade off graphics or trade off performance, but there is no way in the middle as with old viewers. (If you are getting funny results with Eye Candy, even while you think you have similar settings, the Basic Shaders option may be the key).

This may be a pesky little technical detail, but I found myself being irritated by the Linden's claim that Windlight was optional and could easily be turned off to give you an experience as before and the fact that whatever I did, I either lost visuals or framerates.

This not-so-optional new feature is not unlike what happened when voice was introduced. You could of course turn off voice, but you were then left with questionable changes to the user interface and with grayed voice-related buttons scattered around the windows.

Humans learn from experience. The lessons learned from Voice, Windlight and Dazzle, coupled with derogatory remarks about hardware introduced 3 years ago make it hardly surprising that people are getting nervous at the mere mentioning of a new experimental high-end feature or that those "optional" improvements are often considered downgrades.