Firestorm 6 runs fine on a 15-year-old toaster. With the Advanced Lighting Model and all other graphical frills off. Then it even runs just fine on a single-core CPU because it's single-threaded, and it only uses one CPU thread. That's why so many OpenSim users are stuck with Firestorm 6: They're stuck with old toasters.
Firestorm 7 is a different story. For one, it's multi-threaded. On a multi-core machine with halfway decent dedicated graphics, it flies. It's faster than Firestorm 6.
On slower machines, it's a slideshow. That's because the Advanced Lighting Model is permanently on, and normal maps and bump maps and reflections are permanently on, too. You can't go back to Forward Rendering without ALM and without normal maps and without bump maps and without reflections anymore. Basically, Firestorm 7 is hard-coded to Firestorm 6's "high" graphics settings. That was a hard requirement by Linden Lab, otherwise Firestorm would soon no longer be allowed to connect to Second Life.
Since some 15% of all Second Life users are on absolute toasters and can't even afford a sufficiently powerful second-hand machine, Linden Lab still allow Firestorm 6.6.17 to connect for now. For if they don't, Second Life will use quite a lot of users and market share at once. And the investors behind Linden Lab certainly won't tolerate that.
However, in Second Life, there's no way back to Firestorm 6.6.8, 6.4.21, 6.0.2 or whatever some OpenSim users on toasters consider the best.
OpenSim is where poor people go to get Second Life for free because they want L$20,000 avatars, but they can't afford them. It's also where they go because they've been able to afford a €300 low-end consumer laptop once in their lives, that was in the early 2010s at best, and then never again. If that machine breaks, and they don't get a replacement as a free gift, then it's buh-bye OpenSim.
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