Impostors!

The Windlight First Look is back. An interesting new feature is what they are calling "Avatar Impostors" which claims to lower framerate in large crowds. I was wondering what this was, and when I saw what they meant my first reaction was to start laughing:

















It looks like Hibiki jumped right out of an original Playstation game and into Second Life. Apparently they just create a low-resolution sprite of the avatar and then paste that in instead of having to render the avatar.



















But does it actually work? My framerate was around 24 with it on when I was taking these screenshots. I turned it off and it dropped to about 17.