lag hoodoo: la cuarta parte

We'll wrap up our discussion of lag caused by viewer graphic settings in this instalment, taking a look at the 'Hardware Options' button off the main Graphics tab in the Preferences window. In the smaller window that opens with this button contains half a dozen settings. In order, these are:

Filter: this is essentially a way of making textures look more realistic, but it comes at a performance cost. It's probably best left off, unless you have a very powerful system, or are making photographs.

Antialiasing: this smooths the jaggy edges of angles. Again, it comes at a cost, and the higher the setting, the higher the cost.

Gamma: this is an adjustment to image brightness, and is probably not worth worrying with. In my experience, it does not make much if any difference to performance, but adjusting it may make scenes more vibrant in some cases. See Wikipedia for more detailed information. In any case, if you are using Windlight adjustments, I believe they override this setting.

Enable VBO: the Vertex Buffer Object extension to OpenGL is a setting to eliminate the calculation and transfer of redundant information in rendering objects. It's generally best left on, but experiment if you like.

Texture Memory (MB): the size of this is determined by available memory on the graphics card, and helps prevent the constant re-downloading of textures from the server. According to Tateru Nino, the SL 1.22 viewer seldom uses much more than 256 MB. Presumably, this is also true of the other viewers. If you have it set higher, and see problems with crashes, adjust it downwards.

If you are running multiple viewers, I suspect, but cannot prove, that it's best to divide the total cache size of your graphics hardware by the number of viewers you are running, and set the Texture Memory no higher than that value.

Fog Distance Ratio: this affects how quickly things fade out in the distance, but is only used if 'Basic Shaders' on the main graphics tab is disabled. The lower the value, the closer the fog, and presumably the better the performance, though I haven't noticed huge effects.

One last item to discuss, back on the main graphics tab, is combination of 'Run Second Life in a window' and 'Window Size'. In my experience, setting the window size smaller than full screen can improve FPS performance, sometimes significantly. Of course, this becomes a trade-off between performance and being able to actually see anything.

Next time, we'll discuss the network performance settings. Until then, may your rendering be beautiful and your lag be low.