How to enable some of the graphics settings in preferences...?

[Evangeline Arcadia]

I've noticed that there is a difference between the way water looks on my PC compared to my laptop. Even though my PC is older and has a less powerful graphics card, the water in SL is detailed, beautiful and sparkly (e.g . at places like Alirium). I've made a comparison of the graphics settings on the PC and laptop, and set the laptop to the same as the PC,  and notice that on my laptop I can't enable Advanced lighting Model (or Ambient Occlusion or Depth of Field) and this is the one difference now between the settings. Also, Shadows and Water Reflections are greyed out (although set the same). I've also set the settings the same under Hardware, and checked the settings under World> Environment Editor match too. 

I've gone through a comparison of my video card settings for second life and matched them up where possible. 

There's still a difference and I'm a bit stumped as to why. Is anyone able to help with any suggestions please?

[Evangeline Arcadia]

Forgot to add..I'm using a GeForce Go 7950 GTX card on the laptop. 

[Ren Toxx]

May it be that you have to raise the general performance/quality setting to “Ultra”, for ALM to be enabled? That's what I do, even if I then switch it off until I need it.

Otherwise, it may be that your particular graphics card model isn't yet recognized by your viewer's internal database; to manually force it to recognize it, follow procedures such as described here.

[Freya Mokusei]

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Evangeline Arcadia wrote:

Forgot to add..I'm using a GeForce Go 7950 GTX card on the laptop. 

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Oldest card I've seen here in a while. They started making those back in 2006 and they are a mess. A core speed of barely over 500Mhz and being pre-CUDA doesn't help it to run anything released in the last decade.

And yeah, Ren (above) is correct - these are going to be massively limited, they were built to run DirectX 9.0c Shader 3.0 from 2004. Second Life is based on OpenGL of course, but things don't bode well there either. It's mostly an age thing, technology moves on and older cards just aren't built to handle new functionality. Not all rendering processes are equal!

Not at all surprised that it refuses to run modern features - it was never designed for those kinds of technology.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

Yeah, but my PC graphics card is a GeForce GT 610 and that works fine (on windows XP ! ) ....  :matte-motes-confused:

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

You could also check that your Windlight settings for water are the same. You might have Use Region Windlight set on one and not the other for example.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

Thanks for the suggetstion , I've tried setting it to Ultra, but the settings are still greyed out. 

[Evangeline Arcadia]

Yep, checked the environment settings were the same. Everything is the same on the laptop as on the PC except for those few greyed out settings in graphics I mentioned. 

[Freya Mokusei]

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Evangeline Arcadia wrote:

Yeah, but my PC graphics card is a GeForce GT 610 and that works fine (on windows XP ! ) ....  :matte-motes-confused:

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610 is muchmuchmuchmuch newer, even tho it's low spec it's high capability because it's recent - uses the same tricks as high spec cards it's just slower at it. You can do more with less nowadays, but that scaling doesn't go backward in time.

It was more or less the same as a 520, and was released six years after the laptop card you're using. Being a full size card it's more capable and more reliable than the laptop card in the first instance. Its core runs at over 800Mhz (+300 over the laptop) and is compatible with OpenGL4.4 and DirectX 11.0.

OhgodWindowsXP. :matte-motes-oh-rly: Both XP and your laptop 7950 have gone way past their support lifetimes - poor compatibility is going to happen. You're gonna need a lot of luck to enable new features on such old hardware - XP, as software, is only a little bit more flexible.

[Evangeline Arcadia]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I seem to solved the problem! I installed the Phoenix Firestorm viewer onto my laptop and it works beautifully (so far) - I'm now seeing proper water ripples and reflections as I do on my PC! Superb!

[Coby Foden]

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Ren Toxx wrote:

May it be that you have to raise the general performance/quality setting to “Ultra”, for ALM to be enabled? That's what I do, even if I then switch it off until I need it.

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Well, actually there is no need to crank up the graphics settings to Ultra to be able to enable Advanced Lighting Model (ALM). In Firestorm ALM is possible when the "Performance" is set between "Low" and "Mid".

 

 

[Phoebe Avro]

To see sparkley water you only need basic shaders  turned on !your your graphics card may be able to use that but its detected by the viewer and turned off it is possible in bebug settings to turn off auto detect on startup its called

probehardwareOnstartup  in debug settings set it to false

Then restart your viewer

It may or may not work

 

[Evangeline Arcadia]

Thanks for the tip - I had a look and it was set to false already.