Can't adjust shadows, everything is grey! Help

[Janessa Danitz]

I normally run SL on my laptop.

However, I tried to use a desktop recently and the desktop is Windows Vista -- With a graphics card of ( Intel(R) G33/G31 Express Chipset Family). For some reason, it allows me to bump my graphics up to Ultra on firestorm, it won't allow me to put it on advanced lighting model and add shadows. The area to click the box for it is all grey, I can't click it at all. Is this graphics card not supported for SL shadows?

Im confused.

Help please!

[Cerise Sorbet]

That's one of the older Intel chipsets, so yeah, you will be limited in available SL settings. You may still want to check at Intel's web site that you have the most current driver, so that the SL features that do work won't crash you.

(Low/Medium/High/Ultra mean different things depending on what your graphics hardware can do.)

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Janessa,

I'm surprised your computer can run SL at all. Here's a web page that tracks performance benchmarks for computer graphics systems and chipsets...

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

If you search for G33 on that page, you'll see it scores 10. Your laptop probably scores at least dozens of times higher than that. Current integrated graphics hardware scores in the 500-1000 range and whizzy desktop dedicated graphics cards can score as high as 10,000.

Either you'll have to add a graphics card to that desktop computer, or switch back to your laptop.

[hombra]

Cerise and Madelaine have already said it. I just wanted to add that I used these same graphics some years ago; their performance is very low on some areas even at minimum settings. If I had particles set higher than 0 I risked hanging the graphics chipset, but if you avoid certain places and turn everything to minimum, I think you can play fine. As I understand, this chipset just supports OpenGL 2.0, so some features can't be activated, as they require OpenGL 3.0 (not that it could perform even minimally with them on).