Rez time

[LadyEllenT]

It seems in the last few days, the places I've always visited have been taking more time to rez and sometimes they don't fully rez at all. These are places Which typically would fully rez pretty quickly for me. Items, objects and people remain grey forms (not jelly dolls). I must have messed with my settings. What part of my graphic settings (besides the quality and speed performance bar) would effect this?

[Rolig Loon]

Your graphics card will cache textures automatically as you see them in world, so that it doesn't need to download the same ones fresh each time that you see them.  When you see new textures for the first time, they are not in the cache yet, so they appear gray until they download.  The more new textures you see at once, the longer that takes.

Your graphics card does not have infinite space for cache, so it dumps textures that it hasn't used for a while to make room for new ones.  If you have been doing a lot of exploring in SL, that might be one explanation. Look in Preferences >>> Graphics >>> Advanced to see where the slider for Texture Memory is set. It defaults to 512 Mb if your computer can handle it, but if yours is less than that, you can try raising it. 

Also, if you have cleared your cache for some reason -- not usually a good idea -- then everything will appear gray the next time you see it, because the card is having to download all the textures again.

Aside from those steps, follow the standard advice about keeping your draw distance low unless you really need to see things that are far away,  That will reduce the number of textures your graphics card has to handle at once.