Graphics

[SxeCougar]

Can anyone tell me what are the best settings to have your graphics on under avatar preferences? 

[Alwin Alcott]

8 minutes ago, SxeCougar said:

Can anyone tell me what are the best settings to have your graphics on under avatar preferences? 

totally depends on your machine and connection, and your location in SL, or purpose, there is no general advice to give

[Rolig Loon]

That all depends on what graphics card you have in your computer, what viewer you are using, what you are trying to do (photography?  modeling?), where you are at the moment (in a crowded shopping area or in a skybox at 3000m?) , and a lot of personal likes and dislikes.  There is no "best" answer.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Draw distances way over 512 are the way to go, especially on the crappiest GPU you can get your hands on, experts told me.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

The slider in the basic settings is about useless. Skip it and fine tune your settings to match your computer and taste.

Basic shaders should always be on. So should atmospheric shaders unless you're feeling nostalgic for 2006. If you have a computer that can handle it, Advanced Lighting Model should usually be on. It will kill performance on old and low end graphics cards. 

128M is usually the highest you should set draw distance. Set particles lower to improve performance. 

OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects should be on unless you're using an old AMD video card that is well past its expiry date. Antialiasing should be at least 2x, except on terrible computers. Texture memory should be 512MB (if you're running a third party viewer, set it higher if you can).

If you have a Mac, HiDPI displays should be off. Unless your Mac is really new and really fast.

Water reflections is up to you, whatever you think looks good and doesn't tank performance. I think all static objects is a good balance.

Shadows should probably be set to none unless you have a very good computer or are taking pictures. 

The settings under "mesh",  and avatar detail and physics should all be high, and avatar hardware skinning should be checked. Turn Avatar Complexity and Max # of non-imposter avatars down if you're running on a potato.

[Nalates Urriah]

We used to post lots of How To Optimize SL Viewer for performance information. Not so much these days.

It is an arcane art only practiced by mages, warlocks, and witches. If you want to give it a try start with your video card. Graphics Tweaking for Second Life (2010) and Nvidia Settings (2016) Those are for NVidia. AMD is similar.

Once you have that optimized you can go to work on the viewer-computer combination: How To get a Faster Second Life. This is old... 

There used to be lots of articles on How to Do Graphics Settings in the viewer. I looked at a couple of those. They are horribly out of date suggesting things that used to help but now make things worse. Even the 2017 articles were not something I would recommend.

So... we are left one of the basic takeaways from all those articles. Open the viewer Preferences->Graphics and start experimenting. These settings will be different for each computer. Your CPU, memory, motherboard, graphics chip/card, and storage all contribute to how well SL runs  on your machine. What you will tolerate as acceptable performance versus render quality is a personal choice. Thus the recommendation to open Preferences and experiment.

Open you viewer stats panel (Ctrl-Shift-1) and then Preferences. Adjust the Quality and Speed slider. This gets you in the ballpark. I suggest you decide if you want performance or render quality. They are somewhat mutually exclusive. You are looking for a balance point you like. 

If you want the Best Performance start with the slider to the left. If you are more interested in render quality start with it to the right. From there start enabling and disabling features and adjusting various values while watching the FPS values in the stats panel. You'll find there are features that have little effect on the visual while significantly impacting performance. And the reverse is true too. This is tedious but it is how you get to the BEST settings for you specific hardware.