Did I Ruin My Firestorm Viewer or My Graphics Card?

[DeanMackenzie]

Hiya!

Two days ago, I was attempting to take an in-world photograph in Firestorm using high graphics, sun shadows and DOF. I kept playing with the sliders to get what I wanted when Firestorm crashed twice. Since then, it seems that almost all shadows have a jagged edge that can be somewhat corrected by pushing the shadow resolution slider up higher than the default. I clicked “Default” on all the sliders and even reset my Firestorm preferences. Has anyone else experienced this? Should I do a complete reinstall of Firestorm? I’m also worried if I did a number on my Mac’s graphic card (though I don’t see any defects outside of Firestorm.) 

[Madelaine McMasters]

17 minutes ago, DeanMackenzie said:

Hiya!

Two days ago, I was attempting to take an in-world photograph in Firestorm using high graphics, sun shadows and DOF. I kept playing with the sliders to get what I wanted when Firestorm crashed twice. Since then, it seems that almost all shadows have a jagged edge that can be somewhat corrected by pushing the shadow resolution slider up higher than the default. I clicked “Default” on all the sliders and even reset my Firestorm preferences. Has anyone else experienced this? Should I do a complete reinstall of Firestorm? I’m also worried if I did a number on my Mac’s graphic card (though I don’t see any defects outside of Firestorm.) 

Could it be you had the shadow setting higher than default originally? Resetting it to default would introduce the jaggies you now see. You may also have had other settings that improved your view, which are also now at default.

Over the years, I've clean-reinstalled Firestorm and/or the LL viewer several times with mixed results. It's hard (for me at least) to say what happened to you, or what's to be done about it. A clean reinstall isn't hard, but it does take time and you must be careful to preserve things like chat logs. If you choose to go that route, start here...

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_clean_install

As for your Mac, it's almost certainly fine. Modern computers have built-in temperature sensing at multiple locations on each of the power hungry chips, all monitored by the operating system. When temperatures rise, the system will do what's necessary to protect the hardware, including to spool up any cooling fans (that takes time) and to slow the CPU/GPU clocks and reduce operating voltage (that happens instantaneously). The fact that you only see graphics problems in Firestorm is very strong evidence that the hardware is fine. I'd not worry about it.

Good luck, Dean!

[Chic Aeon]

If you made a backup of your Firestorm settings (and EVERYONE SHOULD DO THAT) you can go back to your saved settings that were supposedly working for you.  This is on the BACKUP tab.   

 

Fiddling around in with the shadows is a very dangerous thing if you don't have a hefty computer. Add DOF and you are asking a lot.  I have a computer now that will do all that with no issues but only because it was what was available during the height of the Covid supply chain times :D.   Happy I have it though.  You might try lowering OTHER settings and then playing around with JUST the shadow settings to get a softer anti-aliased look and then change your other settings back.  When you find something that works be sure and make a backup --- if you didn't do that before. 

 

 

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, DeanMackenzie said:

I’m also worried if I did a number on my Mac’s graphic card (though I don’t see any defects outside of Firestorm.) 

If you had, you would see effects everywhere, there wouldn't be any doubt something was very very wrong.

Do a clean install and redo your setting by hand.

It might be tempting to restore from a backup of your setting and short cut doing it from scratch (FS's billion checkboxes are a pain), FS has SO MANY options that going over things again will likely expose you to setting and features you had no idea existed.

[DeanMackenzie]

Hey, my thanks to all of you for the suggestions. Yeah, I'm guilty of never backing up my Firestorm and I'm going to get into the habit of doing it. And I guess the next best thing to try is a complete re-install but I think I might as well wait for the next release. I've done re-installs before and I know to move and store my chat files to a safe location on my Mac. However, when I did a reset of my preferences, I was surprised to find my contact sets were wiped clean. Lesson learned. 

Again, thanks to you all!

[NiranV Dean]

Sounds like light softening is off, in FS its included in Ambient Occlusion, make sure its enabled.