A Thread - All About LOD

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Lard / Lord / LOD!

FIFY, we have to capitalize every letter, otherwise people may not realise just how important LOD is!

[Love Zhaoying]

13 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

FIFY, we have to capitalize every letter, otherwise people may not realise just how important LOD is!

Like MOAP!

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Like MOAP!

And TOS! 

Anyway, dragging this thread kicking and screaming back on topic, a new user doesn't need to know all that much about LOD beyond what the acronym stands for, and that the term gets used (and misappropriated) for a variety of different things like the individual meshes of decreasing complexity that are used to create mesh objects in SL, the object complexity settings in the viewer and sometimes as a way to describe the "quality" of a particular mesh object.

Giving a newbie any more specific information would probably be a little overwhelming unless they're expressing an interest in creating mesh or are specifically asking about tweaking their object complexity settings (in which case just tell them to try it and see but maybe include a friendly warning that it may potentially cause a drop in frame rates and increased gpu usage).

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

And TOS! 

Anyway, dragging this thread kicking and screaming back on topic, a new user doesn't need to know all that much about LOD beyond what the acronym stands for, and that the term gets used (and misappropriated) for a variety of different things like the individual meshes of decreasing complexity that are used to create mesh objects in SL, the object complexity settings in the viewer and sometimes as a way to describe the "quality" of a particular mesh object.

Giving a newbie any more specific information would probably be a little overwhelming unless they're expressing an interest in creating mesh or are specifically asking about tweaking their object complexity settings (in which case just tell them to try it and see but maybe include a friendly warning that it may potentially cause a drop in frame rates and increased gpu usage).

I think it would help if n00bs understood their purchases do NOT have to look like a pile of sticks, even if they are NOT using the highest LOD setting (if they buy items with good quality low LOD). I can see people assuming if something looks like garbage, "that's just how Second Life is".

Edited September 18, 2022 by Love Zhaoying

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

I think it would help if n00bs understood their purchases do NOT have to look like a pile of sticks, even if they are NOT using the highest LOD setting. I can see people assuming if something looks like garbage, "that's just how Second Life is".

That's just the burden we bear for living in a world of entirely user-generated content, mesh may have amplified it a little but SL has always had to deal with the fallout from being the digital equivalent of a patchwork quilt being worked on by thousands of people all with wildly disparate visions and ideas.

I guess at most all a new user needs to know is the basics of how mesh works to explain why a sofa or table suddenly changes to some weird spikey abstract sculpture once you get more than a few meters away from it and that their options are to either avoid buying/using content that does that or tweak their settings which may have a detrimental effect on performance and their hardware.

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

[Paulsian]

2 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

Anyway...  none of this is anything you would tell a newbie about LOD.  This thread is just a place for people to measure their...  swords.  Yeah, swords.  I said it.

LOD - the level of detail your personal computer set up renders items at certain distances?  If it is too low, then items lose detail and turn into weird triangles when you get far enough away?  Is that right?

Your LOD setting only impacts your view.  No one sees SL the same way even with the same settings because your computer hardware and/or software also impact the LOD?  Is that right?

Increasing your LOD setting may or may not impact your computers performance in rendering your view.  It also may or may not heat your computer up and cause issues.  None of this is right, right?

When buying items for your avatar or home you can test items at your preferred LOD, but others with different LOD settings might not see your great outfit or decor items.  Right?

LOD may or may not impact your fps, but draw distance definitely does...  Maybe.   I may have missed if this was answered in all the sword measuring.

If you want to buy an item that a creator says needs to be viewed at LOD 4, but you use LOD 2 for yourself, don't buy that item. Right?

 

 

and finally, no one else cares what your LOD is set to.  Each individual sets their own preferred setting and enjoys their SL in their own way.  They do not care about your view, only their own. Right!!!

 

 

Yep and as a creator at the time I upload my products I tell SL what LOD I want my products to be, which is normally high so even if someone has their viewers LOD low my products will never triangle out ever.

I don't know what's worse, having a world full of objects that are the higest LOD or a world with objects with multiple levels of LOD containing several models constantly updating and changing depending on distance camera is from object? hmm

[Theresa Tennyson]

7 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

I don't know what's worse, having a world full of objects that are the higest LOD or a world with objects with multiple levels of LOD containing several models constantly updating and changing depending on distance camera is from object? hmm

That's literally what the LOD system is meant to do.

[Paulsian]

1 minute ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

That's literally what the LOD system is meant to do.

Yep and wondering if that's more processor friendly or demanding. Having to recalculate and render hundreds of objects around our cameras location at any given point. No wonder we all lag when we get together. If we all had stable LOD likely would not have that. 

I think what the viewers LOD system does is takes objects that are uploaded at a lower LOD makes them behave to act like objects that are uploaded at a higher LOD. 

The name of the game for me is to create objects with the lowest land impact as humanly possible while uploading the model at the higest lod. It's the best of both worlds. How objects are built has a lot to do with land impact. Consumers want lowest land impact. Our jobs as creators is to provide products with the lowest land impact uploaded at the highest quality. It makes us better builders learning to build better keeping land impact in mind. 

Anyone can upload a model that's lower LOD quality to keep the land impact down and I think more and more consumers are learning they can have quality with less quanity and can certainly tell if quantity does not have quality. 

The master builders know more tricks than I do because they have more experience. 

[Paulsian]

This sort of system appears to be brilliantly engineered, but why is what i'm wondering. To teach us? There's more than one way to do things? Nothing worthwhile is ever easy?

I can see making a system more difficult for job security reasons. It's very common in the united states. Make things as confusing as possible so only you and maybe an assistant knows what is going on so others depend on only you for support. 

A platform built for builders with the most confusing everything is a little strange. 

Edited September 18, 2022 by Paulsian

[Paulsian]

 

[Da5id Weatherwax]

12 hours ago, Paulsian said:

Yep and wondering if that's more processor friendly or demanding. Having to recalculate and render hundreds of objects around our cameras location at any given point. No wonder we all lag when we get together. If we all had stable LOD likely would not have that. 

I think what the viewers LOD system does is takes objects that are uploaded at a lower LOD makes them behave to act like objects that are uploaded at a higher LOD. 

The name of the game for me is to create objects with the lowest land impact as humanly possible while uploading the model at the higest lod. It's the best of both worlds. How objects are built has a lot to do with land impact. Consumers want lowest land impact. Our jobs as creators is to provide products with the lowest land impact uploaded at the highest quality. It makes us better builders learning to build better keeping land impact in mind. 

Anyone can upload a model that's lower LOD quality to keep the land impact down and I think more and more consumers are learning they can have quality with less quanity and can certainly tell if quantity does not have quality. 

The master builders know more tricks than I do because they have more experience. 

The effect is actually the other way round. loading each LOD model happens ONLY when the distance from model to camera crosses the LOD thresholds. The calculations for rendering the hundreds of objects around your camera happen every frame anyway.

If every model at every LOD was high-poly the graphics card would still render every tri of it, even if the size of the model on the screen was only a couple of dozen pixels across and you couldn't see the detail with a microscope.

Proper LODing of the model before you upload it makes it less laggy - not just for you but for everyone else that can "see" it inworld because you and they are not wasting CPU and GPU cycles rendering detail that is too small for even the highest-resolution screen to show.

[Beq Janus]

On 9/15/2022 at 4:39 PM, ChinRey said:

You want to get rid of smaller details on objects that are viewed at some distance. Fewer tris and vertices improves the frame rate a little bit and it improves load time quite a bit. But perhaps msot important, with LOD all maxed out, you soon get tris so small the viewer has to find a way to sqeeze several of them onto a single pixel on the screen and then you're really giving your poor GPU some work to do. I seem to remember that  @Beq Janus posted an article about this in her blog a while ago. I can't find it now but maybe she can help.

I suspect it was in the brief discussion of the future problems we are storing up for ourselves in my mesh body analytics posts (this one maybe - Why crowds cause lag) Towards the end is an appenidx of sorts where I briefly discuss some of the common myths and assumptions. 

Quote

We are, as they say, between a rock and a hard place...

 

But does it affect the FPS? Yes, to some extent. If you have a high detail LOD that is being drawn at a distance where most of the triangles resolve to a small number of pixels, then the GPU has to shade each vertex, and this can mean that a pixel in the final render is being shaded more than once, this is known as "overdraw". It means that your GPU is doing a lot more work than it needs to. Simply put, if every pixel on your screen was shaded once and then had to be done against, then clearly, it takes twice as long as shading just once would. This is a great example of a GPU bottleneck, which we rarely see in SL due to the draw call problems that dwarf everything else. These are real problems; they are just hidden from view right now. 

We are now in that future space where the CPU bottleneck has been widened enough that for many of us we are seeing our GPUs work harder. Now you are facing overdraw issues. In an ideal world we would have to only shade each pixel once, that would give you a minimum frametime on your GPU and is dictated by your fill rate. As the techopedia article says there is no accurate or standard fill rate calculation but if for example your GPU had 1000 pixel pipeline cores and a 2Ghz clock speed then you might be able to shade 2 billion pixel per second. Let's now say that you have a 4K screen at 3840x2160 pixels. That gives you a max theoretical framerate on the GPU setup of ~240 fps. In reality, you rarely shade a pixel once only, various overlays and shadow passes etc complicate matters, but these are ok as they tend to be consistent. The issues arise when you friend walks on to the screen in their obscenely over complex mesh body, wearing their obscenely over complex clothes spewed out from marvellous designer by a creator who does care about you electricity bills, hardware health or FPS, and all of those tiny triangles are being drawn to the screen in a small 256x256 patch. There's only 64K of pixels and 250K of triangles....overdraw hell, your GPU is wasting time drawing and redrawing and redrawing the same pixel pointlessly. This is also why we grumble about alpha blend a lot. Alpha blend is by definition overdrawing as it needs to use the previous pixel colour to calculate the next one. 

Drawcalls were the bane of FPS last year, we've moved on and now triangles are back with a vengeance.

 

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

We are now in that future space where the CPU bottleneck has been widened enough that for many of us we are seeing our GPUs work harder.

A little bit off topic but I'm not quite convinced about this. I don't know if you saw this thread, Beq. In one of the tests I made for it I had a 48,960 tri prim build outperforming a 3,060 tri mesh. It's hard to see how that can be explained unless the cpu performance is still the bottleneck.

But of course, the cpu vs gpu "power balance" is an important factor here and my computer -  a 3.60 GHz Intel i7-11700K cpu and a Nvidia Geforce RTX3090 gpu - may be significantly more slanted towards gpu power than what most people have. It would be great if we had similar, and less casual, tests with different hardware setups.

Edited September 20, 2022 by ChinRey

[Beq Janus]

23 hours ago, ChinRey said:

A little bit off topic but I'm not quite convinced about this. I don't know if you saw this thread, Beq. In one of the tests I made for it I had a 48,960 tri prim build outperforming a 3,060 tri mesh. It's hard to see how that can be explained unless the cpu performance is still the bottleneck.

But of course, the cpu vs gpu "power balance" is an important factor here and my computer -  a 3.60 GHz Intel i7-11700K cpu and a Nvidia Geforce RTX3090 gpu - may be significantly more slanted towards gpu power than what most people have. It would be great if we had similar, and less casual, tests with different hardware setups.

I just looked at it today (I tend to be reactive to threads here and only see things when I get pinged 🙂 ) and I'd have to take time (that for RL reasons I don't have at the moment) to examine the tests in more detail to form a proper conclusion. However, we'd need to assess how many draw calls each of those decomposed into for a start because, as you know from my previous "preachings" draw calls outweigh triangles by orders of magnitude. the server-side and network aspects can be largely excluded, they have depending on what it is you are trying to measure. There is a difference between frame rate and what for want of a better term I will call "scene rate", where the latter is how long it takes for all of the assets in your view to be full downloaded and made available for rendering. As you note CPU/GPU balance and bottlenecks is very context sensitive to both the scene being rendered and moreover the hardware doing the rendering. What you should be seeing when comparing a previous generation viewer to the current performant viewers is higher GPU utilisation no matter how powerful the GPU it is likely to be working harder than before. Likewise the CPU profile should have changed. Historically you'd have seen the CPU running at 100% on a single core (Windows is absolutely rubbish at conveying this and what you will see is that 100% spread across all the cores, so an 8 core CPU would show on average 12.5% utilisation - just blame the awful windows scheduler), nowadays you'll still see that burning core that represents the main render thread, but increasingly you'll see more utilisation on the other cores, with more work moving to other threads to run in parallel, in particular you'll see this upon arrival in a new region as we fetch and decode all the textures. 

In your case, the 3090 was barely awake before, and in my experimentation that should hold true for most moderately complex scenes on anything more than around a GTX980, because the fillrate of those GPUs could easily outstrip the supply rate of draws from the CPU and therefore waits. We are now pushing far more work per draw call, and so the GPUs are having to step up and play their part, but how much it steps up, will vary.

I do have a TODO list task to revisit my previous experiments on mesh avatars and perhaps to extend that work, but it is unlikely to happen this side of November due to RL work commitments.

[Charlotte Bartlett]

Proper LODs is a hell of an effort so your item looks nice at a proper distance. So hope you appreciate it, is how I would explain it to a Newbie.

I am biased:  last month 50 plus piece kitchen and accessories all with custom LODs bar the lowest (sorry not sorry).  The effort this takes is incredible compared to those who zero it all out (those detailed furniture makers)….

Many new and old customers always want LOW LI and All The Details as that is “quality”.  I can probably count on one hand those who ask if the LODs are custom.   It’s a really small subset of at least my user base. 

Also it is its own workflow optimizing mesh properly.  It is not really documented for SL products.  It took me a lot of help from forum users over the years to figure my custom workflow.   

Either way if a newbie asked me about LODs I think I would be very happy!!

 

Edited September 21, 2022 by Charlotte Bartlett

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Just now, Charlotte Bartlett said:

Also it is its own workflow optimizing mesh properly.  It is not really documented for SL products.  It took me a lot of help from forum users over the years to figure my custom workflow.

Retopology and creating LODs is certainly a tedious and frustrating art form, it's definitely one stage of the creative process in which I'd like to see AI implemented so I could just drop in a digital sculpt with a few million polygons and type in "make low poly model good now please thank you!" and go make a coffee instead!

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 9/17/2022 at 11:31 PM, ChinRey said:

On 9/17/2022 at 1:19 AM, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

Thankfully, most viewers now have Avatar Complexity settings in their preferences which allows the viewer user to decide whether these very high complex avatars can be fully rezzed or not.

Except it doesn't do exactly that of course. The viewer has no way of knowing which avatars are heavy to render and which aren't so it more or less picks some avatars at random to "jellydoll" out.

But it can, now!

Don't forget Beq's new performance tools, which keeps track of how long it takes to render an avatar (and how bad Avatar Complexity is at estimating it). That info can be used to specifically jellydoll avatars that take too long to render.

To tie this into the topic a little bit, avatars still have the problem quirk where all of your attachments use the same LOD level, based on your avatar's distance from the camera, instead of every attachment being considered on its own. I haven't decided whether I think it's a good thing or a bad thing, there's downsides to both.

[Rick Nightingale]

I was just reminded of this thread while shopping. I'm looking for a fancy, stone gazebo-type structure. Seen two that looked like candidates after 14 pages * 96 items per page on the MP. I went to have a look in world.

One, by a very well known store, was so close I nearly bought it immediately I saw it. The rather low resolution texturing put me off just long enough for my brain to kick in, although at a short distance it was beautiful. Still, it was mod perms so I considered retexturing it. Then I remembered to check the LOD. After the High LOD it dropped to 6 triangles for the remaining three LODs. From half way cross my land it would disintegrate at LOD factor 4. Nope. If only the maker had made just one lower triangle model for LOD2, or even just used LOD1 for LOD2 as well, it would have done the job.

The second was outrageously expensive (L$1000's), but extremely well detailed and, while not as pretty as the first, was good enough to consider. This time I checked the LOD first. The fancy stone details didn't just disappear, they turned into black blocks at the edge of talking distance on the people radar circle. Another one that just minimised the lower three LODs to a few triangles and couldn't even get that right. Useless.

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to Blender I go. I would buy something if I could find it but once again I'm forced to make it if I want something decent.

Thanks to Firestorm for its LOD information in the edit panel.

Edit to add: I just looked at another. It's not what I'm looking for really, it's wood, not stone. It's well made though, and actually has all four LOD models at reasonable triangle counts. Higher on the first LOD than the first one above, yet has a lower LI than both the above and doesn't change appearence jarringly even moving to 256m away and LOD factor 2! So it can be done. Shame it's not what I'm looking for but I'll remember the creator.

Edited October 2, 2022 by Rick Daylight

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

I must say, after nearly 10 years in SL and using it with a range of cards from a 1070 to a 3080, changing the LOD setting has never seemed to impact my performance in any noticeable way, so I have always had it at 4. And I go grid hopping quite regularly. Overall Draw Distance has a far greater impact. Its only when I go to very full multi-region areas that my GPU starts to sweat.

I always assumed the LOD factor was a sort of "legacy" setting for people trying to run SL on an actual potato. I never understood folks who try to run SL on a non gaming laptop and expect decent performance.

I've also pretty much always used Firestorm or Black Dragon. Hearing that the SL viewer is set to 1.25 is kinda shocking. I assumed it would be at least 2. 

I do have some sympathy with creators who butcher the LOD. We demand ever more detailed objects, and we also want them to be low Land Impact, and also as cheap as possible. I really appreciate creators who make both "high" and "low" LOD items. Seems the best way is to let the consumer decide which is best for their purpose. 

Edited October 3, 2022 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[animats]

Making LODs for clothing is really complicated. But the big guys have it working. Here are the instructions for Unreal Engine 5's automatic rigged mesh LOD creator.

Click here to create LODs.

That's used after you've already baked the multiple clothing layers down to a single clothed body layer, adjusting the meshes so the inner layers don't push through the outer layers. Roblox can now do this. No more need for alpha layers. No more need for different clothing items for different avatars, either. One size fits all, being stretched to fit.

Can LL catch up? It won't be easy. But it's not impossible, now that others have shown the way.

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

On 9/15/2022 at 10:02 AM, Rick Daylight said:

There's some really rubbish stuff around, LOD-wise. Lots of it based on the same source of full-perm meshes. I ended up making my own tables simply because the one I liked turned into a mess if I stood at the far end of the room unless I set my LOD factor all the way up.

LODs should be designed such that the object looks right at any distance, within reason depending on its intended purpose and at a reasonable viewer LOD factor. I tend to design for factor 2, and at that, my stuff will look the same shape at any distance, even when it drops to much lower detail. You'll be hard pushed to see the change, but I can still get very low LI. My tables and chairs are 1LI, quite detailed up close, and in any reasonable size room (even at SL giant scale) you'll never see them look bad. That's how it can and should be done.

 

 

Interesting because when I drop my LOD down my mesh body poofs. 

I do not usually have my LOD under 4 anyway… not sure why you go low anyway. 
 

 

[Rya Nitely]

A business perspective

I run two businesses in SL under different avatars (the other is Reid Parkin), and I make a decent living. My business model is basically to let the market decide. The market will let you know the worth of your creations.

My customers want low LI. My mesh items sell well because they are low LI (and good quality). Hardly anyone criticises the visibility.

I make my own LOD models, but I almost always use a triangle for the lowest.

In my experience, consumers in SL are more interested in low LI than good LOD. I strive to give them both, often spending days on the LOD models, but you will hardly ever achieve both a low LI and good representative LODs at all levels.

It isn't true that creators/sellers who use a triangle are taking the easiest way out. They do it to keep LI down because that is what sells, and that is what a successful business does. They let the market decide.

I have looked at the work of other very successful and reputable landscape businesses, and they do the same as me or less. One very well known landscape creator usually uses a triangle at both low and lowest. I don't think this is good practice, but it isn't up to me to decide that. Her items sell very well and have high ratings. The market decides.

So, if most people are using an LOD set at 2, then they probably don't mind so much if items disappear. They will put up with it for the low LI.

 

[Da5id Weatherwax]

20 minutes ago, Rya Nitely said:

A business perspective

I run two businesses in SL under different avatars (the other is Reid Parkin), and I make a decent living. My business model is basically to let the market decide. The market will let you know the worth of your creations.

My customers want low LI. My mesh items sell well because they are low LI (and good quality). Hardly anyone criticises the visibility.

I make my own LOD models, but I almost always use a triangle for the lowest.

In my experience, consumers in SL are more interested in low LI than good LOD. I strive to give them both, often spending days on the LOD models, but you will hardly ever achieve both a low LI and good representative LODs at all levels.

It isn't true that creators/sellers who use a triangle are taking the easiest way out. They do it to keep LI down because that is what sells, and that is what a successful business does. They let the market decide.

I have looked at the work of other very successful and reputable landscape businesses, and they do the same as me or less. One very well known landscape creator usually uses a triangle at both low and lowest. I don't think this is good practice, but it isn't up to me to decide that. Her items sell very well and have high ratings. The market decides.

So, if most people are using an LOD set at 2, then they probably don't mind so much if items disappear. They will put up with it for the low LI.

 

As a former SL business owner I can't take issue with the validity of this approach to the market.

As a techie I do have some comments to add.

1: You've clearly taken on board the fact that the key to low LI is intelligent LOD-ing, not just collapsing the lowest LOD to a triangle. Collapsing the lowest LOD has by far the greatest impact on LI but the bigger the model is inworld, the more an impact the low or even the mid can have on it. Whether this was by conscious design or just discovering it through your own creative process you address this by making your own LOD models.

2: a really minor nitpick about a triangle not being the easy way out. I'm sorry, but it is - although, given the use-case of the particular model you're building, it may still be valid. Where your model is for interior use and nobody, even at low viewer LOD settings, will see it from far enough away to view the lowest LOD (there will always be a wall in the way.) For a purely indoor object, collapsing the low and lowest models in this way may be valid. When an object can be viewed at lowest LOD, usually only outdoors, you are likely to find that using a few (single digits, 8 at the most, usually) triangles to create a planar "impostor" of your object will make no difference to the final LI, the few decimals difference this makes compared to a single triangle in the lowest LOD being lost in the rounding to the nearest integer, but the improvement in inworld appearance being significant. It is a bit of a faff though, and you may find the investment in time or the need to reserve a material slot for the impostor texture unacceptable. It is, after all, your model and your creative process we're talking about here. I'd simply urge you to think about applying the assumption that "lowest LOD is a triangle" across the board.

3: Ultimately, however you approach it, a testing phase will yield the greatest effect. We have a nice shiny beta grid where uploads don't cost and it's covered in sandboxes. Use the standard official viewer - the reference standard, at default settings - and rez your model there. Cam out from it, noting where the LODs flip and how much detail you can see at that size on the screen. Do this at all 4 standard viewer graphics presets, low/med/high/ultra. Once your model looks great at high/ultra and acceptable at low, you're at your starting point for true optimisation. Set your graphics preset to high and repeat the "cam out and inspect the appearance as the LODs change" thing. Are there details in the geometry of a LOD model that you just can't see when that model is displayed? Get rid of them, all they will do for ANY user is burn CPU and GPU cycles to no effect, causing lag. After each change, repeat the inspection process on low graphics settings, to make sure you haven't made it look less than acceptable for the folks running potato systems. When you can't get rid of any more detail from the LODs without it making it look actually bad to the potato folks, you'll have as perfectly optimised a model as it's possible to get in this render engine. And it won't just be low-LI it will be low-lag too Being able to honestly put a line in your MP ads saying "mesh LOD levels have been optimised for both low LI and low lag" is something that catches the eye of techie customers like me, I assure you   (We will, as @Rick Daylight described above, come and see inworld - so don't put that line in unless it IS honest. You'll lose a potential customer forever if it isn't)

[Prokofy Neva]

There are some creators like Hisa and Yugen who provide you with two versions of an item, "Low LOD 4" and "High LOD 2" (the numbers are counterintuitive). And I choose the "Low LOD" for the very simple reason that it is much less land impact and it looks no different to me, and customers don't complain. Most people don't have long draw distance and don't have all the graphics boxes checked.

I don't like being hectored by creators who insist I turn my settings up to 4 for the simple reason that I find this tip really only applies to sculpties (remember them?) which can look an absolute mess unless you have 4. But it doesn't seem to make much difference on *mesh*, *to me*.

And sometimes to me it seems it's more about the texture not being managed (1024 versus 512 which is less laggy and pops into view faster) rather than the vertices.

And now that I've heard that "4" can "hurt my computer," while experts disagree, I put it down to...2. Because I think the really bad view of stuff fixes around 2. And if it doesn't, well, I will look elsewhere.

It's all about land impact. 

I don't tell newbies about LOD. I tell them to put their draw down to 64 until they get better adjusted and figure out how to lag less, then push it up gradually.