Use ATI Display Control Panel 4.5.7 to improve performance

For those of us who have ATI cards they've just released a control panel version that works properly on Powerbooks and new iMacs. Out of curiosity I tried setting Second Life to high speed...

Performance = "speed"
Anistropic Filtering = "Off"
Vertical Sync = "Off"

I keep FSAA on because it's so much nicer.

The effect is a noticeable FPS increase.

Not sure what it's actually doing, if I had to guess I'd say it's adjusted texture mipmapping so that the high res textures are only displayed when you're very close to them. I've noticed distant items are more blurred than usual but closer items are ok.

Personally I like lots of detail even at the expense of FPS, so I'm not sure how long I'll use this option, but it's worth a mention.

you can find it here

Although a pc user, this is the same effect i get when i turn on/off anistropic filtering via the sl menu, with my nvidia having its setting to "application controlled"

In my readings of the debug logs i've seen sl asking to disable vsync so thats normal too

The increase in speed is nothing to do with anistropic filtering which I keep off at all times anyway. And true, I think SL disables vsync too. I still hold with the mipmapping theory.

I think (dont quote me) ground terrain textures are or were mipmapped, although mipmapping filtering is a seperate option in nvidia panel and is switched off in normal circumstances.

There's an nvidia panel? Because I've been looking for something like that with absolutely no luck. I'm at the low end of Mac compatibility for SL (1Ghz) with a GeForce 4 MX and any performance improvement I can get is worthwhile.

I've heard of people using the ATI controller to favor SL, but nothing on nvidia cards.

EDIT: I'm a total dummy. Didn't notice you were a PC user. You threw me by being in the Mac bit. Disregard.

More antidotal evidence (thanks for the tip!):

I turned up everything to full in the ati control panel override for SL. Wow, it looks much better than full SL settings, the FSAA at highest makes a very nice difference. And for some reason my framerates are higher too... lol. Ok, _now_ I'm happy with SL on my X800.

Summary of what I've done to improve look and fps on my dual G5 2GHz 2.5g ram with ATI X800:

1) deleted my SL cache files (startup time improved)
2) turned every seeting in SL on and to full
3) draw distance at 96 (I'm near sighted in game. lol) This one setting makes the most difference in FPS, I would recommend people on slow machines turn it down to the lowest possible setting you can live with.
4) Avatar vertex on (contrary to other posts on this topic it seems to work fine for me and look better)
5) ATI Control pannel app overrides, everything to full.
6) was seeing packet loss, but after I added the firewall udp/tcp ports to both my linksys and my mac firewall settings that went to 0%.

I see fps of 17-> 30 most of the time now and with FSAA on full SL is getting more emersive.. (uh oh).

I run at 1280x1024 with 2x2 FSAA, and I can't stand anything lower res any more. The jagged lines hurt my eyes.

Which is a pain since that means I'm doing well to get over 10 FPS on my Windows box with an nVidia 5600, and my Mac Mini is out of the question.