What SL graphics setting do you use?

A friend of mine came over the other evening, and she had been playing SL for about 2 months on her son's old laptop. When she saw SL on my machine she went ape. OMG, look at the water!

She had been running SL using the lowest graphics setting (Low) as her laptop was unable to run anything higher. I didn't ask her at the time what actually happens if your hardware / software only allows you to run at the lowest graphics setting, and you try setting it to Ultra anyway, what exactly happens?

So, I was wondering, what graphics setting are you running SL at? It would be interesting to see what the most common setting is.

I run mine on Very High, btw, I don't see much difference with Ultra, and I tend to get lag if I try (did I just answer my previous question?)

Although I have a fast system with a good graphics card I set my graphics setting to the lowest. Generally I'm building, scripting and doing things like that for various custom jobs throughout the different RPG communities on any given account.
I like to keep things at the lowest slider, but I keep bump mapping, basic shaders, atmospheric shaders, and nearby local lights on.
Basically I keep it low but I turn on a variety of the perks so it doesn't look completely lame.
I lower all the sliders on the right hand side down on things I don't really have a huge need for.. Like particles are slide down to a low count, flexi prims are almost not even on etc.

What happens is (1) you can't see most of the effects anyway, and some of the options aren't even available in the custom selection because you don't have hardware support and then (2) your system overheats and crashes.

My old laptop has an Intel GMA 910 graphics chip, so I can get about 12 fps with a draw distance of 64 meters and all of the the cool effects turned off. Water and atmospheric effects require pixel shading, which my chip does not support.

My wife has an Nvidia 8600 GT graphics card, so it is night and day. It runs on medium, but has water and atmosphere effects, bit/bump mapping, and all that cool eyecandy. SL looks so much better on her laptop.

My new laptop lasted about an hour before it died (awaiting a replacement next week) but I had SL running at very high settings, every effect turned on, 256 meter draw distance, and 2x antialiasing. It was breathtaking, and now I can't bear to look at SL on my old laptop. It was running on a G51 with a 2.8 GHz C2D, 4 GB RAM, and a GTX 260m. Never had a chance to install the SSD, but the performance difference was well worth it.

My SL Settings:

- ULTRA
- 256-384 Draw (512 when on estates)
- Antisotropic ON
- Antialiasing = x8

System:

Quad Core 2.83ghz
8GB Ram
9500 GT 1GB

ultimate.

except for when i need 200% performance with the smallest possible probability for lag. then i tune down to medium.

on good days (no asset server induced texture lag) i have around 25fps with a draw distance of 256m.

Ultra! :d

Custom, but probably something like "Very High"

All mesh sliders to max, apart from sky.
Bump mapping and Shiny, Shaders and Atmospheric shaders on, but Water Reflection off.
Avatar Imposters and Hardware skinning on.
Local Lights on.
Post Process to high.
4x anti-alias.

Draw distance depends on where I am... minimum for shopping where there's a lot to load, around 160m generally, all the way up if viewing a huge build.

Low - and I've still managed to melt the graphics card in this brand-new laptop, I think. Less than a week and it's going back to the shop. (Dell Inspiron, I think the graphics adapter is a generic 'Intel' thing)

On my desktop I had settings at high with the custom bits I wanted, rather like Kelli.

I use a non windlight viewer. I keep detail up high, particles low, and all the other options unchecked, unless I am taking pictures. My draw distance is usually 96 except when flying where I will bump it up a bit.

Ultra, with AF and 4xAA on, avatar imposters off. Debug settings RenderTreeLODFactor and RenderVolumeLODFactor set to 8.

Draw distance at 256M, but that changes depending on what I'm doing.

How do you measure the "fps"? With the latest viewer all I can find is the lag meter under Help, which is not much use.

It is under Tools I believe, Statistics Bar.

Rock

Press Ctrl-Shift-1 to get the statistics window up. I believe you can also find it in the view menu.

Depends...

Most of the time I leave it at "mid", though I manually bump the "object detail" up to max.
I go back and forth with atmospheric shaders. Some days I like it, some days I don't. I turn it on and off as the mood strikes me, and when it's on, I change advanced sky as the mood strikes me. I tend to prefer my own customization of Torley's "New Romantic". I call mine "New Romantic 2" (how original, right?). It's really nothing like the original setting.

When I go to live concerts, I drop everything to the rock bottom lowest setting possible.

When taking pictures, I kick it up to Ultra and increase the draw distance, but my computer can't handle this smoothly in crowded areas.

My rig (few years old):
Pentium D 3Ghz
2 GB RAM
GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB

I keep everything low, except for the avatar settings which are low-middle. Under some circumstances, such as taking pictures, I may crank settings up.

Hubby keeps things cranked up on a large screen iMac. In general, there's no real difference (other than the FPS difference). You've seen one set of waves, you've seen them all. Some specific scenes do look much better with higher settings, but even if I spent more time touring the artistic builds, I still wouldn't keep my camera focused in the one place where it actually matters.

before my update I was on low settings, but since my upgrade I run on ultra (annoying it only sets it to 256 drawl but 512 is normal)

2.86ghz duo core 2 e7400 (stock clock)
nvidia 8800 gts 640mb pci-e Video card (stock)
2 gigs of ram


Previous system that I ran for 2 years in Sl was.

2.08ghz Amd 2800+
1 gig of ram
64mb video card

When you do that, everything slows to a crawl because of the increased workload and your video components (among other things) begin pumping out heat like crazy. Freezes, crashes, and possibly burnt out video cards happen after that. Many people do this for benchmarking to test their system capabilities, but it's not good for the hardware.

-Old laptop with ATI radeon 9200: set as low as it can go and still be functional.
-Old desktop with 2 Nvidia 6800GT's: Medium.. shaders off, no extras, 64-128m draw.
-This desktop with Nvidia GTX260: Ultra, full everything, 4xAA/8xAF, 512m draw.


*warning - nerd content for those who've burnt up a newer nvidia-based laptop*
Heat cycling (the process of hot when on, and cold when off), especially in a laptop with less efficient cooling, will kill the video components over time. Laptops are more susceptible than desktops because of their cooling, as well as the tendency for people to turn them on and off many more times per day than most desktops.

Many current systems have video cards based on the Nvidia 65nm & 55nm series of graphics chips (basically every card newer than 8600, including the 9800's & gtS series, but not the high end GTX cards). Just so people know, the *wrong* type of material was used in their production (both mobile and desktop parts). The microscopic solder bumps that connect the main core leads to the rest of the chip have too high of a lead content in them. This makes them turn brittle due to the hot/cold - expansion/contraction effect that occurs between the machine being off, and being burdened during heavy usage. Nvidia did not recall these chips as they do still work, but have a much higher chance of failing with heavy use than the older chips, the newly fixed ones, or the differently made high end ones.


http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1045751/nvidia-55nm-parts-bad
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1137385/nvidia-bad-bump-misery-deepens

I just bought a new computer so I tried turning everything up to ultra. It looks great but now I can see everyone else's parcels and the piecemeal look of the mainland disturbs my sense of order. I turned the view distance back down to 64m.

ultra, 160m draw most of the time, antisotropic on, antialiasing x4
3GHz, 4G Ram, 9600 GT 512M

1. It's greyed out and doesn't let you.
2. You get about 10 seconds per frame refresh rate.
3. SL crashes.
4. Your computer fletely, mouse and all.

When lag is bad, I keep it on the lowest setting, so that happens more frequently than I'd like. A lot of the time, I'll set it to Mid. I've had problems with High and Ultra making things looked too washed out in some areas. Guess there were just too many light sources in those areas.

I have an older graphics card, but a lot of RAM. So I change the graphics settings constantly, depending on where I am and what I'm doing.

When I'm taking pics I use High with a long draw distance, but if I want to actually be able to move, I usually need to use Mid. In high lag areas (for example shopping areas), I have to go to Low with a short draw distance.

I can't see much diff between High and Ultra, maybe with a newer graphics card it does something spectactular...?

The laptop I use has an Nvidia graphics card that is advertised as a "business graphics solution" (as opposed to a gaming one, I presume). Two particular things it doesn't deal with too well are particles (I leave those set really low) and rotating objects and textures.

I generally run about 96 to 128 draw distance, all the right-side sliders maxed, bump mapping and shiny turned on, local lights on, shaders and such turned off (non-windlight, essentially). I will turn on windlight features temporarily to check product texture and shading appearances or for photographic purposes, but those features typically drop my framerate to about 1/3 of the non-windlight settings.

All that said, I generally run around 15 to 24 fps in most places, but usually not less than 10. In a nice isolated area, I might push into the 30's.

Remaining specs:
Core 2 Duo at 2.26 ghz
2G DDR2 RAM
120 GB SATA drive
1920x1200 LCD (I usually run in a window roughly 1280 x 1024)

Window: 1680x1000
Quality: High
Anisotropic: ON
Antialiasing: 8x
Enable VBO: On
Texture memory: 512
Fog distance: 4.0


(Core 2 Duo 3.16
512mb Graphics)

Depends on the computer I'm using...

My old laptop, absolute lowest settings possible, and I still get graphics lag.

New laptop, still quite low. No shaders, and imposters turned on, but the mesh sliders are all maxed. I keep my draw distance at 64, as well. Runs pretty smoothly.

My desktop? Custom Ultra. Imposters are off (I hate them, honestly), and everything else is maxed, excepting draw distance, which I keep at a nice 190m, for internet speed reasons. I've had it at about 1024 meters and had it running smoothly, but it took forever to download so much data @_@
It was for a snapshot, so I just ramped up the draw distance and went to make dinner while it rezzed XD

I can't figure out how to turn on shadows at the moment, because I'm temporarily retarded, but when I know how, I do turn them on occasionally (On my desktop only, of course!). Slows my framerate down to about 10-15, but it's certainly manageable, for arranging snapshots, and in isolated areas like my home, it's smooth as mousse.

(Desktop has an Intel Core 2 Q6600 overclocked to 2.5ishGHz, an 8800 GT OC, 3gigs of RAM, Windows XP, and a lovely bright-colour 20" monitor)