Beauty or Lag?

I like to post this question now and then to find out what residents prefer. While a nice balance is always notice, if you could hang out where things were so intricately built that it was near-photographic, would you deal with the low frame rate as a compromise?

Don't want to bring up any sim or type of build in general, let's just use your preferred type of hangout as an example. However this is in regards to something that would require a lot of prims and textures to create if done correctly.

When i mean Beauty, I mean the most beautiful, surreal scenery you can build on the grid, with detail worth zooming in on to see even more.

however, i know its not of interest for many as there here for more social reasons, or the systems cant handle, so it would be nice to see some count in that area.

Thanks

Sadly none of these apply to me, edit it and add a option for those that can handle the beauty without low fps.

Edit: Or is it a hypothetical question?

It's a design question. If you get no lag whatsoever in any situation, please blog about it. You'd be very popular.

I voted "doesn't matter" because that's the closest to my real answer.

I'd put up with horrible lag to see a fantastic build, but I would also need to escape from it and have low lag again. We need both kinds of builds to make the world.

nice look at it. thanks

I'm not going to say I never experience lag.........of course I do. However, if my FPS falls from 30 to 15 it's not so inhibiting that it prevents enjoyable play. There are two types of places that normally generate lag for me. Texture shops (businesses with huge amounts of textures like large hair shops are included in that). And events or gatherings of large amounts of avatars (over 30 in close proxity). A sim or area with 10 to maybe 25 avatars in it don't usually generate heavy lag unless a lot of scripts are running too.

So, I had no option in the available answers. Couldn't vote but I will tell you the nearest answer is "doesn't bother me much"..........but that's not really correct for my experiences.

I can see the "beauty" with my almost maxed out settings and I can tolerate the lag it might entail.

at this time its

2 prefer beauty
6 prefer no lag
2 it doesn't matter

.

My answer is D) A healthy compromise. Beauty at 5fps is useless for most circumstances... it could have photo-realism but if I can't do anything it might as well be a picture. Anything that can let me move and cam at 20-30fps is acceptable, more is a bonus. Lag comes in many forms too, you can stick in thousands of prims and have fairly low lag. Add a lot of huge textures and your fps might not drop, but the world will be grey for a while. Detail does not always imply lag.

i want to be beautiful and everyone feel the lag as i walk by in awe of me..it's a dream but a beautifully slow dream ;P

I generally run SL with an fps below 10, because I have my graphics settings up fairly high. If I use the settings that the viewer recommends, I can run at 25 or more in most places, but I'm perfectly happy running at 7-8 and seeing the world the way I want to. Personally I find differences in fps make very little difference to how I play, there's nothing I can do at 30fps that I can't do at 10 fps, and I don't find the smoother movement and animations compensates for the poorer graphics generally.

Actually it does matter and it would depend entirely what I was doing, and I would want to be able to switch from one to the other (which of course I can, by tweaking the graphics settings). If I'm shopping, or mentoring in a busy place, I want low lag but I'm not bothered about beauty. If I'm hanging round in my fave sim enjoying the sunset, or taking snapshots, I want high beauty but I'm less bothered about the FPS.

I'm like Wulfric, I run with an average FPS of about 8-10, and I can move and cam just fine at that rate, its not inhibiting at all. If I get annoyed by lag in a mall or something I whack the graphics down and the bandwidth up, temporarily, until I leave.

I would happily take lag to see a beautiful build.

However, I may not be able to stay very long to enjoy it, especially if there are a lot of other folks at the build, too. I would just make a point to come back at a less heavily-traveled time.

I have answered this by examining the choices I have already made to optimise my viewing experience - ie lag dictates the issue. Rather than have a location that was beautiful, I would enjoy more detail in the avatars if it was practical, since the social interaction is the driving force for me being here, despite what I may say elsewhere ...

My PC is an absolute beast and I never experience a framerate below 9001.

Well, slight exaggeration, but you get the idea. I don't have performance issues in SL in anything but the most crowded of sims, with my graphics options set to the absolute maximum.

I have a mac pro wth a 8800 on dual 24" monitors that i run too high a setting to get smooth results (yeah yeah im a geek). its my nature tho. I also have a AMD/nvidia 7950 that honestly gives about the same performance (monitor switch, same 24" monitors). The mac pro wasnt purchased for SL, the AMD was built for it, im sure that gives reason.

Seems the results are low-lag over beauty at 50% with a combo of beauty/doesnt matter taking the other 50% .

Turning off antiailiasing typically removes most computer-performance-related lag if its needed (but then photos are ugly and i like taking shots for flickr). Client/server lag, such as anims, well, im hoping mono grid + distributed servers will help take a big chunk of that problem away. Computer hardware ins increasing in performance at same cost exponentially as designed. Seems bandwidth is and probably always will be my biggest thorn, which is tough, because textures are a big part of my skillset and I like zooming in.

I am curious about this because I like building builds related to social situations, but I attract people with the beauty. Therefore Im attempting to find a happy medium.

Thanks again for voting and giving comments, its very helpful and insightful.