Should we do it just because we can? A question of considerate settings.

I've long known that the performance and stability one gets out of SL is directly related to the ability of ones computer and its health. Many of the people who are having issues with SL would have a better experience if they upgraded their computers, or, at least cleaned the dust out of them.

I've always run SL with a 256m draw distance, and most of the effects sliders turned up high. I had a reason for the draw distance--I wanted to be able to see every corner of the sim that I own most of. The rest was just because I wanted it all to look nice--But then, who doesn't?

When RC's for the current client were released, I started getting frequent freeze/crashes. It was only SL that crashed, and only the RC. It was so bad, that sometimes I'd crash, relog, and crash immediately upon re-entering. Usually if I stayed still, I'd be ok. But as soon as it got crowded, or, busy, or I started moving too fast, I'd be on my desktop again. At first, I blamed the forced crashes built into the early RC's; but the crashes continued long after that was turned off, or toned down, and in spite of all the "fixed a crash" entries in the version history. I just grumbled and went back to the current client.

Then the RC became the current client, and, like a good little drone, I upgraded--And suffered for it. Something had to be done.

Umm. . .turned out to be heat related on account of the dust accumulating around my CPU cooler and blocking the vents. I gave the computers insides a good cleaning and had no more trouble.

heh

But. . .I'd been bitten. I've seen SL's requirements increase over the years, and I was aware I was at a point where soon-to-be-introduced features were beyond my systems capacity.

SO. . .a sale at the local computer store prompted me to put together a new system, (described in a recent thread.) The new system is pretty close to state of the art as I could afford, and performs damn well.

Vista's "Windows Experience Base Score" is 5.9, which is as high as it gets, and I got an obvious and considerable performance increase.

I'm not just crowing, I'm going somewhere with this.

When I installed SL and checked the reccomended settings, I saw that it wasn't much of an increase from the old system. But as an experiment I turned up all the settings, and opened up the lag meter. (Yes, there are better performance monitors, but for a quick and easy at a glance indication, the lag meter rules.) It proved to me that the new computer was easily able to take SL at its best.

But. . .as I understand it, some settings take a toll on the grid, and makes life more difficult for everyone. Draw distance, for example, (as I understand it,) is a geometric progression. Doubling my dd from 128 to 256 makes the server work 4 times harder to support me, and going to 512 makes it 16 times harder. PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG.

Which (finally) brings me to my question. For those of us who are capable, is there any compelling reason to NOT run SL as hard as our equipment can take it? Are we being greedy?

For myself, I ended up leaving the settings high, but I've put my draw distance back to 256 since seeing too far didn't really improve my experience anyway. But I like the reflections and new level of detail.

Draw distance, yes. Cranking your draw distance up to 4096 (yes, you can do that) won't quite demand as many network resources as running 64 accounts at 512, but it's not far off. On the other hand there's substantial per-client server overhead so this kind of impact doesn't completely scale down.

Other settings, no.

And SL's requirements haven't increased as much as people seem to think. In 2005 I recall someone finally getting a computer that could handle a draw distance of 512 and they were showing off by standing on the Lusk platform and looking at the Ahern welcome area, and that was amazing. Yes, they have increased the requirements quite a bit, but it's more that computers have finally caught up with the requirements.

And I can't believe nobody else voted for pie!

I think there are only two settings that actually make any difference to others' experience: Graphics/Draw Distance and Network/Maximum Bandwidth. (Well, I suppose having a tiny cache might cause some additional downloading, but the caching algorithm is so dreadful now that it may be a wash.) I can't think of anything else that isn't local to the viewer.

Draw distance doesn't affect physics or scripting, and texture downloads are affected only for the time it takes them to complete. So, it's unclear how much effect draw distance has on sim performance.

Try this. Go someplace busy and wait for your network bandwidth to stabilize. Then turn down your draw distance and see how much of a difference it makes.

I run 256M draw distance most of the time. I'll run it down to 128M when I'm shopping. I go up to 512 for pictures, and sometimes forget to bring it back down. It doesn't seem to have lagged anyone around me.

If you don't move around much, then it probably doesn't have much long term effect.

It does have some, though, because you have to be handled as a "child" agent on every sim you can see into. If you're in the middle of a sim with your draw distance at 128 or less, you're only having an impact on one sim. If you increase your draw distance to 512, you're having an impact on up to 25 sims.

I set the graphics quality to max, with all optional eye-candy on.
I just set the draw distance to 128 meters, because most sims that look good end after 128 meters anyway. And I want things to look good near me. whatever happens a mile away is not necessary to me.

I change my draw distance frequently, to suit the circumstances. I keep it low when I don't need to see far, or in a sim with lots of avatars. I bump it up when I want to see far, and the sim isn't too busy.

I generally run at 128.
If I'm particularly exploring/sightseeing, or taking photos out in the open, I wind it right up for the duration.
I drop to 64 if I'm in a store with a lot of murky grey vendor displays.

I would probably run at 64 a lot of the time if it were not for the unbearable abrupt cutoff introduced since Windlight. Before that, things sort of disappeared into the mist.


I'm not so sure that a big draw distance would have a huge effect on others.
If I shift from 128 to 256, then the effect on the sim(s) is like that of a ring of avatars with a 64m draw distance set. There would be about 10+ of these positioned in a circle of radius 192m around my position.
However, the *only* load on the sims would the uploading of prim and texture data for what these avatars would 'see'. No load would be directly imposed on any other avatars.

Unless the region was stuffed with complex prims and large texture files, I'd guess that the effect might be unnoticeable.

I run at 512 draw when I'm sailing, precisely because I want pretty pictures. Otherwise, I run at 256 (for better view of what's going on on the minimap) or less, if lag is bad. But texture loading is still so slow, that I have stuck with using Kirsten's S16 to alleviate the problem. I have not found the RC/new viewer to be comparable with texture loading. Maybe next time.

Personally, it REALLY bugs me when a virtual world can't display something that should easily be in visual distance in a RL situation. I don't walk around in a 64M diameter hole in a fog bank all the time in RL, and I don't want to do so in SL either.

If I go into a sim and lag seems bad, I'll reduce my draw distance and other settings accordingly. But by default, my main system is cranked to the max, and my secondary (a less-powerful Windows system) is usually as high as I can manage without bad lag.

I run my daily viewer at 64 m and when I need to see something a bit farther out I go crazy and crank it up to 96m! Anything beyond that and I can "see" but not move anywhere.

Honestly, I'm not sure I'd recognize SL with my settings (on the 1.8 viewer) with much more than a 96 m draw distance! I'm so used to seeing SL with an older computer and viewer that anything else might startle me.

I usually have draw distance up around 350ish. Other settings are usually around the middle of the road. From my perspective I'm not interested in how pretty SL looks I just care about getting my work done. SL needs to play nice with everything else I have up, usually a lot of browser pages open on my other monitor running heavy duty spreadsheets plus a couple of instances of visual studio.

Generally I'm not moving around a lot. I tend to teleport to a sim and then cam around it doing whatever I need so I rarely suffer from lag due to settings. Mostly I'm not interested in the prims on the sim anyway, just the terrain and that usually comes in quickly and first.

Fog distance ratio (in graphics preferences, hardware options) changed. I think the default was 1 pre-Windlight, now it's 4.

When on my home sims (which is 95% of the time) I usually have dd at 350-400 so I can keep an eye on what's going on down below. When on the mainland I usually drop down to 128 because the lag is crippling.

I have all the settings maxed out otherwise - I had this computer built for SL and I intend to take advantage of all the shaders and eye candy. I came to SL for the creativity and eye candy.

They should use an "avatar impostor" style scheme for draw distance.

Bake a snapshot of the distant view from a point at high resolution, and put it up as a skybox for that place (how big a place depending on how far away the skybox is). The baked snapshot can be uploaded from the client, and re-uploaded if the current skybox is too old or is lower resolution than your client can manage.

You would probably only need half a dozen time-based skyboxes if this is only used for "distant" objects.

In addition, the baked skyboxes could overlay more distant ones, so you'd get a series of increasingly distant backdrops out to whatever you set your "skybox draw distance" to.

On my little put put Dell, I keep draw distance at 64 to 96, occasionally upping it to 256 max when flying a helicopter. I use a non WL viewer, and keep most settings at the middle range.

It will vary for me - I usually keep it on 96m when I am out shopping or what not. Sometimes go up to 128 when I am looking around a large store.

When I am in the combat sims, it is at 512m, so that I can snipe from corner to corner..

My network speed is almost always set to max, unless for some reason I go to a packed sim, then I will drop it down to 50%.

If we do not push the boundaries, then they will never extend!

I normally don't do it because it's just too laggy. I do agree that the boundaries need to extend, but not at the expense of my experience now.

4096m? How please? I miss that from older versions of the client, and have some long, long landscapes I want to take.

If there are a lot of avatars with high draw distances, the server has to spend time uploading all the extra textures to each of them.

The impact of one avatar isn't very significant. It's only in crowds where this matters. And as you said, the effect is bigger the less efficient the builds are with their texture usage. However, the chance of hitting a nasty build is much higher with a big draw distance.

It's best for everyone if you reduce your draw distance whenever you notice slow rezzing in a populated area. Otherwise, you're unlikely to be adding much lag to others.

I run Ultra (Defaults to 256M draw) at 1600x1200 with Impostors Off, AF, and 4xAA enabled. I also have some graphical debug settings boosted: RenderVolumeLOD = 4, RenderTreeLOD = 8. (^_^)

Gimmeee preeeetie. =^-^=

I select graphics options based on what my graphics card can handle.

Once in a while I go to Ultra just to see what it looks like or take a pic, and I can use High in areas without too many textures to load, but most of the time I need to run in Mid, when shopping I have to run Low.

I'd love to have a shiny new graphics card, but it's just not high on the financial priority list right now. (shrug)

What CPU & graphics card are you using?

Oooh, I will have to play with this. It would be preferable to have things disappear in fog than just disappear in thin air, I think.