As the client changes - what is your draw distance?

Haha!


128 for shopping and laggy places. More depending on what I'm doing.

Similar. I use 512 in my own sim, 128 when exploring.

I keep the old SLI rig at 224 all the time, full details, with no real problems on older clients. Windlight kills my draw back to 128, halfs the details, and kills my FPS, and I can't seem to get it to run with anything near the level of mesh detail that the older clients give. I swear it's a bloated pig and I want a 'windlight OFF' checkbox.

I turned Windlight up to ultra and only use custom options to turn Impostors off. So, I run at 256... All the time. (^_^)

Glad it's not just me that this drives batty. Overall I love WL, but I find this REALLY annoying especially if I am using a vehicle or flying.

I usually run with my draw distance just under 200. Higher if I am sightseeing, lower if I'm someplace laggy or running multiple clients.

It's interesting to see the answers, they confirm what I already suspected, that many run with the draw distance awfully high. Personally I keep mine at 64-80 most of the time, and go up if building/terraforming for short periods.

Same here; it annoyed me enough to go back to the regular viewer. I love the water, sky, etc in WL, but I would take the way the regular client renders the prims over that any day.

Have to agree with Darien that these answers are fascinating - and that I don't get the issues others complain about so much with a draw of 96.

My concerns were solved anyway as the stuff really in your face in one direction (the least "noisy" one) was blocked when a neighbour put up a build bang next door at the same height. Theirs has their back to me, is visible over the fence and is a nice Asian build with trees. Great! How very convenient

Usually 96 or 128, but 64 to avoid lag isn't uncommon, sometimes 160 if I want to check out what new builds are going on in my sim. I do go down to 32 (with RenderFarClip) sometimes and really wish they'd include lower draw distances with the regular preferences. If you know you're going to be spending the next hour and a half in the same room with the same textured prims, but with primmy flexi scripted avs animating around you, there's really no need for a draw distance of even 64.

I'm really glad you asked this -- I've been using 160 as my "check my build for what people with better computers might see" distance. It never occurred to me that more than a small handful of people with fantabulous computers would be using higher than that on a regular basis. Isn't 128 the default setting?

I run 256 most of the time and go up further for photo's or if it's a nice sim

I keep mine on 288. . . I seem to rez quick and if not I will alt-click on something and zoom all the way in on and then it rezzes for me but so far no problems.

128 mostly because there isn't much of anything to see whatever my distance is.

Running SL on a iBook G4 800...... with draw distance set to 32m (through debug settings) SL is.. kind of.. playable..........

I'm starting to find it necessary to reduce my years old standard 128 meters draw distance on the windlight viewers. The new viewers don't work as well for me as the older ones did.

LL should make the default draw distance be 64
It may help keep newbies from leaving SL due to lag before they learn about reducing draw distance.

I used to use 96m, but use 128m now since even 128m under WindLight doesn't really correspond to what I was able to see at 96m with the regular viewer.

A higher than necessary draw distance taxes the sim you're on since it has to include you in every object update happening within your draw distancee, whether or not you're actually looking at it or ever plan to look at it.

At 256m you're potentially - and unneccessarily - taxing up to 8 surroundings sims as a child agent no matter where you are in the sim you're currently on, which isn't quite as bad as actually being on that sim, but enough of them will have a noticable effect.

Shame that things are foggy at 64 rather than just not rendered ...

Yes and no.
I definitely preferred the old foggy to the new Windlight sparking water.
Completely unrendered would be almost as bad.

Given a magic wand, I'd go for a system in which the terrain and largest prims just outside draw distance were rendered untextured in a fog, with smaller prims unrendered.
That would give a more natural graduated feel when moving.

I don't I love the sparkling water!

512 here... makes a change from the 64m, I had to use on my old machine (and then only get 4fps)

Noticed that with the camera constraints disengaged I can sit on my build platform at 728m and watch the goings on in the shop some 700m below... although admittedly the avatars dont't show up at that range...

[x] 384 most of the time, 512 very seldom. I should set it to 128 too if I'm in a heavy crowded area/shopping etc. but my brain lags sometimes too. Its easier to blame the grid/sim/connection than to realize that there's just to much stuff to load. ,-) I'll try now but I tend to loose orientation with a lesser drawing distance, I'm used to a greater one.

Use 256 for sailing, 96 the rest of the time. I'm using a 6 year old Athlon 1.6 mhz chip, Nvidia Geforce 3 with 64MB on board, 1 gig of RAM and Ubunutu Linux. I'm using the RC2 client and having a longer draw distance helps when sailing or flying so I don't run into things. Still don't see ban lines until its too late though.

When I'm at 'home' I keep mine at 512m. When I go travelling, I try to remember to drop it to 128m.

-Atashi

64 for general, everyday use, 512 when i am exploring cool places with very few avatars around....

Mine is 256 until I go shopping - all those single prim vendors take forever to rez so I drop to 64 then.