far clip, wide screen or window?

Hi

what does far clip mean, does it mean it will be faster if i check the box or faster if i leave it unchecked?


also will i get better performance running the client in window mode or full screen with the same resolution setting as my display settings on the desktop. also i am using 1024x640 at the moment , would changing this to 800 x 600 just in the game preferences make a different to performance.

thanks if anyone knows the answers.

I think I know this one, but correct me if I'm wrong. Far clip is the distance you can see an object before it disappears. With it on, you can see objects much further. But if you disable it, objects will disappear at a much shorter range. For performance issues, I have 'disable far clip' checked. But it depends on your PC. If it's powerful enough to handle it, test it out to see if you're comfortable with the performance.

Also, the performance you get with different resolutions also depends on your PC. On my laptop, I see only about a .3 fps change between 640 x 480 and 1280 x 800 windowed and fullscreen (though I usually keep it windowed so I can switch to Media Player, Internet, e-mail, etc.). Just mess around with the graphics settings a bit, and see what works best.

if you disable far clip (having it checked) it will slow down the performance of your machine a lot, as its not clipping things. If you notice the draw distance settings doesnt work if you have disable far clip on. Your best bet for performance is to have it unchecked and set the draw distance down pretty low, depending ont he area your in and your computer. Like if im in a club with 30 people around it gets pretty bad and i set it down to only draw up to 64 meters away, and it clears up a ton.

Disable far clip is also to see in correlation with "Drop Draw Distance if FPS <" in the advanced graphics settings. Disable far clip disables this selection. Drop Draw Distance drops (clips) the distance if you are getting really low framerates in a busy area and tries to keep you above the configured fps level. I haven't tested how successful this is, but on slower hardware surely useful.
For your resolution settings, i don't know, you might try out with control+shift+1 to look at your framerates and with alt+return to change between full screen and windowed mode. I think it is not much of a difference as less pixels in the window require more scaling for the loaded textures as well.

Regards,
Leff.

Far clip is short for "far clipping plane" and has to do with the extreme boundary (plane) that clips (removes from the 3D scene) anything and everything (polygons, prims, particles, avatars, terrain, sky, clouds, etc)--ideally, anyway. SL's clipping planes are weird and seem to have layers (prims even having an additional clip level based on size). Particles have another clip level also based on size. The far clipping plane is (usually) where the fog is drawn to, with it getting thicker as it reaches the far clip plane position.

Draw distance (or visibility) is when prims, avatars, particles will get removed (unless already clipped by a "subclip layer" as described above). It's a bit confusing and annoying how it works--and that's not even with LOD thrown in which influences clipping further!

The near clipping plane can be seen when the camera moves through a polygon that doesn't reach the screen edge.

Great Eep, I like when someone knows more of the actual details. Thanks for this inside view.
Means LOD level of detail?

Regards,
Leff.