request: fewer graphics option settings

So much of SL is focused around visual appearance, it's annoying how many settings there are that change how things look. Local lighting, bump maps, complexity (how far something has to get before it's rendered with less than the full number of polys)... All of these features can make things show up but look wrong.

Please consider more focus on whether objects are drawn (i.e., just clipping plane and max particle count), and less on how they're drawn.

Ehh, no thanks. If my performance is bad, I'd rather see something but have it look wrong, than not see it at all. I don't care much if the trees at the distance don't look perfect, but that's still a lot better than seeing a grey void.

Besides, how things get drawn can have a vast effect on performance. I'd rather disable local lightning and miss the pretty lights, but see 256m, than have a beautiful image that's cut at 32m.

What Dale said

I prefer the complete opposite. I set my draw distance to minimum in order to see the shiny things with pretty lights! Frankly I find there is so little of any quality to see, so rather than see the crap that some dork has plonked on the land 256m away from me I keep my draw distance low. That way I can see a clean horizon and the stuff I'm interested in, which tends to be close to me mostly, and maintain a good FPS. I'm not interested in seeing other peoples skypads and cutey cute suburban prefab houses unless I'm passing or actually there in person.

I totally agree we need a good range of view options to suit personal taste and massively varying hardware. Ideally we need a NEW RENDERER !

I have almost all of those options turned off. Some of them I turn on on occasion.

Getting rid of the options or forcing them all on or off would SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the quality of SL for me. No thanks.

Removing features is generally a bad idea in SL. No need for this sort of proposal.