What does glow do? Why can't I see it?

What does glow do?
Why can't I see it?
I've tried turning thing onto glow but have no effect that I can tell, even at midnight.

This a recent machine 6months old, HP 17" dv9000 laptop. I thought it might be good. Ha!
Using RC. 1.20
Recommended settings are at nothing enabled. I only turn on shiny.

You are at 289516.7, 273615.1, 501.3 in Bangu located at sim2450.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.17.201:13002)
Second Life Server 1.21.1.86182

CPU: AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-52
Memory: 1951 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 02:46:46 UTC 2008 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce Go 6150/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.1 NVIDIA 100.14.19
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.14910 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 9509/225079 (4.2%)

So..Any images anywhere of glow in action?

I was wondering too and thought to look for a class,
when I use glow it's glaring blight even at .10.
A friend showed me an avatar in glow and it was of course amazing, didn't get any specifics.
Was thinking to apply it more often in accents and builds but it never looks right?

Try turning on Renderglow in the debug settings.

It's best used very sparingly.

VERY sparingly.

Just checked: Render glow is set to TRUE in debug settings.
Question rephrased.

In the edit panel there is a "Glow" option. I get FullBright but nothing glows.
How do I see Glow?

I'll answer my own stupid question.
I had to turn on "Basic Shaders" in preferences, while having glow turned on, on a prim in front of me, then I knew.
It slows the machine down a fair bit so I won't be seeing that for a few years,

You won't miss much.

Glow is a nice effect but I suspect that it will be _horribly_ overused. It will become the new llTargetOmega. Anything higher than 0.1, unless something really is supposed to be both radioactive and on fire, is awful, and even then it should not be used over about 0.3.

I think I have spotted the problem...

I have an HP/Compaq desktop with an nVidia motherboard, onboard nVidia/Intel Hi-def audio, and nVidia GeForce Go 6150SE. I think you got the laptop version of the same motherboard, or something similar.

Honestly, its some side effect of:
the GeForce 6150SE
the BIOS
Linux routines to read the card attributes.
the nVidia driver.
your nvidia-settings config
SL Viewer autodetect and graphics config

For one, the BIOS may not correctly initialize the IOMMU. I lost 64MB of RAM to simulate that.

There's no aperture setting, and I get a Linux boot error that the 32MB BIOS window is too small.

lspci shows a couple of different stats about BIOS memory ranges... pretty consistently the nVidias show a 16-32M small window, then a fullsize window the same size as the texture/shader RAM on the card.

I managed to get some help with this:
Upgrade to the 169.12+ version driver.

In /etc/modprobe.conf:


In nvidia-settings try some cheesy benchmarking with turning on and off the GLsync and running something like glxgears in between each setting change.

In SL, it seems that the autodetect was broken, but custom settings would still do way better frame rates than advertised.

Just some throughts and things to try.

Thanks very much for your effort and info.
I tried throwing that line into etc/modprobe.d/options (kubuntu)
couldnt see any options for glsync in nvidia-settings
looks like i have 100.14.19 driver

thats all Im gonna try, ive had enough of configging.
Thanks anyway.

btw. my framerate drops from 24 to 10 if I turn on render glow thing.
edit. yes I rebooted. made no difference but didnt break so thats a bonus.