Blurry pictures

This has been bugging me since I first came to SL. Often, all of the SL UI and 3D will look beautiful, but specific posters on the walls in stores will be blurry. Reproducibly, always the same posters. I always figured that I just had the screen resolution set too low, but tonight at Crystal Gadgets I cannot read a thing so I experimented. I tried every resolution from 800x600 through 1280x1024 (both inworld setting and Windows Display Settings), no luck. I moved the Display sliders all the way to the right. I decreased field of view to 64. I stood very close. I stood far away. ARRGHHHHH I don't know anything about graphics, how can I make these textures sharpen up? I am on a laptop with not a particularly great graphics chipset, but everything else looks just fine.

Most likely those are just textures that never completely loaded/rezzed for you. Hovering the mouse cursor over them sometimes forces SL to rezz them, but sometimes you just need to wait it out.

I can click on them, wait for half an hour, click again ... they do not rez. The rest of the world, and other posters, all look fine.

OK, more info on this. The textures that do not render all appear to be small, 32x32. Higher rez pictures on the same size poster ... 128x256, say ... rez fine. Is there any preference or UI setting I can tweak to make low-resolution textures rez better?

Strange... Sure, I have at times also problems with rezzing textures of pictures. But waiting a little is mostly enough to let them get clearm, but clicking them always solves it, no matter their size.

Morwen.

Can you tell anything by looking at the texture console? That's cntrl-shift-3. It seems rather unlikely the texture is 32x32 although maybe it's huge and that's a preview size before it loads. It sounds like the other textures are in your cache but the blurry ones are not.

Is that information correct?

If a 32x32 texture is on the same size poster as a 128x512 poster, the 32x32 will appear to be a lower resolution because it IS a lower resolution. A 32x32 texture is ridiculously low resolution for a store poster. If put it on a normal sized store poster, it will look blurry even when fully rezzed. Well, maybe more blocky than blurry... I don't remember if SL blends to compensate when your pixels are really big.

This has nothing to do with your interface, it is just the texture that the person who made the poster used.

--- Alternate explanation ---

Maybe the 32x32 is just the lo-res pre-load version of the full resolution (and never properly loaded) texture? That almost seems more likely, as I can't imagine a reasonably intelligent store owner using a 32x32 texture for a normal size store poster... it would mean NO ONE could see it, ever!

So getting back to the idea that it is on your client side, I'll ask the obvious question: have you cleared your cache?

Rather than just doing it through the client, do it manually by deleting everything in the cache folder (which is in your local settings folder for SL).

Still no help? Maybe ask a friend to come look at the posters and tell you if they can see them in full resolution. That would at least nail down the problem to your side... wouldn't you hate to spend hours on this, only to find out that it's a problem with the owner's texture?!

OK, I turned the texture console on and read about it. It seems to back up what you-all say ... at Crystal Gadgets (where most of the product posters don't rez and everything else does; this happens at other places too), there are always some number, around 10, of textures that stay listed in the console, and thus I guess never finish loading? Their status is always NET or SIM. Most, but not all of them are Bound. And for each one, the Requested Discard level (column 3) is 2 or three lower than the Actual Discard level (2nd column from right). All these textures show size 128x128 or smaller. WHY don't they finish loading????????

I searched around in the forums and uninstalled my virus protection completely (firewall still in place). I increased SL's cache to a gig. I fiddled with the graphic memory size in Preferences, and with the max network bandwidth setting. No effect.

More ideas, people? I'm stumped!

Is your net connection wireless (wi-fi)?

I've heard that causes poor performance in SL. I'm going over wireless, and frankly, I also have the texture loading problem.

One thing I can tell you for sure, though... I had a super-high powered computer here at my place for one night, and the textures loaded so quickly I didn't even see it. What normally takes 3-8 minutes happened almost instantaneously. Same wireless connection, the only difference was a significantly more powerful computer.

/me can't wait until October when she can get one of the powerful computers!

No, my connection is a very good DSL. Oh, and I did clear cache by deleting app data and temp directory contents. I can understand loading slowly, but randomly selected textures NEVER load at all. it is as if SL has marked them "already loaded", but they're not.

This seems like it might be related:
/327/97/203990/2.html#post1633458

One of the only things that I can think of (and sorry, Osprey, I didn't follow that link, too lazy now) is that maybe the original creator of the textures actually uploaded weird sizes (i.e. not multiples of 8, like 325 x 749 or whatever.) SL will try to match them to whatever it can handle, like 256 x 768, and the textures can get all jacked up. Dunno, just a thought.

Thanks, Osprey, but I already do that one, otherwise my teeny laptop couldn't cope at all, lol!

Oryx, that's interesting. That would explain it always being the same textures, when it happens. Since that night, the following interesting chain of events happened:

> That night, and after I had completely deleted the cache, I logged in with my alt from the same computer and SHE COULD SEE THOSE TEXTURES, and everything else, very clearly.

> So, I immediately logged out and re-logged my main in, who still couldn't rez them!!!! Same computer, just rebuilt cache!!

> I left the computer up all night and tried it again in the morning. THEN, both my main and alt could see them fine.

> I am not the only AV who has this happen, have since seen two other posts referring to similar phenomena

Here are my current thoughts:
--- the condition is probably seen only when SL is running under stress. may also be only seen by marginal graphics gear like mine (Intel mobile chipset)

--- it could easily be triggered by odd-sized textures more easily than others. probably not related to texture size; that same night i dropped by Caledon, home of large textures, and rezzed most of the place just fine

--- the textures may have some sticky 'bit' in the cache that stops sl from even attempting to finish loading them. but their status in the texture console is still either "NET" or "SIM" (whatever those mean), which means that SL is at least partially aware that they're unloaded

this hasn't happened the last two days, but then in the places i've been, sl has been healthier than last week.

i don't know if i understand what you are asking, but wonder if what i'm about to ask will make sense?

for example, at Gurl6 hair store, every texture will load except maybe 2-3. i can go back days later, and the same few are blurry. is this basically the same scenerio?

also, when i take a snapshot of my avatar, and then upload it, it's always blurry. why?

could this setting (that i am unfamiliar with) be the reason some are blurry, while others are not?

The Gurl6 scenario is exactly what I'm talking about, and lol, Gurl6 is a very likely sort of place for this to happen. (If Gurl6 and Naughty were in the same sim, it would probably morph into a lag black hole).

The blurry AV photos I've never seen, and may be a different thing. The photo settings are tricky, and probably interact with your display settings in Windows. (I could imagine this happening if, for example, your screen resolution in SL were different from your display settings screen resolution)/ I assume you've tried both high and lo-res?

It would be interesting if it went away if you used some totally different format like "compress pnotos to disk", which uses a compressed jpeg format.