lag from fullbright?

I was just chatting with a friend and he told me fullbright contributes to lag. That makes no sense to me, since turning off lighting ought to lighten the load on the videocard. However, he said that SL also uses fullbright to affect physics or something. Do any of you know?

If I'm not mistaken, all lighting has been offloaded to your video card. I'm fairly certain Full Bright only affects an objects appearance.

Lights don't lag sims, but may slow down your frame rate if your machine has trouble effectively rendering things.

It sounds like he has fullbright and hardware lighting confused.

Fullbright just sets all faces of the prim to, well, full brightness, as opposed to having the sides and bottom shaded according to the sun position. Hardware lighting actually casts light, and affects other prims surrounding it according to the parameters set in the lighting, so that will cause some lag depending on how good your graphics card is and how much memory your computer has.

Hardware lighting, as far as I know, doesn't affect physics whatsoever. The only thing that affects physics is if a prim is set to be physical (and therefore interact with the physics engine), either via the prim settings or via script. A prim that it not set to be phantom interacts with the physics engine only to the extent that physical objects or avatars cannot pass through it.

Hope this helps

yep, since there is no shading done in realtime anymore it does lighten the load (however tiny it may be)

there is (or maybe was) a light setting for physical attributes, along with wood glass plastic stone & rubber, and before fullbright you had to set the prim to light to get the same effect, and that did effect the physics, altho it doesnt cause different stresses, it just applys different attributes

stone (in theory) would fall faster than glass, rubber would bounce more than wood ect, in reality there isnt much of a difference

if you enable "RenderGlow" in the debug menu... all Full Bright objects glow... like the sun. THAT could be what's lagging them down.

Render Glow crashes me every time I enable it (where it worked fine on the beta grid)

Though I agree, it's more likely they're actually meaning "lights"

Actually, I know he isn't referring to hardware lights, because he specifically recommended lighting up the space with a light-emitting prim instead of using fullbright. It was kind of a surreal conversation, but I couldn't just discount his opinion because he's a really good programmer.

Lighting in SL doesnt use shaders and refraction rendering, its a simple luminance 'feature'.

No from what I have read using the light option in the features section causes lag not the fullbright option in the textures ...fullbright is better.

Elinah

UNLESS you were using scripts to turn several prims "on and off" fullbright. Then in fact, ONE LIGHT in the area to turn on and off would produce less lag than all the little microscripts whose job it was to listen for a command.

And as stated previously, fullbright now triggers the "RenderGlow" feature. (still unofficial).

I know this is just my inner geek coming through, but if stone falls faster than glass, the physics engine needs a major overhaul.

Many people don't know that the weight of an object does not determine its speed of falling. I think the phrase "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" is something that causes this confusion. The impact is harder, but they don't fall any faster.

it needs one anyways theres no difference between the settings, but yea your right i wasnt thinking phyical science when i wrote that

Turning on hardware lighting with 1-3 lights nearby causes my FPS to drop by half. A full 8 lights nearby and I can't even walk around anymore. I wouldn't call that a tiny load .