Terrain detail problems

I'm not sure this is the right forum, but it's the only one I could see that seemed vaguely appropriate.

I've been landscaping an island I recently bought, using RAW file uploads, which I've found a very useful feature for large area landscaping.
So far I'm fairly pleased with my results. Until that is, I fly to one edge of the sim and look across the landscape.
My carefully crafted 'mountains' (all of 60m high) on the far side of the sim look like a jagged line drawn by a child to represent mountains!
My smoothly wandering river also looks like a crude zigzag, even worse, parts of it vanish or become a chain of diamond shaped lakes!

On investigation I've found that it's necessary to get within slightly less than 100m of any given landscape feature before it renders correctly (with a 256m draw distance selected btw). Any further and it degrades to a ludicrous extent.

To me the whole point of an island is to be able to create a realistic landscape (along with having more control and no annoying neighbors). If I can't do that I might as well build an ACS-like billiard table sim.

Does anyone out there know what's happening here? Am I doing something wrong? Did this start happening since the last update? I'm confused, disappointed and a little annoyed by this development, advice solicited.

It's a 'Level of Detail' issue. I have problems with it as well, with the pair of Island sims I recently completed work on. A distant mountain with a beautiful waterfall looks 'damaged' until you get close, and carefully adjusted terrain details look badly done, until you take a closer look.

Unless you have a graphics card that has huge amounts of video ram, and have your settings 'just right', the SL client opts to show distant objects with far less detail, which badly distorts some carefully designed terrain features. Even if you have the best hardware on the market, it still does a trade-off, producing less detail on distant objects as a means of producing better frame rates.

You *may* be able to make it a bit better by adjusting your graphics settings. But I doubt that this limitation can be eliminated, short of increasing bandwidth requirements and reworking the SL client to prefer detail over rendering speed. Unfortunately, such redesign work would further raise the minimum hardware requirements, kicking a lot of people out of SL.

Thanks for the feedback Ceera. I can't actually improve my graphics without putting a second 512Mb SLi card in - which SL doesn't support anyway!
Besides, that won't make it look better for everyone else, which is what I'm really worried about. I mean, if it looks bad with my setup, what does it look like to someone with an entry level machine?

Oh well.

It's pretty discouraging though, I'm sure when I first saw SL the horizon wasn't a jagged zig-zag line of low quality rendering, I wonder when this all started?

I think it was about version 1.6 or somewhere around there, when they first tried to improve performance by decreasing level of detail for items at a distance. Not sure, as I work on a 'barely capable of playing SL' Mac Mini, and I usually have to keep my draw distances set fairly short. It's probably been like this for at least 4 months or more. Not sure when I first noticed it. The problem didn't really leap out at me until I was designing whole sims, and I increased my draw distance to try to get a better over-all impression of my work as a whole.

I fiddled with settings - no improvement. All detail was at max anyway.
I even cranked draw distance up to 512, which works fine, though it's a little pointless on a single island. STILL got horrible low detail landscape over 80-100m.

Now that's plain silly. What on earth is the point of having a usable draw distance setting of 512m, when the landscape looks awful past about 80m?
That, to me anyway, seems completely illogical.
Somewhere round here there's a distinct lack of joined up thinking.

As far as I know the issue with Nvidia cards hasn't been fixed.. (and as you mention SLI I know you have NV ) - make sure bump+cloth isn't checked.

If it is checked it caused problems with the ground textures and I'm pretty sure is the cause of your problem.

Katier, could you elaborate on the nVidia problem you mention? I have a nVidia card in in my dual processor tower Mac, paid a premium, top dollar for it, now a day seems to not go by that I do not regret that decision.

Like pulling a bandage off fast can you give me the further pain in one quick yank?

Ah, no, Avatar Vertex is off, so Bump & Cloth can't be checked.

That's not actually the problem I'm having. Though I did have it before I disabled AV. You are talking about the problem where ground textures simply don't load properly, so you get a mushy [left]blurred mess.
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What I'm talking about is one where at 80m the actual 3D landscape 'object' is nice and smooth and detailed, but as you move away it looses detail, curved lines become straight and before you know it your painstaking landscaping looks like a child's kindergarten scrawl - but with perfect textures.
This is a 3D rendering problem, not a texture rendering problem - though by enabling Bump & Cloth I suppose you could have both. If you were a real glutton for punishment. Ah, the versatility of SL!

Basically if you have bumped+cloth checked then with a nV you'll most likely find land textures to be blurry ( like they havn't rezzed but it's a perminant state ). Dropping to just bumped cures the problem.

For some reason that option was removed from me on oneof the recent upgrades I can no longer choose to bump or not.

They keep saying to get new drivers for my card but I do not see any avalaible for the Mac users who have nVidia cards.