preferences_graphics_tab

• Preset in use: Shows the name of the graphics preset in use.
• Quality and speed: Allows you to adjust the graphics quality (lower is faster). Many options are changed based on this setting.
  • Reload Defaults: The circular arrow to the right of the Quality and speed slider (above) will revert all graphics settings to default values. Use this if you have made changes that have a negative impact on the veiwer and cannot remember what you changed.
• Fullscreen Mode (requires restart): Enable this if you want to run Firestorm in full screen mode, as opposed to windowed.
• Shaders:
  • Transparent water: Allows water to look transparent instead of opaque. Enable this (if it isn't already) if you exeprience glowing water while wearing rigged mesh.
  • Bump mapping and shiny: Enables the rendering of shiny and bump mapped surfaces.
  • Local Lights: Globally enables/disables local lights.
  • Atmospheric shaders: Enables advanced atmospheric and lighting.
  • Advanced Lighting Model: Check this to allow shadows, materials, and other features to be enabled. Note that enabling this can cause instability and performance issues; click here for known specifics. For more how shadows behave, see this SL wiki page.
  • Ambient occlusion: Checking this enables more realistic shadows; the stability and performance note above also applies here.

• Shadows:

  Lets you choose what light sources cause shadows; this is available only if the Advanced Lighting Model option above is enabled.
  • none
  • sun/moon
  • sun/moon and projectors
• Water Reflections: Allows water to reflect terrain, objects, and avatars.
• Point Lighting: Affects the number of rendered light sources when Advanced Lighting Model (above) is disabled. A viewer restart is needed if this setting is changed.

• Draw distance:

  Affects how far out from your viewpoint objects will be rendered in the scene.
• Max particle count: Sets the maximum number of particles you are able to see on your screen at once.
• Maximum complexity: Controls at what point a visually complex avatar is shown as a jellydoll. ¹⁾Please note that setting this to No Limit is not recommended, as this can lead to you being crashed by extremely high complexity avatars (one million or more. Current defaults are:
  • Low: 35,000
  • Low-Mid: 100,000
  • Mid: 200,000
  • Mid-High: 250,000
  • High: 300,000
  • High-Ultra: 350,000
  • Ultra: 350,000
• Max # of non-imposter avatars: Sets the number of avatars that will be fully rendered.
• Post process quality: Determines the resolution with which glow is rendered. A lower setting will cause glow to look slightly pixelated.
• Avatar Physics: Affects the detail of avatar physics. Set to 0 to disable avatar physics entirely.

• Level of Detail (LOD) Distance Factors:

  • Objects & Sculpts LOD: Determines the amount of detail the viewer will use in rendering object shapes; a lower setting causes objects to appear more angular and polygonal.
    Setting this higher than 4 via Debug Settings is not recommended. Please see here for details on why high values are not recommended.
  • Flexiprims: Determines the amount of detail the viewer will use in rendering flexible object shapes.
  • Trees: Determines the amount of detail the viewer will use in rendering (Linden) tree shapes.
  • Avatars: Determines the amount of detail the viewer will use in rendering avatar shapes.
  • Terrain: Determines the amount of detail the viewer will use in rendering terrain.
  • Sky: Controls the detail with which windlight skies are rendered. Higher values mean better quality but lower performance.
• Avatar Rendering:
  • Avatar cloth: Allows the rendering of flexible cloth on avatar clothing, such as shirts and flared pants.
• Presets: Three buttons which allow you to save, load or delete graphics settings presets.
  • To create a preset, set your graphics settings as you like. Click “Save” and give the preset a name.
  • To load a preset that you have created, click “Load” and choose the preset to load.
  • To delete one, click “Delete” and choose the preset to delete.
  • The presets can be accessed either from Preferences→ Graphics -> General or from the presets button in the upper right of the viewer, near the media and sound controls.

• Anisotropic Filtering: Enables anisotropic filtering to improve texture quality. This setting may reduce your viewer's performance. For more information see this wikipedia page.
• Enable VSync: Synchronizes the image frame rate of the viewer with your display refresh rate. Helps avoid screen tearing.
• Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects: VBO on modern hardware gives a performance gain. However, older hardware often has poor implementation of VBOs and the viewer may become unstable when this is enabled. VBO is explained in depth here.
• Enable Streamed VBOs: Allows the use of streamed VBO as well as static; only works if you have VBO enabled.
• Enable Lossy Texture Compression: If this is enabled, texture compression will be enabled for rendering. This gives improved performance, and a smaller grapics memory footprint, at the cost of lower quality rendered textures. Textures are compressed by the video card before being stored into video memory. Given that compressed textures can often end up pixellated, it is not recommended that this be enabled unless you have little video memory. Ref: SL JIRA MAINT-708.
• Enable support for HiDPI displays: (Mac OSX only; requires restart). This will generally give you a sharper display but a lower frame rate. this option is disabled by Default. Reference http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Release/6.1.1.525446
• Antialiasing: Smoothes jagged edges. Renders a scene the number of multiple times that is actually shown and scales it down. Choose the level of antialiasing the viewer will use (requires restart). This setting has no effect when Advanced Lighting is enabled.
• Gamma: Use the Sky Setting editor's Scene Gamma control on the Atmosphere & Lighting tab instead of this. In other words, go to inventory, open the sky setting you want to be brighter, and change it there. The gamma in Preferences only works when Prefs → Graphics → Atmospheric Shaders is turned off.
• Viewer Texture Memory Buffer (MB): This is the amount of graphics memory the viewer will use. By default, it is set to the size of your graphics card's memory.
  • 32bit versions only. This setting is hard limited to a maximum of 512MB. Lowering this value may resolve certain texture corruption and performance issues, but under normal circumstances you should not need to alter this setting.
  • 64bit versions only. This setting is hard limited based on the VRAM available with your graphics card. It is recommended you increase the slider to use the maximum available to prevent texture thrashing.
    • GPU 1GB = up to 768MB
    • GPU 2GB+ = up to 1024MB
    • GPU 4GB+ = up to 2048MB
• Enable Dynamic Texture Memory: Allows the viewer to use more than 2GB of texture memory. Dynamic Texture Memory only works on 64-bit viewers with at least 512MB VRAM and GPUs supporting and reporting either GL_ATI_meminfo (AMD) or GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info (NVIDIA) vendor-specific OpenGL extensions. It will allow using all currently available VRAM, or at least the value specified in minimum viewer texture memory capped at physical VRAM, minus VRAM reserve for allocating textures. That value minus cache reserve is the texture memory available for textures actually rendered.
  • Note: GL_ATI_meminfo (AMD) or GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info (NVIDIA) are OpenGL extensions that come with your graphics drivers. If the extensions are not present in your graphics driver, or if your GPU is unable to use them, or if the viewer is unable to get a reply from your system, this setting won't be available.
• Fog Distance Ratio: Determines how far away Second Life's fog effect begins. Lower values = closer fog. Only used when you have Atmospheric Shaders disabled. If Atmospheric Shaders are enabled, this effect is handled by the Distance Multiplier control in the Advanced Sky Editor.
• Image Decode Concurrency: Determines the number of threads to use for decoding images. 0 allows the viewer to take advantage of multiple cores in your computer, so generally should provide the best performance. Any other number limits the viewer to the specified number.

• Freeze updates to World (pause everything): This suspends rendering. Useful for picture taking, if you wish to capture a specific scene that might otherwise change while you are preparing.

• Restrict maximum texture resolution to 512px (64bit only; requires restart) (default on 32bit already).
• Max Texture Quality Level: If you have a poor connection, you may wish to reduce the level of texture detail. This can be set to Normal, Minimal or None.
  Naturally, setting this to anything other than Normal will result in textures displaying poorly, or not at all. Do not change unless absolutely necessary - for example, if you have a very poor connection but need to be online, and don't care if you can see textures or not.

These options control when alpha masking should be used in an attempt to mitigate the well known alpha sorting issue, in which prims behind other prims may appear to flicker in front. The two options are:

• Render alpha masks when “Advanced Lighting Model” is not enabled
• Render alpha masks when “Advanced Lighting Model” is enabled

• Render Glow: If enabled, shows the glow effect on any prims that have it.
  • Strength: Controls the intensity of the glow effect. The default is 2.
• Show avatars that haven't finished loading: Equivalent to the debug setting RenderUnloadedAvatar.
  Note that this is not a solution to a bake fail, as it doesn't actually fix anything; it merely forces the viewer to display whatever it happens to have managed to load. It is recommended that this be always left disabled.
• Limit Framerate: Yield some time to the local host if a threshold framerate is reached. The framerate limit is set with the slider to the right.
• Show the Scene as Wireframe: Enables wireframe display of everything. Note that this setting does not persist after a relog.
• Enable Attached Lights (Face Lights): Enable this if you wish to see the affects of lights worn by avatars.
• Render Attached Particles: Enable to see particles generated by worn attachments.
• Time to delay while pre-caching before showing world: Allows the world to start caching before it is shown, at login.
• Quality of the shadows: Adjusts the quality of shadows. Note that increasing this will significantly impact rendering speed (FPS).
• Scale of Terrain Texture Rendering (requires restart): Indicates the scale of terrain textures, with lower values being more compressed textures.

Depth of field simulates real life blurring that occurs when things are not in focus. For example, if you are taking a photo of a person, then typically, things in the background will be blurred; the futher away, the more blurred. If you shift your focus to a tree behind the person, then the person will, in turn, become blurred. For more information, refer here. You can adjust the following settings to mimic RL camera effects.

• Depth of Field: Enabling this causes out-of-focus objects to be blurred, depending on distance.
  • Enable while in edit mode: Normally, DoF disables when you edit something; if you enable this, DoF will remain active.
  • Enable while underwater: By default, DOF is turned off underwater; enable this if you want it on.
  • Depth of Field focus follows pointer: If you enable this setting, then the focus point will follow your mouse, making the old flycam workaround unnecessary. You can lock our focus at any point using Alt-Shift-X, after which the focus will remain there and you can then move your mouse without the focus following it.
• Camera F Number: Controls maximum screen radius from which to sample from, to avoid graphics card In real world terms this is the aperture setting for the lens and the lower the value the shorter the depth of field will be. The same applies to SL.
  The default value is 9.00
• Camera Focal Length mm: This tells the viewer what Focal Length/Lens Length to simulate for the DOF effect. Higher numbers produce a narrower depth of field.
  The default is 50.0
• Camera FOV degs.: This tells the viewer what FOV you would like to simulate for the DOF effect. Higher values will produce a more narrow depth of field.
  The default is 60.00
• DOF Focus Transition Time: This sets the time in seconds it take to the viewer to change focus from one object.
  The default is 0.50
• DOF Rendering Quality: This determines the quality of the DOF Effect. For non-photography uses '.25' is good. For setting up shots '.50' or '.70' is very nice. For shooting quality images '1.00' is best. Note that High values will slow down your FPS.
  The default is 0.70