Viewerhelp:Preferences - Graphics - Hardware Settings

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KBcaution.png Important: This article has been translated. The translation was imported on 18 Mar 2010. Any changes will require re-export for incremental translation.

Fine-tune aspects of your Viewer graphics. In some cases, your NVIDIA or ATI graphic card's system-level control panel can override what you see here, so if changing these options isn't making an expected difference, consult your graphics card's documentation and check that control panel first.

Filtering

  Enables Anisotropic Filtering to make textures at angles appear sharper. For example, a sign on a tilted building in the distance appears crisper when this is on. Slows performance noticeably on less-powerful graphics cards.
Antialiasing

  Specifies the number of times the Viewer draws a scene, which reduces jagged edges. Set higher to display smoother edges, with correspondingly more rendering work, and thus slower performance on low-end graphics cards. If your card meets or exceeds the System Recommendations, you can enable antialiasing with minimal performance loss. On capable systems, 4x is a good balance between quality and speed.
Enable VBO (OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects)

  Results in an overall performance gain on most systems. On some systems, may cause stuttering and crashes, so if that occurs, disable this setting.
Texture Memory (MB)

  Amount of graphics card memory reserved for textures; without enough, Second Life scenes may flicker or blur.

Normally, the Viewer automatically detects the amount of texture memory in your graphics card, so you don't need to change it. Occasionally, the amount may be set incorrectly, and you must manually adjust it to what your graphics card actually has.

Fog Distance Ratio

  If your graphics settings are at High or better, ignore this obscure control.

It only works consistently when Basic shaders and Atmospheric shaders are both off. Decreasing it makes the distance more foggy, which is preferable if you want a more gradual falloff at the horizon line. Otherwise, it doesn't matter.