Tutorial: Letting your graphics card do the heavy lifting

Hello Everybody! Below is a tutorial on how to let your graphics card do the heavy lifting when it comes to Second Life. Now I know that Second Life does have hardware options in the graphics preferences in my experience when I let the viewer do the work I end up with massive amounts of lag, glitches, and a shoddy look. So after some experimenting I’ve found a way to fix that with Nvidia video cards. (Sorry everybody, I’d post the one for ATI Cards but well…I hate ATI Cards because I think they give people cat aids and they also catch on fire). Images are shrunk down so that I don’t break feeds, however you can click on the image to see a larger version.

Step 1: Disable Hardware Options in your Viewer

This is pretty easy. Go to your SL Viewer Preferences and then to graphics. You will see a button labeled “Hardware Options”. Go ahead and click that and you should see options for AntiAliasing, VBO, etc. Go ahead and disable all of these except for VBO. See Image Below

The button that should be selected is OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects. Nothing else should be selected and AA should be set to disabled. I know that in Second Life Beta you cannot select your AA settings but that is fine as we can take steps down the road to ignore it.

Step 2: The Nvidia Control Panel

Now that we have your Second Life Viewer settings the way we want them we can go ahead and exit out of Second Life.

Right click on your desktop and select Nvidia Control Panel. If you do not see it you can go ahead and search for it or looking in Start –> Programs –> Nvidia. You should get a window that looks like this:

On the left hand menu you should see “Manage 3D Settings”. Select that and you’ll see the table on the right appear.

Use the scroll down menu to find the .exe file for your Second Life Viewer. I use Phoenix so I would select phoenix.exe. If your viewer is not listed you may add it by clicking the add button that I have circled and searching for the executable or .exe file on your drive.

On my drive the location Second Life viewer is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\SecondLifeViewer2

For the beta viewer it is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\SecondLifeBetaViewer

For Phoenix viewer it is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Phoenix Viewer

Once you have your program selected go ahead and move on to Step 3

Step 3: Fiddling around with the settings

You should be looking at a window similar to this:

Feel free to play around with the settings as you see fit. I will share with you what mine are currently set at:

Anisotropic Filtering is set to On

Antialiasing – Gamma Correction is set to On.

This one is pretty self explanatory

AntiAliasing – Mode is set to: Override any Application Setting

This is essential to what we’re trying to do here. This will tell your video card to ignore anything SL tries to do with AA and instead run it itself

Antialiasing Setting is 4x

You can go higher, and in some cases I will go as high as 32x. However, for day to day Second Life that is like strapping a rocket to a turd. Sure it’ll go real fast and look pretty but it’ll be a real mess in the end.

Texture Filtering -Anisotropic Sample Optimization is set to On

This improves image quality by locking the frame rendering rate with your monitors refresh rate and will eliminate horizontal tearing effects in 3d images

Texture Filtering -Negative LOD Bias  is set to Allow

This isn’t necessary but I like to have it enabled especially when I am flying around as it will sharpen a stationary image but will introduce aliasing when I am in motion.

And with that you should be done. Before you go setting everything to plaid go ahead and read the descriptions of what you are tinkering with. It will be below the box once you have it selected and will also give you some typical usage scenarios. Hope this helps your Second Life experience.

I promise I’ll be snarky later this week or something.