High-Quality Firestorm Settings
Move the Quality and Speed slider toward Ultra, then set the individual controls manually. The following is a strong everyday high-quality baseline for a capable dedicated GPU. It is not a promise that every region will maintain high FPS: scene complexity, PBR content, avatar count, scripts, network conditions, and server performance still matter. But you can adjust quality and performance for your specific hardware.
(image Preferences)
| Firestorm setting | High-quality recommendation | Why it matters |
| Transparent Water | Enabled | Improves water appearance, especially in waterfront and underwater scenes. |
| Ambient Occlusion | Enabled | Adds contact shading around furniture, feet, folds, and intersecting objects. |
| Screen Space Reflections | Enabled for quiet regions and photography | Enhances reflections but can be costly where many reflective surfaces are visible. |
| Mirrors | Off by default; enable when needed | Planar mirrors are among the most expensive effects and only matter when a mirror is actually visible. |
| Shadows | Sun/Moon + Projectors | Produces the richest depth and lighting, but is a major GPU cost. |
| Reflection Detail | Static & Dynamic | Allows more complete reflected visual information. |
| Reflection Coverage | Full scene for high quality | Broadens where dynamic reflections apply; reduce first when performance is poor. |
| Point Lighting | Full | Preserves local-light quality in detailed interior scenes. |
| Draw Distance | 128–192 m for everyday use | 128 m is usually rich enough. 192 m is excellent for scenery, homes, and open regions. More is not automatically better. |
| Max. particle count | 4,096 if your GPU handles it | Useful in effects-heavy scenes, but particles can become expensive very quickly. |
| Post-process quality | High | Maintains the quality of shader and post-processing effects. |
| Max. nearby lights | Use a high value only where necessary | Large values are useful in elaborate lighting, but can add GPU work in heavily decorated interiors. |
| Objects & Sculpts LOD | About 2.0–2.5 | A good balance of mesh detail and cost. Use 3.0 temporarily for close photography or content inspection. |
| Avatar LOD | About 2.0–3.0 | Helps preserve mesh body, hair, and attachment detail at useful distances. |
| Terrain LOD | High | Improves terrain definition, especially outdoors. |
| Sky LOD | High | Useful for visual quality, though less critical than object, avatar, and terrain LOD. |
| Mirror Resolution | 1024 for ordinary high quality | Good quality without treating every visible mirror as a photographic render. |
| Mirror Update Rate | Medium | Good compromise between animation responsiveness and continuing render cost. |
You can enlarge these by clicking. You’ll see the difference in my case is minor. But, I can see it and like my daily use settings. I think worth my time.
PBR, Reflections, and Mirrors
PBR changes the way materials interact with light. Metal, painted surfaces, wood, fabric, glass, and other materials can look substantially more convincing, but the result depends on both the material and its environment. A PBR material may look too dark, too bright, overly glossy, or dull if the EEP environment and region lighting do not suit it.
For best visual quality, begin with Ambient Occlusion, Screen Space Reflections, and high-quality shadows enabled. Then judge the scene. Reflections are especially dependent on what is actually visible in the frame, so their cost can change dramatically as the camera turns toward a reflective shop interior, a water scene, a mirrored room, or a densely decorated PBR home.
| Situation | Recommended reflection and mirror settings |
| Ordinary exploring, shopping, socializing | SSR on if performance permits; Mirrors off; Mirror Resolution 1024 retained for later use. |
| Detailed home, studio, or showroom | SSR on; Reflection Detail Static & Dynamic; Reflection Coverage Full scene if stable; enable mirrors only if a working mirror is relevant to the scene. |
| Still photography | SSR on; shadows at the best practical level; mirror resolution 2048 only for a significant close mirror; set mirror update rate High only if motion is part of the image sequence. |
| Machinima | Use high reflections and shadows for controlled shots, but test frame pacing. A stable lower setting is usually better than a visually richer setting that produces uneven motion. |
| Crowded event | Turn Mirrors off first. Reduce Reflection Coverage and Detail, then disable SSR if required. |
Screen-space ambient occlusion should not be confused with occlusion information that may be part of a PBR material. Turning the screen-space effect off removes that particular viewer effect; it does not mean all material-level occlusion information disappears.
There is more… scroll down for the page links.