Hardware

Best Second Life® NVIDIA Graphics Settings for Firestorm: PBR, Reflections, and Performance – 2026

by

I keep seeing images from Second Life® that look better than mine… well, technically they are better. Better resolution, crispness, and contrast. So, I decided it was time to review my graphics settings computer and viewer-wise.

Now there is no single “best” Second Life® graphics setting. A quiet home, a detailed PBR region, a shopping event, and a machinima set impose very different loads on a viewer. Old or new hardware can carry different loads. There is the matter of Personal Taste, which determines what you want to see. There is no ‘right’ setting. Try for the best visible quality and acceptable frame rate and stable texture loading that YOU enjoy.

I am an NVIDIA  user/fan. So, most of my images and writing are NVIDIA  related. But similar settings apply to all video cards. You just have to figure out which of the settings I refer to are in your graphics control panel by a similar name. A.I. can help.

For NVIDIA  users and actually others, most of the picture-quality decisions belong in the Firestorm Viewer itself. The NVIDIA  Control Panel should make sure Firestorm uses the discrete GPU and avoids unwanted driver overrides. Current Firestorm builds also differ from many older guides: the central controls are now in Preferences → Graphics → General, with additional tabs for Hardware Settings, Rendering, and Depth of Field.

NVIDIA Control Panel
NVIDIA Control Panel – Sept 2026

As of 9/22/2026, the NVIDIA graphics driver is version 32.0.16.1714 (617.14). You can check your version in the viewer’s Help->About… panel.

Short version: Use a per-program NVIDIA profile, keep filtering quality high, and let Firestorm control antialiasing. In Firestorm, use the General tab for shadows, ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, mirrors, draw distance, avatar limits, and LOD. Save separate presets for everyday use, photography, and crowded events rather than treating an all-maxed setting as a permanent default.

I have my everyday settings tweaked mainly for quality. For flying I change to more performance-oriented but I increase Draw Distance to 512m. For panoramic views I have a total max on quality. These are all saved as presets.

Read more

Pages: 1 2 3

NVIDIA 1180 Almost Here…

by

We had rumors for months as to what the next NVIDIA card would be, when it would release, and what it would cost. But, we are getting closer to a possible release. NVIDIA only goes so long before they release a new card. So…

Ray Tracing is a way of rendering a scene. Its big advantage is in rendering very realistic images. For instance, most of an Ikea catalog is made from rendered images that for a long time I thought were RL photos.

The reason it isn’t used so much in games is the cost of rendering the images. So, software like AutoDesk’s AutoCAD use it as real time rendering isn’t needed. The primary task is prototype product images, pictures of products not yet existing in RL. Only within the design process… a computer.  Making it more of a snapshot thing than a  movie camera.

NVIDIA adding in a Ray Trace feature will being higher quality graphics to more games. Less time will be spent calculating the effect of lights and shadows.

For use in Second Life it isn’t going to be a big plus or even a change. The SL render engine is required to support older systems. So, adding a ray trace feature to the engine is not going to be a high priority, if it is even a consideration.

However, the card will be faster and likely have faster video memory.

NVIDIA 1180 Rumors

by

The release date is the big rumor. It ranges from July to September 2018.

It also looks like NVIDIA may be the only manufacturer releasing a major video card in 2018. The collection of information available as of June 2nd, 2018 is in this nerdy video.

The TL:DR take away is it will be the best card of 2018 (…is that because it is the ONLY card?), pricy, somewhat faster but no one is for sure, will use the newest GDDR6 VRAM which is in short supply… But, this is only speculation even when based on educated guesses.

From an earlier video we get more specific details and for the visually oriented (aren’t all SL peeps visually oriented?) it is in an easier to compare format.

Read more

M.2 vs NVMe – Fast or Slow SSD?

by

In the world of Solid State Drives (SSD) we have new tech most home users haven’t heard of. So, the idea is they can put in an SSD and it will be fast, which is wrong. Only if hardware is matched and properly installed will it be fast.

The video is bit long winded but, it clearly explains what has to be matched and the settings issue.

He did not mention the need for the motherboard to have ample PCIe channels. If one pours all this data into a PCIe bus with only 8 channels nothing is going to be fast. Your new video card likely wants 16 channels but will work with 4… not well. With an SSD wanting 4 channels the motherboard is forced to divide up channels.

If you have anything else using PCIe… things get really crowded.

So, installing an SSD is easy and simple. Getting it to perform at the rated specs is complicated. Not rocket science, just a bunch of details one has to know about.

Intel vs AMD for Second Life

by

Second Life™ users want performance. Most of you know Second Life is NOT an optimized game world but rather a hobbyists-built world that can drag even the best gaming machine down to single digit frame rates. So, performance is a thing among SL users.

CPUs are the heart of performance with the GPU being the legs.

Both Intel and AMD have new CPUs out. So, the natural question is which is best for running Second Life?

In general, this is how the two stack up in head to head testing. (8+ min)

For some data processing in the beginning AMD is noticeably ahead. Yet in the games similar to Second Life the Intel consistently renders about 5±% more frames.

Read more