And not in a good way :(
Why did no-one warn me that excessive time in SL would cause my graphics card to heat up so much that my laptop would shut down on me?
I feel very rude, you know, having a conversation with someone, be it a friend or some French lass in a blue rubber catsuit with a bullwhip and 12" heels, only to suddenly disappear without warning leaving them wondering what they said or what was so important that I had to shoot through without even paying for the coffee.
I'm nicer than that. I really am.
SL problems call for RL solutions and I am hoping my very recent purchase of a notepad cooler pad will minimise my hasty exits mid-sentence. We'll see.
Monday, March 9, 2009
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Yeah, unfortunately SL has a reputation as a graphics card killer :-/ Gotta watch that, and do whatever you can to minimise the damage.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few settings you can apply, such as never run the system on 'Ultra' (or even on 'High') graphics settings, unless for a short while as you take pics for the blog. Sometimes, if my card's struggling (and I run a pretty high-end gaming desktop, geekgirl that I am), I'll shove the graphics onto 'Low' and just tweak a few of the individual settings (check the 'Custom' box on the Graphics Preferences window to see those) to make things look prettier.
The main thing I do is to continually tweak my graphics preferences according to where I am and what I'm doing. If I'm taking pics and standing stationary, I'll have it on Ultra for a while, to get the best possible shots. If I'm treasure-hunting (and thus a lot of textures will be downloading) I have everything as low as it will go, apart from 'Objects'. If I'm indoors then I don't need high-resolution trees, sky and ground, so those go down to zero. It may seem like a lot of hassle, but once you get used to it, the changes only take a few seconds to apply. I just wish we could create graphics settings pre-sets; kind of one-click "indoors", "treasure hunt", "photo-op" settings, instead of having to adjust each thing individually.
I think this calls for a blogpost ;)
That's really useful stuff to know, Mar. Thankyou. I'd found some of it, and did some of it already (for lag preventative reasons) but it's good to have all this detail here.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah. Custom graphics pre-sets would be a great idea.
As a sidenote, the good news is that my notebook coolpad thing seemed to do the trick last night. Inworld for over five hours without a heat-related shut-down. Usually my laptop manages four at the most before a visit to the fridge.