Textures and Lag

A lot of people never consider the correlation between textures and lag. Fact of the matter is, most of SL's performance issues are due to texture bloat. Videogames rarely use textures larger than 512x512, games like Crysis and Skyrim are often using 128x256 textures on surfaces SL users leap straight to 1024x1024 to texture!

Gamers know those 4K HD texture mods come at a big performance hit if your machine doesn't have enough memory to handle it, and even games running those mods are typically rendering a fraction of the amount of textures Second Life throws at your videocard.

 Many attachments, such as hair, even have 512x512 or 1024x1024 store logos plastered on a hidden root prim you never see, that texture is still eating up VRAM and SL only uses 512MB of VRAM for textures before your framerates start to crawl.

 A good rule of thumb is that unless a surface is 10x10m or larger, you should use a texture smaller than 512x512 and avatar attachments almost never need textures larger than 256x256 unless they're full body mesh.

 There's never a reason to texture hidden surfaces and you should always try to combine textures and use the entire texture map where possible.

Texture responsibly and happy SLing!