Now, I am quite sure everyone of you knows how Lismore looks like on the lowest of settings, and to be fair, SL is fugly as hell on Low. However SL is remarkably (read: bad coding) a very demanding game if you want to run it on max settings, something I'm sure only a few of you have....so, let me show you a comparison!
Now here we have Lismore on Medium, with a draw distance of 400. This is my normal setting, even though my recommended settings are on High, I prefer to take a step lower cause we all know how lag can be. Also, on this setting (and by default) Anti-Aliasing is disabled. Most of you probably know this setting and how it looks.
Now, we go to Hardware Options and turn Anti-Aliasing on, on 8x no less. What Anti-Aliasing does is make things look smoother, at distances like these you wont notice it so much but when you look at AV's and the likes, you will notice it. I had Anti-Aliasing on as I was taking some pictures of my AV's, highest settings always brings the best out of them. Next we crank that puppy up onto Ultra, again with a draw distance of 400 (else we would not see the back of the sim there.) Now, take a look on how huge that difference is.
As you can see, we suddenly got a whole lot more lighting and the colors burst out even more. You can see that the trees actually look somewhat more realistic compared to their kind of cartoony look on medium at that distance. One of the other big noticeable things is Zenko, you can actually SEE the crystals now rather then their glowing outlining and you can tell what colors they actually are behind that glow. Also notice that due to the increased lighting, shading is far more noticeable and makes it look even better.
Now I didn't turn shadows on, that might even be too demanding, putting things on 8x Anti-Aliasing and onto the Ultra settings is already demanding a lot of my PC, hence why I only use it for pictures because in truth, SL can look pretty damn beautiful when it wants to be, but it's a demanding bish when you want it to look beautiful. Anyways, I hope you all enjoy this little comparison between Medium and Ultra and how Lismore looks in them.
Yes, I was bored, what do you mean this topic is pointless? D:<