The slider in Preferences > General > Hardware Options > Texture Memory (MB) can be now be set only for values within a range of memory that Second Life can properly support. At this time, the texture memory requirements of Second Life are almost always below 512 MB. (Technical Note: the viewer will actually allow itself to use 1.5 times the value set in this slider, in some cases.)

In performance tests of the viewer, it can be counterproductive to allow textures to occupy too much memory, even when the GPU might support more. Too much allocated texture memory can cause memory to become occupied by unused textures, while other necessary textures have no memory left to use; this will routinely slow down the performance, or even crash, especially when some other large applications are running. Many residents who experience crashes have this value set at 512 MB, but find they can eliminate crashing by lowering the Texture Memory to a smaller value such as 256 MB.

Likewise, be aware that setting the Texture Memory too small can cause very frequent texture swapping, making inworld texture loading very slow. To mitigate this problem on some systems, the slider can only be set as low as 64 MB. Thus the detected video memory in Second Life supports a range from 32-512 MB, or 64-512 MB, depending on your system.