Graphics Settings

[Gory 0]

I'm sure this has been covered, but I've been unable find it using search. If anyone can send me the link, i'd love it.

That notwithstanding here's my question: Where do you start from on the graphics set-up? I'm aware there's trial and error, but the possible permutations mean that i'd be trialing and erroring well into my 50's.

i'm running an Athlon 2400+ processor on an ECS somethingsomething motherboard. 512mb Ram. GeForce Verto MX420 (64mb). Older Soundblster PCI 128 (i think) sound card.

I just bumped up the resolution to my full screen res of 1280x1024x32 and set everything else to MAX. It's really pretty but darn slow frame rate. Where should I start reducing? x32 to x16? Effects textures? Shadows?

Help?

Thanks in advance,

[grA] Gory

in Los Angeles

[dekela 0]

i have a 566Mhz p3 and a gf2 mx 400 64meg card. my settings are as follows, 800x600x16 display @ 86Hz, vxync off, no shadows, effect detail and texture on medium, all other on high, mipmap textures on everything else off and my frame rates are acceptable. any where from 30 to 60 fps on most maps. hope this helps

cheers

Edited August 26, 2003 by dekela

[Gory 0]

Dekela,

Thanks for the prompt reply. What i'm looking for, though, ideally, is a chart of what settings are important, which to lose first, etc. For example, is "compress textures" good or bad?

Thanks,

Greg

[dekela 0]

you could have a look at this its not a chart but it might help

cheers......

[Specter 0]

That is an awesome report that will give you alot of good info.

For that video card though, Id turn off all vehicle and character shadows, run at 800X600 with a 16 bit Z buffer, turn off mip mapping, run low detail smoke, and turn bullet holes down or off. Unless you record your games, turn off replay, and the start up movie.Everything else should be good on high.

Do be warned though, that there are some mods that will be slow for you no matter what, and not to judge performance by the way they run. Frostbite and Harntrox 4 will be two of them. They have alot of heavy scripting in them that need a very beefy system to really perform well. They are awesome mods....some of the best. But they do eat up a system.

[OSO 0]

I would have to disagree with you on the point that the scripting is what causes the system strain in Frostbite. Most of the missions have a large number of vehicles in them as well as having the fog settings turned down. These two factors cause a bigger strain on a system than a script. I was extremely diligent in organizing the scripts into groups to reduce their overhead on the system.

I freely admit that there are numerous hidden enemy on the maps at mission start that are revealed when the player enters a zone. This is a trade off and I really can’t say which is worse. A loop to check the position of the player(s) or rendered polygons in view with AI active and executing plans. The result of this is a mission that runs smooth to a point that then has a hiccup when everything is revealed and assigned plans. Before the hidden actor bug was introduced in patch 1.3.5 the plans didn’t have to be assigned via the script. Jack57 was the one that pointed this out to me as a work around for this bug that we as scripters don’t have any control over.

Other factors that may cause fps hits to occur are having more than one map portal in your view at the same time. Example: If Room one has 12,000 polys in it, they are loaded into your RAM. If you are looking through a window into Room 2 that also has 8,000 polys in it, you just dumped 20,000 polys into your RAM. Regardless of your system, you should notice a performance drop even if there aren’t enemy AI on the map when this occurs.

Another thing that hasn’t been discussed here is this guy’s sound card and settings. Turn off the EAX effects and go into your sound card settings and turn off the enable hardware acceleration or buy a new one. You would be surprised how much RAM audio takes up. It is a matter of preference really which is more important to you as far as audio or visual.

[Gory 0]

Thanks for all the advice. I had been setting the resolution to the highest and everything else low. I difinitely think think this advice works better. I have 2 questions from the above advice:

1. Which setting is "low detail smoke"

2. Why would turning hardware acceleration off make the game run BETTER? Seems counter intuitive to me...

Thanks, all.

Greg

[dekela 0]

1: effect texture and effects detail

2: try it and see

cheers......

[OSO 0]

That was actually recommended by Red Storm’s Tech support a long time ago when GR was first released and un-patched. I had the same sound card in my old rig that you have in yours. Their recommendation worked for me. The older sound cards lack the ability to play numerous sounds simultaneously and it ends up creating a bottle neck thus slowing your game down.

I can't explain why enabling hardware acceleration makes it worse because I don't know.

[Gory 0]

Allright, here's a wrench for you...I just replaced a mistakenly bought PC2100 512MB chip with a PC2700 512MB chip in order to maximize the system...and run at 133mhz/133mhz.

Should I put the PC2100 512mb back in and run at 100mhz/133mhz with 1gb of ram? Will that help?

Thanks again for all the input.

Greg

[Specter 0]

No. It wont help. In fact it will slow the PC2700 down to PC2100.

Whenever you mix speeds, the PC will run at the slowest one.