Can play it but it’s a little slow/low?

[Badmagic]

Was looking around earlier a bit for “tips n tweaks”, after finding nothing that really worked other than the very obvious stuff like play in a postage stamp resolution I figured I’d try some different resolutions and settings (my native is a choice of 1680x1050 on my gaming pc monitor and 1920x1200 on my “work stuff” monitor) to see if I could stomach the usually horrible up-scaling or at worst ultra letterbox with massive black borders.

 

As I figured, although what I could see of the game looked pretty I would need a magnifying glass to play un-scaled and if scaled it looked like a horribly pixilated blur.

 

Anyway, I set it on “High” textures and “Very High” renders then I put every slider on maximum (thanks to the –norestricion switch) before checking resolution from 800x600-1680x1050.

 

I then checked every second or third resolution trying individual bar settings other than textures and renders at 75%, 50%, 25% etc.

 

Imaging my surprise to find the only slider that truly killed performance was the horribly poor shadows, as it doesn’t turn shadows off but only makes them less defined I would have expected this to be a minimal effect on fps but the difference was near as damit 50% faster game-play with shadows at 0 instead of 16, I like many others think the shadows look a bit horrible, whether it’s a bug or a driver issue I cant say but the game actually looks better for me with them reduced to 0 as it removes all the strange artifact’ing on their edges, previously I had been moving it all over the place, 16, 12, 8, 5 to find a balance between performance to looks but at every setting they look more or less horrible and even as low as 1 still gutted performance in comparison to 0.

 

The next most hungry for performance slider for me was view distance which was to be expected, previously I was hovering around the 25-35 range for an acceptable (for me anyway) fps level for single player (SP), anywhere between 20-40.

 

With the shadows set to 0 I can now whack it up to 75+ and see the same sort of fps I was experiencing prior to disabling shadows at only 30’ish view distance.

 

Depending on what people would accept for fps in SP as I know some are willing to go lower where others aren’t willing to compromise anything, if I was able to accept 10-25 fps I could literally be using everything at maximum @ 1680x1050 with the only exception being shadows at 0, as I cant bear a fps quite that low I compromised and also moved the view distance slider to 60% and I’m maintaining about 25-40 fps, seeing as I was significantly lower previously I or you could lower it further to get an even larger boost if 25 fps is too low for you.

 

I even tested by starting a bloodbath with the 100% traffic setting, a dozen cops on screen along with their squad cars, at least another dozen private cars, explosions pedestrians limbs flying left right and centre and standing in the spotlights of at least a couple of choppers I was grinning.

 

I then just before getting obliterated loaded my save and proceeded to jump on a motorbike and gun it as fast as I could over a nice long bride into a highly build up area and the now thanks to the sliders massive amounts of traffic to dodge.

 

Didn’t hiccup or slowdown once.

 

Frames per second are incredibly subjective, I wouldn’t accept anything less than 60 minimum in a multiplayer game but I don’t play this multiplayer, single player for me though is another matter, as long as I don’t get eye strain or it adversely affects my ability to play I’m happy.

 

After a couple of days trying different things I really don’t think the shadows slider is the full story here otherwise it would have been posted on day 1 minute 1 of the game launch, instead I am thinking it’s a combination of reducing resolution then putting it back to what you actually want to play the game at, as I said, I started at 800x600 and worked my way up where as in the past simply lowering the shadows slider had little to no noticeable performance gain for me.

 

I’m sure many wont try it, I’m also sure it wont work for some and for all I know it may make things worse for others but I strongly urge people to try this as frankly it gave me some bizarre results.

 

It may also be worth noting what people are using if it has a positive, negative or no effect, for example, for me it would look like:

 

 

Overclocking: NoneO/S: Vista U 32 (SP1)CPU: 4800+RAM: 4x1024 3200 DDR (3.3 effective with 32 bit limitation)GFX: Nvidia 8800 GTX 768Result = +35%-50% fps

 

 

Also, keep in mind depending on your system most will likely need to use the “-norestricion” shortcut switch as with myself in order to gain complete control of the in game settings for testing.

 

Anyhoo, with performance at a premium in this title this only takes about 1 minute to check and 9 minutes to test although I admit I was rampaging for quite a bit more than 10 minutes during my testing phase so you never know, it may well give you the same bizzaro world speed boost it gave me so 10 minutes isn’t much to pay to try it out.