Some performance observations + graphics settings that have an effect

[Tam3n]

Ok so here are some observations I have made while tweaking various settings.

First thing to note is that the this game is very CPU hungry. If your CPU is not up for it, you will get a fps drop for certain! Turning Hyper Threading on/off doesn't have any noticeable effect. When I turned HT off I saw that all four cores were utilized, 1st and 2nd core around 80% and 3rd and 4th around 50%, in the Coerthas city I was doing my tests in. When I turned HT back on the load was distributed in varying degree on all 8 threads.

Also tried to set affinity to only two cores (they were then used 100%) which resulted in a drastic performance drop. So you really want to at least have a quad core processor for this game. My cpu is i7 3820 @ 4,46GHz and 16GB quad channel ram is running at 1938MHz and it still looks like I could make use of some more CPU power!

About hard disk performance, you naturally get faster loading times with a SDD, but it shouldn't affect the fps too much after the zone and characters are loaded. Since I have some ram overhead, I tested running the entire 9GB game from a ram disk. While that effectively reduces the reading times to something very small, it didn't have much of a effect on the actual game performance. That's mostly due to fact that even with a SDD the loading times are mostly just waiting for the server to transfer your character into different zone. Also running from ram didn't have noticeable effect on the fps drops.

The most important graphic settings are the three first in the list.

"HDR rendering" mainly improves rendering of bright objects, mainly the sun. With it you also get a little better colors out of the lighting, but nothing very noticeable most of the time. If your fps is constantly lower than you'd like, try disabling this.

"Occlusion culling" disables rendering of objects you cannot see, freeing resources. Mostly noticeable in cities and other places where a lot geometry is located in the direction of sight (even if most of it is invisible behind walls etc). It doesn't have any effect on the visual quality and I'd always enable this option.

"Use LOD" does what reads in it's description. Distant objects are rendered in a lower detail thus reducing the rendering load. I was a little surprised to see that this option actually nicely decreases the fps drops seen when you turn the camera/move around.

If you still have trouble when there's a lot characters around you, try hiding the shadows of other NPCs.

I have two 7850s in crossfire... If you are playing on a lower end GPU you might need to reduce the other settings further, however these were the settings I found making the biggest impact on the frame rate. Also if you are suffering from a low performance even on the lowest settings on a decent GPU, the bottleneck is then most likely caused by your CPU.

For me the Catalyst 13.8 beta2 drivers have been working nicely.

Looks like enabling/disabling Frame Pacing doesn't have any effect, which is excepted since this is a DX9 game. For now I'd leave it disabled just in case.

Enabling disabling triple buffering doesn't have any effect and I'd leave it disabled.

Using the high quality texture filtering option doesn't have any impact on the fps for me.

Also running firefox-youtube in the background doesn't have any effect on the fps for me.

This game (like any) should run better in the fullwindow mode.

Have you noticed these same things or do you have better info? Please post