Correction:
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing should be disabled. It will make a grand difference in many textures, BUT it's a huge performance hit.
Also, if you are not seeing all of these settings, from the CCC, choose View and then Advanced.
Be well, people of CoH.
Awesome Bill! What a unique and cool guide. 
We have the same card and I have simply not been very satisfied with the performance of CoV out of this hardware. I am going to go through all of your settings as soon as I get to the home pc. Thanks!!
Bill,
Thanks for the information and time to get these all in one spot. I have the same Vid Card as well.
I have looked at all of those settings and just have not had the time to try and tweak to see the results.
I look forward to giving them a test tonight.
Murph
Murph's 50s:
H: Tank, Cont, Def, Scrapper, Blaster, Bane
V: MM x5, Corr x2, Stalker, Dom, Fort
Glad to help, yall. Hope it improves things for ya. I'm also writing up the 2nd revision of performance guide which will include this and much more. I'll have it posted by this weekend.
Be well, people of CoH.
You rock Bill! I can't wait to get home and tweak some of my settings. 
But still I fear and still I dare not laugh at the madman!
One man's "meh" is another man's "zomg". - Leatherneck
Procrastination meter coming soon.
I have a question Bill... I have noticed a SUBSTANTIAL increase in FPS when I disable 'depth of field effects'... what the heck *is* 'depth of field effects?' 
Make a man a fire and keep him warm for the day, SET a man on fire and keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Incarnates: K'lir(Fire/Dark Corr):Hot-House Flower(Plant/Fire Dom):Kinrad X(Kin/Rad Def):Itsy-Bitsy Spider(Crab):Two Ton Tony(Mace/WP Broot):Teeny Weeny Widow(Fortunata/Widow) : Zeroth Law (Ice/Fire Tank)
Depth of Field is an effect that causes things in the distance to become hazy so as to replicate how things look in reality.
It would be a nice effect except for:
It breaks FSAA on ATI cards due to ATI's craptastic OpenGL support
It is a performance hit
Bloom adds lighting effects, strobes, reflections, etc, same probs as with DoF
Water on Low does NOT seem to break FSAA, but is a performance hit. Water on High breaks FSAA.
Be well, people of CoH.
Cool, thanks!
Make a man a fire and keep him warm for the day, SET a man on fire and keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Incarnates: K'lir(Fire/Dark Corr):Hot-House Flower(Plant/Fire Dom):Kinrad X(Kin/Rad Def):Itsy-Bitsy Spider(Crab):Two Ton Tony(Mace/WP Broot):Teeny Weeny Widow(Fortunata/Widow) : Zeroth Law (Ice/Fire Tank)
Good guide Bill I'm looking forward to a performance increase from turning off Fast Writes. I never would have known about that bit of advice...
Bloom is evil and I'm glad I turned it off long ago...my fps were in the pits with that thing.
Intresting I have an ATI Radeon 9550 I'll have to try some of this out, thanks for the guide.
im at a lost bill I cant find SMARTGART anywhere in the CCC
[ QUOTE ]
im at a lost bill I cant find SMARTGART anywhere in the CCC
[/ QUOTE ]
BlueHeeler PMed me with the same problem, and I'm at a loss to explain how that could be happening, especially as he has the same card I do.
The first thing I had him do was from within the CCC, click on View, and Advanced. On my system, SMARTGART is listed between Video and VPU Recover.
When he stated nogo on that, I asked him to check:
When installing the driver, go through the FULL steps of:
Use the ATI uninstaller in Add/Remove Programs
Reboot
Cancel XP's auto install of the video adapter
Run Driver Cleaner and strip all ATI video driver remnants
Kill off ALL anti-virus/internet security packages
Install latest version of Catalyst
Reboot
On reboot, do nothing after logging back in (if you have it set to prompt for login)
You should eventually get a message stating CCC functions won't be available until SMARTGART has finished it's tests. Again, do nothing until this comes and goes.
Now you should be able to bring up the CCC, go to the Advanced, not Basic, View, and see SMARTGART. If you still don't.... I'm going to have to admit pure confusion.
Has anyone else come across this issue? Are yall using the Omega drivers instead of the real ATI ones?
Edited to remove a reference to changing AGP mode in BIOS. It doesn't exist there in my BIOS. The only place I can find to adjust AGP 2X/4X/8X is within the SMARTGART section.
Some other thoughts: Shortman and BlueHeeler, are both your motherboards AGP 8X capable? Is AGP set as primary in the BIOS? What is your AGP Aperture set at?
Be well, people of CoH.
[ QUOTE ]
Has anyone else come across this issue? Are yall using the Omega drivers instead of the real ATI ones?
[/ QUOTE ]
Omega has Fast Write on the Smartgart tab. Not only is it off by default, it's disabled so you can't turn it on! Fast Write has been around for years and, as far as I know, has never ever worked well. I think having it off by default may be the biggest reason why many people do so much better with Omega drivers. (There's definitely a story behind this "feature". Did the CEO's son think it up or something??)
I show what most of the graphic options look like in this thread. I recommend turning ON the Shader option if you have it while you're travelling around, training, selling, and like that. Turn it off when it's time to start fighting.
One note: ATI has finally gotten around to fixing the problems with the water effects. If you like the new water effects but have had them turned off because of problems, try downloading the latest driver.
[ QUOTE ]
One note: ATI has finally gotten around to fixing the problems with the water effects. If you like the new water effects but have had them turned off because of problems, try downloading the latest driver.
[/ QUOTE ]
Water on low was fixed in the last rev. Water on high is still broken. Water on low still causes a, in my opinion, unnecessary performance hit. Were I to find myself in standing water far more often than I do in game, I'd feel differently about it.
Actually, since I did all my testing with the HDR effects prior to disabling fast writes, I'll go back and take another run with water on low.
Retested Water on Low with my brute in Primeva. Any performance drop present was negligible at best. Thanks for the prompt to retest. I'll change that in my big performance guide rewrite.
Now wait a min.... clicked on Contacts and the cov client locked up. I usually have a slight pause when clicking on contacts the first time after login, but I haven't had a lockup in freaking ages.
Dropped out, rebooted, now getting that lovely "Unknown Message from patchserver: 20" error, 2nd try worked. I try three times, and if I don't get in I use my skip updater shortcut.
Back in with same character in same location, no settings changed, still on Water = Low:
Normal pause then contacts came up fine. So I'll call it a fluke.
Launched up in flight and paused. The water fx making the water transparent enough to see the rocks around Primeva be seen below the water line.... yea.. it's pretty enough to keep. Hmmm, yea.. water in sewers is much better as well. Ok.. set water to low.
Damnit... belay that. Negative. With water on Low in sewer missions, I was getting an average of 21FPS... turning it off, my FPS shot up to 45. That is too paiful a performance hit for me to back up.
So crank it on low if you want pretty screenshots, but for gameplay, leave water fx OFF.
Be well, people of CoH.
For those not finding the SMARTGART tab, if you have the PCI-Express version of the card, you won't get the tab. It's only for AGP cards. My fault for not verifying what yall had prior to sending you on a goose chase.
Be well, people of CoH.
[ QUOTE ]
ATI's craptastic OpenGL support
[/ QUOTE ]
It sounds like you might be able to help. considering that OpenGL appears to be the source of an issue I have..
You have the same video card I do, but with the 6.3 drivers, I can't run the game...
When I went into the ATI control panel to implement the settings you listed, I click on the 3D stuff and get the following error message repeatedly:
"The currently used OpenGL driver does not support the required extensions to run the 3d preview"
When launching the game, I get these error messages after agreeing to the ToS:
You card or driver doesn't support GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array
You card or driver doesn't support GL_ARB_multitexture
You card or driver doesn't support GL_ARB_texture_compression
Then:
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y93...Xion/Error.jpg
Then:
City of Heroes has crashed and cannot continue. You may need to upgrade to a supported video card or driver.
And it closes.. I can restore to before I installed the 6.3 drivers, but I'd like to get this working if I can. Advice?
KonekoChan,
The only time I've seen the OpenGL errors you speak of, it was due to a corrupted installation.
Be sure the latest version of DirectX is installed, and then run through these steps all over again.
Use the ATI uninstaller in Add/Remove Programs
Reboot
Cancel XP's auto install of the video adapter
Run Driver Cleaner and strip all ATI video driver remnants
Kill off ALL anti-virus/internet security packages
Install latest version of Catalyst
Reboot
***The following wil occur if you have an AGP card and NOT a PCI-E.***
On reboot, do nothing after logging back in (if you have it set to prompt for login)
You should eventually get a message stating CCC functions won't be available until SMARTGART has finished it's tests. Once this is done, you're done.
I know you are all probably sick of me posting this litany every time someone makes an inquiry, but I can not stress enough the importance of a proper driver upgrade. It also allows me to push the corrupted driver install out of my mind so that I can then seek other alternative causes of issues.
Be well, people of CoH.
Hi Bill,
Last night when I got home I upgraded to the cat 6.3 drivers and made the suggested changes. My performance improvement was amazing! and the quality was still at a very satisfactory level.. however there is only one problem.
I can no longer alt-tab out of the game. Previously I could alt tab and have a firefox window up on one side of the screen, with the game in the background running actively on the other side (to check guides/posts and still watch for badguys)
However now I am locked into the game once in, alt tabbing causes some graphical analomies, such as many grainey squares changing into strange colors, but I can never get my firefox window to display in front of CoV.
Any ideas?
To be perfectly honest, Malaekai, I don't have a good answer for you on that.
Alt-Tabbing from full screen 3D has been problematic and buggy for as long as I can remember. However, last night I was able to alt-tab from CoV to Notepad while copying all of my settings.
The only thought I have on the topic would be to verify that your desktop resolution and refresh rate are identical to the res and refresh you have set in game. Most of the folks I know that do a lot of alt-tabbing generally run in windowed mode.
However, running ANYTHING else on a system whilst gaming goes against my gaming philosophy except in necessary conditions.
If anyone else has any ideas on getting alt-tab to function without graphical anomolies, please hop in.
Be well, people of CoH.
Well I am definitely not reliant on alt-tabbing so much that it isn't worth the trade-off in performance increase. Overall it's not a large issue, and not one that I would undo the changes for. I have used it to follow things from the web in the past, but really the only time I've even done it lately was when setting up my ingame settings from your guide :P
Anyway I'll check with the res/refresh tonight and make sure that it's set to the same numbers.
Thanks!
Run in a window and don't worry about ALT-TAB
[ QUOTE ]
Run in a window and don't worry about ALT-TAB
[/ QUOTE ]
I don't have any problems if I don't worry about alt-tabbing. What would be the point in running in windowed mode otherwise?
Yeeeaaa, I don't do windowed mode. Fullscreen or nothing.
Be well, people of CoH.
Hey folks. Although I'm growing more and more tired of having to deal with ATI, I have no intention of upgrading my X800XT for some time, so I've little choice.
Here's some info that will max the performance while maintaining your eye-candy quality when playing CoH/V.
In Game:
Resolution AND 3D Resolution Scaling: Same As Desktop (I currently run 1920X1200)
Refresh Rate: Same as Desktop (I'm running a Dell 24" Wide LCD, so currently at 60Hz. On LCDs, refresh is meaningless as an LCD redraws each pixel as needed, where a CRT refreshes the entire screen based on the Refresh Rate. To my knowledge, there is no way to increase the factory set redraw rate of an LCD)
Advanced Graphic Settings: Enabled
Particle Physics: Enabled
World Texture Quality: Very High
Character Texture Quality: Very High
World Detail: From 50% to 200% (This setting has a major impact on FPS. Setting it at 50% will give you far greater performance, especially in CoV. I currently run this at 75%)
Character Detail: 200%
Max Particle Count: 50000 (I run at 25K and notice no difference in particles.)
Vertical Sync: Enabled
FSAA: Off
Shadows: Enabled (You will gain some performance by disabling shadows)
Use Geometry Buffers: Enabled
Anisotropic Filtering: Disabled
Texture Crispness: Smooth
Shader Quality: High
Water Effects: None
Depth of Field Effects: Disabled
Bloom Effects: None
In Catalyst Control Center:
Under Display Options:
3d Refresh Rate Override: Same as Desktop
Under 3D settings:
Anti-Aliasing: 4X (Uncheck the Let Application Decide box)
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X (Uncheck the Let Application Decide box)
Catalyst A.I.: Disabled
Mimmap Detail Level: Full to Quality
Wait for Vertiacal Refresh: Always On
SmartShader: None
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: Enabled if available
API Specific:
Direct3D:
Enable geometry instancing: yes
Support DXT texture formats: yes
Alternate pixel center: no
OpenGL:
Triple Buffering: yes
Force 24-bit Z-buffer depth: no
****READ ME!****
Under SMARTGART:
Fast Writes: Off (THIS IS VITALLY IMPORTANT TO YOUR PERFORMANCE. I just had a massive increase in FPS on indoor missions when I finally remembered to disable this damnable setting. Currently sitting in an Oranbegan map in CoV at 60FPS. Be advised, massive dips into the 20s still occur in the CoV zones although I have completely lost an odd jittering that was occurring while moving forward)
****READ ME!***
All other settings can remain at default values.
Other notes:
If your monitor has a DVI input port, USE IT.
For further Windows XP system cleanup info that will also increase your overall performance, please see my system performance guide.
Edited for emphasis about Fast Writes.
Be well, people of CoH.