ATI Settings Guide - Catalyst 6.4 Update
By
Bill Z Bubba,
Posted on: 2006-04-17 10:52 in Player Guides
Well [censored].
I was at work when I wrote the above updates. I get home, get everything set up as I have in the guide, and what happens? The rendered image in game, NOT my menu windows as they're fine, but the actual image is totally black.
Drop FSAA to 2X and it's ok. Or not. Sometimes 2X works in game, sometimes it also causes black screen issue.
So I run to a mission, in the hope that maybe zoning in game with the proper settings will fix the issue...
Nope. I load to a completely black screen. Ok, let's find the culprit time. Exit game:
Current settings are as above with in game FSAA at 4X and AF at 8X. Found in the CCC that I had disabled Fast Writes again late last night, enabled fast writes, rebooted.
Back into game, AF is still at 8X... but lo an behold, FSAA is back to off.
Why? Anyone? Cuz I'm at a loss. Set it back to 2X: black screen, menus still fine, 4X same thing.
Turn off FSAA, image immediately renders.
So for all you alt-tabbers out there, I'm sorry, run in windowed mode. By the by, the one time that I did get 2X to work in game, it still looks like crap. Allowing the game to manage fsaa does NOT produce the proper lack of jaggies when compared to allowing the driver to handle it.
Devs,
I was under the impression that ATI users were going to be getting some info regarding the current crap state of communication and support from/with ATI. Still waiting.
Be well, people of CoH.
At that high resolution, no FSAA is needed. Seriously. And high quality water is awesome.
Remember, you are using 6.4s
I strongly recommend disabling Vert refresh.
Also turn off triple buffering
Aniso beyond 4 X has no highly visible improvement, but causes performance drop.
I use 4X / crisp textures, it's wow nice looking. Try it. Really.
Can't change LCD refresh.
Character quality at 200% may be hurting performance a good bit. I use 95 % world/100% character.
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At that high resolution, no FSAA is needed. Seriously. And high quality water is awesome.
Remember, you are using 6.4s
I strongly recommend disabling Vert refresh.
Also turn off triple buffering
Aniso beyond 4 X has no highly visible improvement, but causes performance drop.
I use 4X / crisp textures, it's wow nice looking. Try it. Really.
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I've tried life without FSAA. It's crap. I'd be happy to post some screenies to prove it if you like. If you enjoy watching a world with jagged edges, yes, even at 1920X1200, then go for it. I can't.
With Vertical Refresh disabled, I get tearing due to the speed at which I move and spin my camera angle. My turn rate is punched up to 650% in game options. Triple Buffering is enabled specifically because Vert Ref is.
I can live with 4X AF, as I agree, in CoH/V, you only notice the difference in specific areas, like cobblestone roads.
Why are you using Crisp when it states in the in game description that it wil have negative effects on cards that support AF? But I'll give it a whirl.
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Can't change LCD refresh.
Character quality at 200% may be hurting performance a good bit. I use 95 % world/100% character.
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Technically, you can. I was able to punch mine to 75Hz at the desktop level by lowering the resolution, but it's a pointless thing to do as it doesn't increase the redraw rate.
Character Detail is supposed to only affect the distance at which characters are drawn. I want to see the voids, quantum gunners and other players as far out as possible.
Be well, people of CoH.
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Character Texture Quality: Very High
Character Detail: 200%
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Character texture makes characters look very good up close. The higher the more realistic. Very high can cause a noticeable fps hit if there are lots of toons to draw (Hami Raids, over 3 Masteminds...).
Character detail is how well defined any character looks like from a distance. I've found that once you get a certain distance away from a character, they are so small, that drawing them well is no longer important. I've found 90% to be passable.
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Max Particle Count: 50000 (You can lower this for some performance gain)
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If pushed up high, one can be blinded by the special effects of particles in dense fights, especially if you have disabled 'suppress other players effects.'
If pushed too low, you miss certain effects like the flashing floor rings around contacts. About 1,000 is sufficient for personal and nearby effects if one is looking to squeeze out a few more fps.
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FSAA: 4X (This is changed from the prior guide. It was brought to my attention that lockups and/or graphical anomalies were occurring with alt-tabbing when letting the Catalyst Control Center manage FSAA and AF rather than allowing the Application decide.)
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
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I'm still using 6.1 ('cause 6.3 kept crashing me... ATI Radeon X800). And letting the program run FSAA and AF did nothing to stop the alt-tabbing crashes. (And it's not just the 'alt-tab'; even minimizing one program and opening the other will cause a crash about 25% of the time.)
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Shader Quality: High (It has been brought to my attention that older cards have serious FPS hits with this setting on high, so play around with it.)
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Shader quality is wonky. In Pocket D with shader on Low, the floor is transparent (as it was meant to be); however, on medium, the floor is opaque. In CoV, with shader on Low or High, I don't see the revolving red lights on the black copters that I see when this is set on medium.
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Water Effects: None (Water on Low does NOT break FSAA, as it is not going through the P-Buffer, but it WILL cause a heavy FPS hit when in cave or sewer maps.)
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In sewers, with water effects on high, the water looks great, and I get rippling refractions, however, the mirror image on the water is still broke... I don't see my reflection between the camera and me... I see it beyond me. Needless to say, I leave this off.
BTW... thanks for all your work into this!
Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides
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I'm still using 6.1 ('cause 6.3 kept crashing me... ATI Radeon X800). And letting the program run FSAA and AF did nothing to stop the alt-tabbing crashes. (And it's not just the 'alt-tab'; even minimizing one program and opening the other will cause a crash about 25% of the time.)
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Enable your Fast Writes in your bios and your CCC. I did a lot of testing/different settings with 6.1-6.3 drivers with an ATI 800XT and I'm 100% certain disabling FF causes this problem (or is, at least, a major player in causing it). I had this problem frequently with it disabled and have never had it with FF enabled. Now that there's no performance degradation, might as well make the game more stable for yourself. 
Ok, so quick question...
I have a regular (non-LCD) monitor... do I want a higher Refresh Rate than 60? Or will it be a performance hit?
Thanks
Level 50s:
BlackSpectre, Dark Defender (Guardian)
Thorin, Invul/Axe Tank (Justice)
Volcano Juice, Fire/Stone Tank
Professor ?, Mind/FF Controller
Stone Forge, Stone/Fire Tank
Unless you enjoy your eyes bleeding, yes, you want a higher refresh rate. 75Hz is comfortable. There are some items you'll have to take care of:
First, you must determine if your monitor can handle your current resolution at a 75Hz refresh rate. If it can, great. Go for it. The actual performance hit you will take is negligible at worst.
Then you will need to make sure that your video card driver has refresh rate override enabled, same as desktop. This will force any game you run to also be at 75Hz, thus getting around the complete stupidity of Microsoft, and their decision that all full screen 3D should run at 60Hz.
Lastly, make sure that the resolution and refersh rates are set to same as desktop in the game options.
Be well, people of CoH.
<Edit> Disregard, what I tried didn't work.
Good work though, keep it up.
It's rather odd, I got FSAA2x working now. What I first tried (above post I deleted), was trying to put FSAA to 4x in both ATI Control Center, and the Game. This worked at first, it gave a somewhat cleaner edges picture, but not quite smooth yet. Then it stopped working after relogging, and got the black screen.
Then I tried the setting you original suggested, FSAA 4x in game, application controlled in the ATI Control Center, and this gave me the Black screen again you mentioned, UI working. Then I tried FSAA2x, and that is working now. The rest of my setting as per your original post (so application controlled in ATI control center, FSAA2x in game).
It looks a ton better now, fairly smooth edges, hadn't had this since CoV release on my ATI box, so not gonna touch it anymore, just happy its working somewhat now. Still a big difference in looks to my Geforce box :/
This is with 6.4 and an ATI X800Pro.
That black screen business...
I find it bizarre. With the HDR effects disabled, there should be, at least based on my current understanding thanks to Wraith's input, no issues what so ever with FSAA either controlled by the game or by the driver.
Yet we get black screens when allowing the game to manage FSAA.
Makes me beging to wonder what else is being pushed through the p-buffer like the HDR effects are. Or if this is something else entirely.
But I can conjecture all day long. Until some representative from Cryptic comes in and gives us an udpate, I'm shooting in the dark as much as I was when I thought CoH/V used SM3.0.
And I refuse to get that kind of egg on my face again.
Anyhoo... if you want FSAA to function as it should, set it in the CCC, and disable water, bloom and depth of field in game. I have yet to have it fail on me set up like this. (I disable FSAA and AF in game, but it's probably unecessary to do so as the CCC SHOULD over ride any in game settings. SHOULD be the operative word.)
Be well, people of CoH.
6.4's are screwing up a few contact pics and garbling for me so far with the X850XT PE. Other than that, seem to be ok. One of my friends got a X850XT and said he bought a DVI cable to use with his Dell 21 inch LCD instead of using the VGA cable and has experienced much better FPS rates than with the VGA cable. Hear anything about this?
AWESOME!! Thanks Bill! 
Incidentally, FSAA also makes the screen go black for me at 4x, but seems to work fine at 2x (with all your settings from the first post of this thread). Just some additional confirmation for ya. I'm using an ATI All In Wonder 9800 series AGP card.
Thanks for all your hard work and excellent explanations. 
Level 50s:
BlackSpectre, Dark Defender (Guardian)
Thorin, Invul/Axe Tank (Justice)
Volcano Juice, Fire/Stone Tank
Professor ?, Mind/FF Controller
Stone Forge, Stone/Fire Tank
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DVI cable to use with his Dell 21 inch LCD instead of using the VGA cable and has experienced much better FPS rates than with the VGA cable. Hear anything about this?
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Yes. I also used the DVI cable after first running around with analog (d-sub) when I first got my LCD. Loads difference. The biggy for me was that all my gamma issues went away. If you CAN go DVI, do it.
Black_Specter,
Yup. I've given up on allowing CoH/V to manage my FSAA and AF. Too much hassle, isn't rendered as cleanly. So back to disabled in game and managed by CCC for me. I'm currently running 4X/4X and everything looks fine.
Be well, people of CoH.
You can't change the refresh on an LCD. Change it all day in software, but it will still be effectively 60Hz, with after image being the only concern. Afterimage is likely not an issue on any LCD monitor of gaming intent.
Bear in mind that having a nice big LCD monitor doesn't make you an expert on how they work any more than having my being into PCs/networking (especially gaming hardware and optimizatoion) since the Commodore VIC 20, makes me a Quantum3D X-24 card expert. My brother has a 21, 2 19s, 1nd several 17 inch dells, as well as every LCD on every current high end laptop Dell has. We thoroughly researched latency, refresh, contrast ratio, native resolution ( and how deviating is good or bad, in a given system), and every other factor. You can't change refresh rate, because there technically isn't one.
Do you understand what you give up at 1920xXXXX resolution, in using FSAA? Your video card internally pre- renders at higher than actual resolution, and with quincux/smoothvision, or similar randomizing, or nonlinear techniques, it even uses randomized point samples. This is an oversimplification, but basically, you eat a god bit of extra memory bandidth and processing ability of the vid card. 1280 x 1024 with 4X AA, is only a mimic of your 1920 x XXXX, yet I imagine for most people reading your guide, running 1920 x XXXX native resolution on an LCD would be more than sufficient without antialiasing. This very high resolution aslo would be done without the video issues that seem to crop up while using AA.
And as for crisp textures.... again try it. SOME cards may have issues, but my lowly 9800Pro didn't lose 2FPS, but the eye candy is incredible.
Character detail shouldn't be changing view distance of enemies. World detail should be.
Do you realize how many people play this game with a Ti4x00/9500/9700/9800/Geforce5x00 card? You are complaining about jaggies at a resolution that would break all of those cards with antialiasing, in almost every case. Persons trying to duplicate your settings on these cards may be a little unhappy.
I've been a computer gamer for over 20 years, and a PC gamer since '92. I can promise you that amongst MMO players, My 19" Hitachi Super Scan Elite 751, and 9800 Pro All-in Wonder represents median performance and output quality.
"So for all you alt-tabbers out there, I'm sorry, run in windowed mode. By the by, the one time that I did get 2X to work in game, it still looks like crap. Allowing the game to manage fsaa does NOT produce the proper lack of jaggies when compared to allowing the driver to handle it."
I alt- tab every game session, on my 9800. My daughter does also, on her GF6200.
I still run 1280X1024 with no FSAA, high water quality, and 4X AF, high quality AF, and crisp textures.
Bill, have you considered that your viewing is subjective? The game is not DOING the antialiasing, it is setting a bit, and the card driver is doing it. Or you can set it in the card driver. One difference is that on some ATIs you can enable high quality AA if you force it in driver. This may be the quality difference you see. Otherwise, no, not possible. There is zero difference between card driver forced and game allowed FSAA, -unless- the driver forced has options not available in the app controlled mode.
I will admit that, after testing, my 9800 doesn't suffer bad with 2 X forced, but also benefits very little in image....
Oh, and it bears repeating: Triple buffering will incur a great amount of memory bandwidth/usage cost. Vertical sync WILL cause frame rate loss. Interestingly, VSYNCH solves an issue with cards redrawing faster than the monitors"refresh", even if it is momentarily. Triple buffering is to correct the other issue of if a card is rendering fewer frames than refresh, it can clean image. The cost is very high when enabling both. I am quite glad that a few people have $300 to $500 video cards, but the trend towards $400 PCs tells me that you are causing people to make underinformed decisions.
If this is a settings guide, how about actually explaining the setting, and a little more detail about the good and bad it can do.
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Bear in mind that having a nice big LCD monitor doesn't make you an expert on how they work
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I have never claimed to be the end all be all in ati/lcd gaming knowledge. I have corrected my guides several times thanks to input from other players. So step 1 here should be for you to take that into consideration when discussing these matters with me.
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You can't change refresh rate, because there technically isn't one.
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I understand this. It doesn't change the fact that I CAN change the refresh rate setting within XP by lowering the resolution. Is it actually making in real change in how the monitor works? Probably not, but it doesn't change the fact that the setting can be changed. It doesn't sound like either of us know WHAT changing the refresh is actually doing, does it? Is it simply a case that Microsoft is too stupid to grey out the setting, or is there something going on that you and I don't understand?
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Do you understand what you give up at 1920xXXXX resolution, in using FSAA?
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No. I had absolutely no idea that enabling FSAA had any effect on performance at all. /sarcasm off
I am fully aware of some other FACTS as well. Running without FSAA, at any resolution, is crap to MY eyes. This means one of two things: Either I can't tell the difference between a lower resolution with higher FSAA, (not the case as I have tested it) or FSAA is doing something other than what you think it is. Will I pretend I know what FSAA is doing? Nope. All I know is what my eyes tell me. They tell me the following:
1920X1200 w/o FSAA is MORE jagged than 1280X1024 w/ 4X FSAA.
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yet I imagine for most people reading your guide, running 1920 x XXXX native resolution on an LCD would be more than sufficient without antialiasing
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You could be right. From what I've seen reading these boards, most folks don't even realize that their FSAA is broken until they disable CoH/V's HDR effects. (In the case of ATI cards.)
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I alt- tab every game session, on my 9800. My daughter does also, on her GF6200. I still run 1280X1024 with no FSAA
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No FSAA and no problems alt-tabbing. Coincidence? No. Live with your jagged edges. I honestly don't care. For me, they are detrimental to my enjoyment of a game. My guide is specifically written and meant for people that DO care about how their games look.
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And as for crisp textures.... again try it.
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Just did. Smooth and Crisp. The only difference I'm seeing is that on wall textures, crisp introduces some kind of odd waviness. Beyond that, I see no difference. Perhaps because I run FSAA and AF?
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Character detail shouldn't be changing view distance of enemies.
[/ QUOTE ] "This affects how far you can see high resolution versions of characters such as heroes or villains."
Implying to me that for PvP, this should be all the way up, and for PvE, it doesn't matter. Do you concur?
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Persons trying to duplicate your settings on these cards may be a little unhappy.
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Actually, from the feedback I've gotten, the folks with higher end hardware than I have been able to push items higher, the folks with lower end have adjusted their settings appropriately and thanked me for guiding them to which settings were the big performance hitters.
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Oh, and it bears repeating: Triple buffering will incur a great amount of memory bandwidth/usage cost. Vertical sync WILL cause frame rate loss.
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Tested this for ya. In CoV, flying across Nerva:
V-Sync+Trip-Buff on: No tearing, 15-30FPS
V-Sync+Trip-Buff off: Tearing of vertical lines 20-35FPS
Yes, 5FPS is quite a jump. (No, I'm not being sarcastic.)
V-Sync On, Trip-Buff Off: Interesting. 20-32 FPS, but mostly stayed in the 27-30FPS range. No tearing.
So I'll meet you halfway. V-Sync should be on for high resolution LCD users, Triple Buffering off. I'll have to figure out later why triplebuffering isn't boosting the performance while V-Sync is enabled.
Now the biggee:
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I am quite glad that a few people have $300 to $500 video cards, but the trend towards $400 PCs tells me that you are causing people to make underinformed decisions.
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Here, you're just being flat out offensive and antagonistic. The majority of the folks that need a guide like this or my performance guide are the people slamming their heads against a wall trying to figure out why they're only getting 5FPS in CoV.
Although I greatly appreciate any feedback that will lead to a better guide, and thus help more folks, this ego-feeding antagonism of yours I can happily do without. Especially when some of what you say has been proven incorrect.
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One difference is that on some ATIs you can enable high quality AA if you force it in driver.
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Must be the case. For as I've stated numerous times, driver manage FSAA creates smoother lines than CoH/V managed. Something is different. So I'll stick with what my experience shows me.
Be well, people of CoH.
MWAHAHAHA
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MWAHAHAHA
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Well good. Thanks for verifying your trollness.
Be well, people of CoH.
Ok ok B Z- here's the root of why i'm such a meanie: I was looking for an ATI guide when I stumbled across yours. I needed to know why Fast writes was so troublesome for me, and maybe some insight into what variance there was between driver revisions.
None of that. What kind of 'settings guide' gets praised for being nothing more than you spewing what works for you? This is that whole "Give a man a fish" thing. I would learn nothing as an educated person, by seeing what works. I could make my own educated decision by learning HOW it works.
I never was satisfied with "Hook the ground leads the the body of both vehicles, then connect the hot sides to the battery posts". In leaning WHY this was advisable I came to understand effects of deep cycling newer non- marine batteries, as well as heat transfer, Hydrogen relase risks, etc.
You said any suggestions that improve the guide are great. Here's one:
Teach the reader the HOW.
www.guru3d.com
www.tweak3d.net
www.anandtech.com
www.Arstechnica.com
www.hardocp.com
www.3dchipset.com
Those are a few resources. Tomshardware is ok, but after is quit being sysdoc.pair.com, I think it went kinda commercial, as far as review quality.
Haven't been to thefiringsquad.com in a good while- it used to help.
Ars technica will have VERY detailed info- sickeningly so.
I'll quit poking you now!
Fast Writes are an odd one aren't they?
Had you read my performance guide, you would have noticed these two links:
One for ATI settings
And one for Nvidia
Had you used a little more search-fu you would have found a whole slew of entries about fast writes and the bizarre behavior some of us have seen over the last few revs of the Catalysts. Back with the 6.1s and 6.2s, disable FWs, I was getting a massive increase in FPS, but now that performance bump seems to be missing, regardless if FW is on or off. Still playing around with that in order to find out why. For all I know, it could be that having fast writes on is interfering with triplebuffering boosting performance when v-sync is on. <shrug.>No clue.
I don't mind the poking. You have a valid point that a guide should have links off to explanations on what each setting in a driver accomplishes. My bad for not repeating them here when they already exist in my other guide. This guide is the HOW, the other guide is the WHY.
You will find, especially on internet forums, that you will get a far different response from the folks actually doing the work and testing settings out, if you come to them with nothing but facts and more testing.
At least for me, I find myself far more responsive to logic than opinions. And far less reactionary as well.
EDIT: Here's a fun one for everyone:
For the first time for me, one character's contact list pictures were broken. 1 part was the bottom half of my contact's image, another part was the bottom half of MY image, and a 3rd part was pure graphical gibberish.
Disabled Fast Writes, rebooted, problem gone.
So how do I know what fixed it? Was it the reboot? Was it the disabling of Fast Writes? Sunspots? Gremlins?
Yall tell me.
Be well, people of CoH.
Same issue with contacts. Oddly, reverting to a previous driver revision AND disabling FW is how I fixed it and also got none of the purported FW disable contac pause/crash issue.
As far as performance and triple buffering:
Im being unoriginal and lazy, but here:
Smooth Gaming with Triple Buffering
CrazyRhino 17 Mar 2006
Have you ever being in a situation where you enable v-sync to get rid of annoying image tearing, but only found out it killed your frame rate? We know v-sync caps your maximum frame rate at your screen refresh rate, which is 60 time per second for common LCD monitors. Actually playing games at 60 fps is not bad and it should provide a smooth gaming experience. However, you sometimes find the frame rate strangely capped at 30fps as soon as it drops below 60fps. At this point you probably start screaming "OMG! tearing sucks, and v-sync sucks no less!!!". It's not v-syncs fault all alone, usually it's the combination of the images being rendered using double buffering with v-sync enabled. So you asked why is double buffering evil? Basically there are two buffers in the graphics hardware, the image you seeing on the monitor is in the front buffer and the next rendered frame is in the back buffer. Since we have v-sync enabled, before the graphics hardware can swap the front and the back buffer, it needs to wait for the next vertical blank period (happens every 1/60th seconds on monitors with refresh rate 60Hz) to maintain synchronization with the monitor's refresh rate. This works fine when the graphics card can render frames faster than 60fps. If all of this makes sense to you, perhaps you can imagine what happens when the graphics card is unable to bump 60 frames per second. When that happens, the graphics card is unable to make the buffer swap because the next frame is not ready in the back buffer and it'll have to wait for the next vertical blank period to make the swap. The end result is that instead of swapping buffers 60 times per second, it's only swapping the buffer 30 times a second, and that's the reason why frame rate is capped at 30fps.
This is where triple buffering comes into play. With triple buffering enabled, now we have 3 buffers and the graphics hardware can start rendering into the 3rd buffer without having to wait for the front buffer gets swapped out. Let's just say it helps maintaining frame rate when v-sync is enabled. Both ATi and nVidia provide an option to enable triple buffering in their drivers. Unfortunately it's only half right, the triple buffering option in their drivers only have effect in OpenGL games. Considering the numbers of OpenGL games is largely inferior to D3D games, it's even less than half right.
CoH is Open GL.
TFA doesn't detail the downside - you just increased your framebuffer size by 50%.
So, to recap:
1920 x XXXX - BITE of mem and performance
FSAA, 4x CHOMP of mem
Triple buffering - CHOMP of mem
Used memory must be read and written to. This would be why we get similar framerates in game, despite your card having more pipes going faster, and MUCH higher memory bandwidth. The Tradeoffs you make in memory used (read: world texture quality is a biggie) will elicit more performance. In your vid card settings, highest texture quality SHOULD be non- compressed, high res images. The lower setting will add compression. Going lower still adds more compression, and /or reduced resolution to the texture. Being as you have potent processing, I bet compression would significantly speed you up. The Mipmap detail level Can boost performance, but youll get real ticked when you move slightly away from an object, and it's details blur into obscurity. While these parallell the game settings, they affect the card's rendering of the game's output.
I am still disputing the need to see enhanced detail level of PC/NPCs in game. World detail determines if they are seen, and how far. I suggest you revisit the settings. If I am prvoen wrong in your mind, then just call your version correct. I also will revisit my previous test.
Bill, you do a fine job. Sometimes people expect one person to give them their answers instead of not being lazy and looking around for additional answers or questions. There's a thing called Google that is really helpful for that. Please keep giving your advice and testing things. Many of us appreciation them and they work for us. While some just want things to work right away and when they don't they start being sarcastic for internal personal issues.. Ignore em.
Hey folks. Some items have come to light that have prompted me to change opinions on a few settings.
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 (If you can handle the loss of eye candy, lowering this will offer a performance boost.)
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 50%)
Character Detail: 200%
Max Particle Count: 50000 (You can lower this for some performance gain)
Vertical Sync: Enabled
FSAA: 4X (This is changed from the prior guide. It was brought to my attention that lockups and/or graphical anomalies were occurring with alt-tabbing when letting the Catalyst Control Center manage FSAA and AF rather than allowing the Application decide.)
Shadows: Disabled (Prior to this update, I ran with Shadows enabled, but the performance hit compared to the fuzzy blob at a character's feet just didn't pan out. If Cryptic ever adds serious shadow effects, as with a light source through a tree showing each leaf in shadow, then I'll turn this back on.)
Use Geometry Buffers: Enabled
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
Texture Crispness: Smooth
Shader Quality: High (It has been brought to my attention that older cards have serious FPS hits with this setting on high, so play around with it.)
Water Effects: None (Water on Low does NOT break FSAA, as it is not going through the P-Buffer, but it WILL cause a heavy FPS hit when in cave or sewer maps.)
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: Let Application Decide
Anisotropic Filtering: Let Application Decide
Catalyst A.I.: Disabled (Your mileage on this may vary depending on your card. Test on and off for extended game sessions to determine if this is of benefit to you. I currently have it enabled for testing purposes.)
Mipmap Detail Level: Full to Quality
Wait for Vertical Refresh: Always On
SmartShader: None
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: Disabled (Huge performance hit)
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
VPU Recover: Disabled
For AGP users ONLY:
Under SMARTGart: Leave everything at default.
Fast Writes: At the time of my last guide, disabling Fast Writes gave me a considerable performance boost, but occasionally caused lockups when clicking on Contacts/Info menus. At the time of THIS writing, I'm not seeing the performance boost I was, so something has changed in the driver.
All other settings can remain at default values.
Other notes:
If your monitor has a DVI input port, use it as you will get a cleaner image with less graphical weirdness.
Be well, people of CoH.