Ultra Mode: Visual Settings Walk Through - Other Graphics Data

Copying over from the Open Beta Forums. I'll finish filling this out with the other graphical functions as I get to them.

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Yay, finally finishing up the rest of the visual walk through. Due to the sheer length that this was getting to be, editing it in the allowed edit window was getting to be a bit of a P.I.T.A.. So, splitting this into multiple posts to make it easier on my eyes to edit through.

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Ultra Mode

Okay, those looking for Ultra Mode information, here's what you need to know.

The starting point for running all of the Ultra Mode options at once in 1680*1050 are the RadeonHD 4850 and the Geforce 8800 / 9800 / GTS 250.

If you have a lower resolution display, you can use a weaker card to get the same image quality.

My I17 pictures folder has been flagged for public viewing: you can get to it here: http://picasaweb.google.com/je.saist/Issue17Beta

Ultra Mode itself is presented as several different features:



These features are:

• Shadow Maps
• Environmental Reflections
• Water Effects
• Ambient Occlusion

Shadow Maps

Shadow maps affect the real-time shadows that are cast in the open segments of the game. Currently Shadow Maps are not enabled for indoor maps as the maps are built against the in-game sun. Ergo, Shadow maps do not seen to function at night either. They are there, but they are not as obvious.

The starting point for Shadow Map support is basically the RadeonHD 38xx series in the 1440*900 resolution range. A RadeonHD 3870 coupled with an Intel I7 processor @ 2.67ghz and 4gb of ram was capable of driving Shadow Maps on Low in most open-area combat situations of the game.

Lower GPUs, such as the RadeonHD 4650, Geforce 9500 GT, and RadeonHD 2600 were capable of turning shadow maps on, but were unable to sustain playable performance at 1440*900.

Higher End GPU's, such as the RadeonHD 5770 (the highest I have on hand to test with now), could drive Shadow Maps at the highest quality with a resolution of 1920*1200 when coupled with a Phenom II 965

To give you an idea what Shadow Maps look like, here's some shots in Cimerora on my HD 5770

Low Quality: On low quality shadows, the shadows have extremely hard edges and are sharply defined.



Medium Quality: On medium quality the edges of the Shadows start to blur, and this can be obviously seen on the shadow right above the options box:



High Quality: with the high quality shot I moved the camera in a bit to try and show that the shadows were blending better on the tree, and on the house shadow atop the options box.

Environmental Reflections

This is the option that controls what you get reflected in windows and off of costume parts. Again, the breakpoint here really is the RadeonHD 4850 / Geforce 8800 / 9800 / GTS 250. If you have a weaker card than these, you probably won't be able to drive Medium or High Environmental reflections.

However, older cards can generally handle reflections better than shadow maps. A RadeonHD 2600 Mobile edition coupled with a Mobile Athlon 64 X2 @2ghz can drive low reflections at 1280*800.

For reference A 9500 GT on hand was capable of driving Medium reflections when coupled with a Core 2 Duo @ 2.2ghz, although performance in combat situations suffered greatly.

Above the breakpoint, with the most powerful cards I have in hand, the RadeonHD 5770, Enviromental Reflections could be run on the highest setting in most City of Heroes zones. Performance in City of Villains wasn't quite as good...

Okay. Here we go. I also found a bug. The zone pictured in the reflections is not from any existing CoH or CoV zone. I suspect it's the testing Praetoria zone. Enjoy this.

No reflections



Low Quality Reflections



Medium Quality Reflections




High Quality Reflections




Ultra Quality Reflections




And just for kicks, a better shot at Proto-Praetoria

Water Effects

Now here's the Ultra Mode option you can pretty much crank to maximum as long as you have an OpenGL 3.0 compatible graphics add-in card. Now, because ATi cards have reputations for issues with Water Effects, I took these screenshots on my HD 5770 in Nerva.

Basic Water:



Low Quality Water:



Medium Quality Water:



High Quality Water:



Ultra Quality Water

Ambient Occlusion

Basically, this just makes shadows and edges in the game more realistic.

To show what I mean, here's some shots from a Geforce GTS 250 on Nvidia's OpenGL 3.3 driver preview.

To start off with, here's a shot of Cimerora without ambient occlusion



Here's Cimerora with OpenGL 2.x Occlusion. Now, the only DX9 cards I had on hand at the start of the beta test were a Geforce 6800 Mobile edition, a Geforce 7900 GT KO, and a Radeon x1950 Pro. Honestly, if you have one of these older cards, upgrade. Just... upgrade.



Due to some clumsy fingering on my part, it's hard to see 1:1 differences between fast occlusion and balanced.



I didn't move in between Balanced and High Quality, so some of the understated shadows on the walls are more obvious.



Now, I think there might be a bug here in the client, because the progression of shadows didn't change when I moved to Ultra. you can see that the FPS dived massively though.



As a reference, I went and checked this on my HD 5770.

High Quality Occlusion



Ultra Quality Occlusion

Anti Aliasing

Anti Aliasing has been moved out of the Advanced Settings and is in it's own section as part of the base graphics. So, what exactly does Anti-Aliasing, or AA do? Well, the short version is, it removes jagged edges from a rendered image.

A good example is found in Cimerora at the steps:



The stair edges are extremely jagged, and there's a clear stair-casing effect on the edges. As Anti-Aliasing is turned up, the jagged effect goes away.



The general rule of thumb is that as you increase Anti-Aliasing, object edges will become better defined in a game world. The price to pay with making images clearer is lower performance. High End Graphics Cards from Nvidia and ATi can have multiple Anti-Aliasing methods, each designed to deliver a superior Image.



However, anti-aliasing on ATi graphics cards may, or may not, play nicely with Ambient Occulusion...



This looks alright... right until I change the camera position.

Anisotropic Filtering

Anisotropic Filtering is still buried in the Advanced Graphical Settings, but since we are dealing with texture and image quality, we'll go ahead and look at it. The best way to think of Anisotropic Filtering is that it is a Texture improvement technique. It helps improve the visibility of textures as the distance to that texture increases: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2136960,00.asp

So, lets start in Ouroboros looking at the textures on the ground:



As we raise the level of Anisotropic Filtering, the textures in the background are more sharply defined:



As the filtering goes up, the practical application starts to diminish:



As we go into higher levels of AF, other rendering factors start to have a greater impact, such as Anti-Aliasing and Ambient Occlusion.

8x:



16x:



Now, AF improvements are more obvious as resolution increases... and longer draw distances are available.

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Advanced Graphical Settings

With the Ultra Mode Features, Anti-Aliasing, and Anistropic Filtering out of the way, lets work through the rest of the available graphic options.

Suppress FX When Close

Here's a nifty function of the graphics. As your camera closes in, the graphical effects applied to your costume can be turned off.

World Texture Quality

World Texture Quality deals with the general quality of the textures that the game uses to render the world around you.



On low modes, textures are generally blurry, washed out, and lack detail.



As you'd expect, increasing the texture quality makes everything look better.

Medium




High



Very High

World Detail Level

Now, there often is some confusion as to exactly what World Detail Level is. The best way to explain World Detail Level is this: World Detail Level determines how far out from your character details in the world are drawn.



Here, in Ouroborus, we can see the dim outline of something in the distance. As the detail is cranked up, we can see what that object is:



While the detail of objects away from the camera has increased, the detail of objects near the camera have not changed. As we crank the settings even further...



We can see more and more details in the distance. According to Paragonwiki, if you turn the visual distance scale all the way up, virtually all world objects will be drawn and rendered into the screen, whether or not those objects are actually visible.

This does mean at some point there is a trade-off in terms of what is rendered, and what can be seen. At some point, the World Detail Level will be drawing and applying textures to objects that are hidden by the camera; hidden by the resolution; or naturally obscured by other technologies such as Anti-Aliasing, Ambient Occlusion, and Anisotropic Filtering. This is one of the reasons why detail levels behind render scale 2.0 are not exposed in the UI. The 2.0 scaling is just about the breakpoint for 1024*768 - 1680*1050 resolutions. As resolutions climb higher, the un-filtered detail level change can be more readily recognized... but the viewing advantage goes away as filters are applied and the image is cleaned up.

Character Texture Quality

Character texture quality determines the actual quality of the textures applied to your avatar in game.



Here, on Low, we can see that the Avatar's image is blocky, and there's not much detail on the Enforcer arms, and the legs have some faint striations.



As we move detail up, we can better see the details on the Enforcer arms, and it becomes clearer that the Avatar is wearing the fishnet bottoms:



High



Very High



One of the factors to keep in mind about Character Texture Quality is that colors can change. It's more noticeable on the enforcer arms and legs, and since I had Ultra Mode Reflections set, not as noticeable as it could have been on the wings, but as more details are added, costume parts can change perceived color. The rivets and bumps on the enforcer parts can make the costume parts appear to be darker at higher detail levels.

Character Detail

Much like World Detail, Character Detail is often confused for what it does. Like World Detail, it handles how far away objects are rendering from the player.

While World Detail handles static objects, Character Detail handles interactive objects, such as contacts, NPC's, enemy critters, and other players.

Here in Cimerora, we have two fishermen on the docks. With a low detail distance, they seem to be missing costume components.



As we get closer, we find out that the engine just was not drawing those components because of the Character Detail.



Increasing the Character Detail increases the distance at which details are drawn from the camera:



Because of this effect, some players are convinced that Character Detail changes the amount of detail applied to an object. As we just saw, Character Detail was affected by distance, so lets see it again.



As we move the detail up, the soldiers closer to the camera gain some shadow detail while the soldiers on the platform appear to gain their armor.



Much like World Detail, Character Detail is dependent on just what can be seen on screen. So, if you crank filtering effects, long-distance character detail can be impacted as well.

Geometry Buffers

Geometry Buffers is a performance enhancement option that... well. Either you have it... or you don't.

Shader Quality

If you are running with an Ultra Mode setting, Shader Quality is automatically set to high. If you have an older graphics chip or an integrated graphics chip, you might need to set a lower Shader Quality setting.



Here, in Nerva at night, the colors on my stalker's armor pop, and stand in stark contrast to the night-time scene.



As the shader quality goes up to Medium, more effects are applied to the scene. There's more general detail in the surrounding plants, and the armor is now darkened to match the night time scene.



At this resolution, and with no other details enabled, there's not much difference between Medium and High Shader settings.



So here's the same scene in daylight.

Lowest:



Medium:



High:

Depth of Field

Depth of Field is a graphical effect that is supposed to enhance the feeling of looking at objects at a great distance. Games like Star Fox Adventure, Zelda, and Borderlands use Depth of Field effects when focused onto an enemy or object to help enhance the feel that one is looking straight at the object.

In CoH though... it's more like somebody smearing Vaseline all over your monitor...



(insert Jeremy Clarkson walking by, announcing he's going to do a J-Turn's in Ouroboros... and...)



Oh yeah. Really. Depth of Field effects need a make-over.

Bloom

While the Depth of Field effect is obnoxious and easy to screencap, Bloom isn't as easy to explain. It's a method of working the lighting system for more realistic lighting effects. I tried to force an example in Cimerora.



While the entire scene gets brighter, look at the clouds up top.



They've now gotten overly bright due to the Maximized bloom. Bloom really can help the game world feel more immersive, but it's also easy to over-do the extra lighting effects.

Desaturation Effects

Desaturation affects don't occur very often in the game. Mostly, you'll see these effects while running Ouroborus missions, such as at the start of a mission:



The effect wears off quickly enough...



Although you'll get it again when the mission ends:



If you don't like the effect, you can turn it off.

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Multi-GPU Support

Several players of City of Heroes have Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire configurations. At this time City of Heroes does not leverage either multiple GPU technology for additional performance.

That being said, there is an unofficial and completely unsupported method of getting SLI working on some configurations. That method might be known as:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe" -slifbos 2 -test

This is one of the reasons why I'm able to drive much higher quality values in my GTS 250 shots than I mentioned in the threads opening. Under combat situations using the in-testing SLI method, my A64 6000 / 2gb / GTS 250 triple SLI system can manage 15-20fps @ 1680*1050 with Shadows, Environmental Reflections, and Water Effects on Ultra Quality.

At this time no similar shortcut has been made available for Crossfire users. Basically, if you have a multi-gpu setup, don't worry too much. Official support could be arriving later this year... and I suspect that will allow my HD 5770's to run full-tilt in all game areas.

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Okay, I received a PM asking two questions. First, was SLI working on the Live Server, and second, which settings would be required for a certain configuration to push 1920*1200. The user in question has dual 9800 GT's... which... well. Even with SLI... are probably going to struggle to push Medium details in 1920*1200.

I've got Geforce GTS 250's in Triple SLI, and with Television's SLI test mode, I can push all Ultra Mode Settings maxed and get an average 20-25 fps at 1680*1050 in most City of Villains zones... As I've mentioned in other threads, CoV is really the performance benchmark to pay attention to as it's system geometry forces massive overdraw and has some really bad architectural choices. If your rig can handle 20-25fps stable across CoV zones, in theory, your rig should be able to handle the worst Praetoria can generate.

Anyways, okay, fine, the users 9800 GT isn't actually as powerful as a GTS 250, and I've got one additional card... but SLI support is still very much a work in progress... and one of the developers (Television) has indicated that there's more performance headroom in Multigpu setups. Whether or not that's enough to drive another resolution stepping, I don't know. What I do know is that both AMD's and Nvidia's OpenGL 3.x and 4.x drivers aren't exactly optimized for Video Games, and City of Heroes is I think the first commercially released game title to leverage the API.

So there probably is the headroom on some multi-gpu setups to turn an average 20-25fps into a 25-30fps average.

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Anyways, getting back to the problem though... Well, first, as I said, SLI isn't supported on the Live server. Click on the pictures for larger versions.

Here, I'm on the test server in Nerva. With my camera taking in the water front, I'm pushing 26fps, and I've got all settings maxed. Ambient Occulusion is on high quality. The fps count is in the upper right hand corner of the picture.



When I go to the same spot on the Live Server started with the SLI command, although I'm running a lower level of ambient occlusion, I'm only pushing 23fps:



Now, what you can't see is the /graphfps 1 command, which isn't captured by the in-game engine. So here's an example from another Computer.



Now, while running on the test server with the SLI command, Nerva is mostly a yellow response. While running on the Live server with the same command line setting, and lower-in-game settings, Nerva mostly responds as red.

So, what settings should you use?

Well, at 1920*1200... you probably are going to have to settle for low Ultra Mode settings... and even when SLI support is merged to the main branch, I doubt you'll be able to push medium settings.

There's also another problem with Nvidia cards right now... at least with this driver... which I'll demonstrate:

Here's the settings that a single Geforce GTS 250 is most comfortable at across most of the game in 1680*1050. Shadows and Reflections set to Low, Water Set to High, and balanced Ambient Occlusion:



As I bring the camera up though... the frame rate plummets:



As I turn to head towards the AE building, the frame continues to plummet:



Sure, 12-16fps is technically playable... it just isn't pretty.

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Now, as of right now, a single RadeonHD 5770 can drive Ultra Mode at 25-30fps in 1920*1200 in combat situations with all details maxed out, so if you are buying on a budget, that's your best choice for a new graphics card. Presuming Television and AMD get Crossfire support worked out, I suspect Dual-5770's will be able to handle anything Praetoria can generate.

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*Nix Support

Okay, as you probably know by now, Transgaming handles programming their Cider engine for the Macintosh Client... and used CoH as one of the standout examples of OpenGL during the GDC OpenGL 4.0 keynote: http://www.khronos.org/developers/li..._GDC-Mar10.pdf

Currently Ultra Mode works across both ATi and Nvidia graphics cards under Cider on OSX.

Currently Ultra Mode only works across ATi cards under Cedega on Linux. Ultra Mode is also only exposed under the in-testing Cedega 8 engines. As of the latest Nvidia driver and latest Cedega 8 testing engine, Ultra Mode is still not exposed to end users.

No, I do not have a date on when Cedega 8 will ship, nor whether or not there will be a public Cedega engine preview release for all those not in the Cedega testing program.

Update: As of now there is a public beta of the Maudite Engine. Ultra Mode works on ATi cards with Catalyst Driver 10.4

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A new testing engine for Cedega hit today. Unfortunately, it still does not bring support for Ultra Mode on Nvidia cards.

Update: Ultra Mode still doesn't work with the latest Nvidia drivers and Cedega engine combinations. Believe me, I test everytime a new driver hits or a new Maudite engine is released. When the situation changes, trust me, I'll be posting pictures.

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Okay, at this point in time with the most recent build of City of Heroes on the test server, there seems to be a memory leak or other major issue with the Cedega engines on both ATi and Nvidia cards. Here's a copy of the bug report submitted to Transgaming:

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So the NVidia GTX250 should be able to run in Ultra Mode at a decent resolution? Does anyone have recommendations as to specific graphics settings for this card?

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After installing a GTS250 I was able to run with higher settings for almost 3 minutes. Now I've applied your recommendation above and I'm getting around 30-40 fps. Thank you very much for all the valuable info!

I'm running:
System Name: Dell Inc Dimension E521
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
CPU Clock: 2004.2 MHz (10.0 x 200.4 MHz)
Level 1 Cache: 2 x 64+64 kB (data+instr.)
Level 2 Cache: 2 x 512 kB
Chipset Name: NVIDIA GeForce 6100/6150/nFoce 500 Family
Chipset Vendor: Nvidia Corp
Chipset: C51 Host Bridge
Southbridge Vendor: Nvidia Corp
Southbridge: MCP51 LPC Bridge
Memory Size: 3406252 kB (3326.42 MB)
Monitor Vendor: Dell Computer Corp.
Monitor Model: Dell 2208WFP(Digital)
Video Chip Vendor: Nvidia Corp
Video Chip: G92+ [GeForce GTS 250]
Video Memory Size: 1024 MB

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According to Nobel Savage SLI support will be arriving with Issue 19

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...2&postcount=12

AMD Crossfire support has not been confirmed as of this update.

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sweet so my sli 470gtx system should rock coh? any luck that running sli will remove travel supression in pvp LOL. great write up btw very very detailed.

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Also, a small tip:

Verticle Sync, this is something you can disable and not notice a difference with the naked eye. It will also yield a huge FPS jump as well.

I run full Ultra Mode and if I have it on or off, I can't tell a difference, but I do see a very large increase to my FPS when it's disabled.

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[B]Leading Badge Holder in the City of Community[/B]
Owner & Operator of...
[URL="http://www.vidiotmaps.com/"]Vidiotmaps.com[/URL] & [URL="http://www.badge-hunter.com/"]Badge-Hunter.com[/URL]

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Read this. This will tell you why you want vertical sync enabled, along with triple buffering. You can find the option to enable triple buffering in your nVidia or ATi control panel.

In brief, vertical sync prevents tearing from occurring, by synchronizing the graphics card with how fast your monitor can actually display images. While there are a few exceptions, I'll bet a tenner that anyone reading this post has their monitor running at 60Hz. Sure, once every hundred times I'll lose, but that's a very tidy profit.

As your monitor runs at 60Hz, it makes no sense to have your GPU working any faster than 60 frames per second. Vertical sync prevents updating the image on the monitor until it is ready. Without vertical sync, you can end up with the monitor displaying parts of multiple images, as your graphics card will try to send over a new image before the previous one has had a chance to be fully shown.

Like in Blue Peter, here's one I made earlier.



There are some latency concerns with this, namely that the image you are seeing is not the most up-to-date that it can be, but triple buffering resolves this. You're best off reading the article I linked if you want to know how that works.

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Necrobond - 50 BS/Inv Scrapper made in I1
Rickar - 50 Bots/FF Mastermind
Anti-Muon - 42 Warshade
Ivory Sicarius - 45 Crab Spider
Aber ja, nat�rlich Hans nass ist, er steht unter einem Wasserfall.

I've never seen image tearing such as this or to any other degree with VSync being turned off. At least not with CoH.

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[B]Leading Badge Holder in the City of Community[/B]
Owner & Operator of...
[URL="http://www.vidiotmaps.com/"]Vidiotmaps.com[/URL] & [URL="http://www.badge-hunter.com/"]Badge-Hunter.com[/URL]

[URL="http://net-warrior.mybrute.com/"][B][SIZE=3][COLOR=darkorange]Challenge My Brute[/COLOR][/SIZE][/B][/URL]

Je_saist...

May I say something?

Wonderful Guide!

*hugs*

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** Guardian�s Crazy Catgirl **
************* 22 XxX 10 *************

Yes. I can get lost on a straight-line map.

Wonderful guide, but is there a "For Dummies" version for those of us who have systems that the Game says can handle Ultra Mode, but enabling it creates FPS creep? I was thinking something along the lines of "setting features X to min/off and features Y to Max will yield minimal FPS impact while providing marginal improvement over Compatible/Performance modes".

...or should I just make a new thread with my sys specs and play the gfx settings noob?

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