Tips'n'tricks to get more FPS - research for a sticky!

[esd]

Hiya,
I'm looking at putting together a list of tips'n'tricks for getting the maximum FPS from X³ on your rig, to go in a sticky.

Basically I need your tips and tricks. What have you done to get more frames? Graphics options, tasks to kill, system maintainance to perform... all wanted, preferably in a similar format to mine. Include what sort of difference it'll make to the FPS.

So, to get the ball rolling:

System tricks:
Kill the Explorer task
This should be the LAST tweak you perform before starting the game.
Windows Explorer is what puts the icons on your desktop, and the taskbar on your screen. These take up a fair chunk of resources, which do absolutely nothing while you're playing. So kill it.
If you're running Windows XP, you do this by opening the X³ launcher window. Then hit CTRL ALT DEL together. Go to the PROCESSES tab of the Task Manager, and find the Explorer process. Click END TASK and when asked, click YES. Icons and taskbar promptly dissapear, so close the Task Manager and now you can play!

When you quit the game, you won't have any icons, a start button or a taskbar. Hit CTRL ALT DEL together again, and then click FILE. Choose NEW TASK (RUN)... and then type explorer into the runbox followed by hitting enter.

Now you've got your desktop back.

Expected frame rate increase: Noticeable to significant.

Turn off all non-essential programs!
You do not want your antivirus running while you play. Nor your firewall. MSN and other chat mediums you definately don't need while you're in X³. Anything in the Taskbar? Close it, until all you have left is the volume.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE DISCONNECTED FROM THE INTERNET BEFORE DISABLING FIREWALL(S) AND/OR ANTI-VIRUS!

Expected frame rate increase: Depends how many programs you had open.

Defragment!
A heavily fragmented drive is a slower drive, because the read heads have to chase the data from all over the place, jumping little holes created when you deleted that JPG of Angelina Jolie, or any other file.

Expected frame rate increase: Nil to Noticeable, depending on how bad your drive was.

Yes, it's boring, it takes time, but it's worth doing regularly.

Processes
Use task manager, (or on 98se, a 3rd party app such as Sysinternals Freeware Process Explorer to identify and kill processes you don't need.

Virus scan/spyware scan!
Spyware, Malware and virii can cause havoc to your computer, in some cases completely trashing your data. However, even the innoquous ones have negative side effects, most importantly here on your computer's resources. Less resources = lower FPS, so update your AV and spyware software, and scan regularly!

Expected framerate increase: If you've been bogged down with loads of virii and spyware, the results could be phenomenal!

Ingame tricks

Turn off the HUD!
If you're not using it, turn it off! Heck, try and learn to fight without it! Not only do you get a better view of the sector, your ship and passing traffic, but you get a whopping FPS increase!

Expected frame rate increase: Significant! Some users have reported it's more than doubled their FPS! *this has been significantly reduced since 1.2.01, because the hud doesn't cause as much of a drain*

Now it's your turn!

[nomad2k3]

GRAPHIC DRIVER SETTINGS

Graphics driver settings can be altered in the control panel/ display /advanced tab


You may want to disable any AA (AntiAliasing) and/or AF (Anisotropic Filtering) from within your graphics driver profile/settings tab
Expected framerate increase: none to extreme 0-30fps


You can also try setting the "image settings" from high quality to high performance,
Expected framerate increase:medium 5-10fps


turning off Vertical sync can also boost your fps, altho you may get "tearing of textures in game (if this happens turn it back on)
Expected framerate increase: none - medium 0-10fps



lastly if you are using an AGP card try looking in your bios under your "onboard devices tab" and make sure the AGP apature is set to 128 or more, a lot are set to 32 or 64, setting it to 128 can give gains in speed by simply allowing the agp more bandwith
Expected framerate increase:small 0-5fps

[pixel]

try minimizing you target monitor, in options you can set the game to have no monitors apparently.

try turning off off post process filter in the options.

[Alkali]

If your using an ATI card, mine's an x700pro 128DDR3, try older drivers. I'm using 6.14.10.6525 - not sure which catalyst version they come with but its fairly old! On my card this driver gives me about 5fps more than the 5.10 catalyst. Also try ATITool to overclock your card. Be careful though! Read up on it and get some decent cooling.

Also with ATI control panel set the texture and mipmap preference to "ultra performance" - looks a bit shody but prob about 2fps faster. I have catalyst AI set to low (DONT SET TO HIGH!) and geometry instancing enabled. Which leads me to a couple of questions: Does X3 use geometry instancing? And what EXACTLY does AQC do (whatever it is have it on - gave me about 3fps).

[toomutch]

NVidia have recently launched a new set of drivers (81.85). Try them, but be prepared to roll back as some on this forum have found that the latest drivers reduce the frame rate. It worked for me, but only just - I'm getting another 3 or 4 fps after updating from 71.89, but when I'm only averaging around 20fps, this is a significant improvement.

Please keep these tips coming, cos at the moment X3 is NOT the game we were expecting.

Toomutch

[EventHorizon]

Sorry to sound stupid, but I am on V1.2 and I can't see the options that the manual says I should!!!!

I can't turn off the monitors, and I have no idea how I turn off the HUD!

Can anybody help me with this? It's driving me nuts! My 6800 GT (256Mb) should handle this game...heck Quake 4 and FEAR run like a charm @ 1280*1024, X3 don't even work well at 1024*768!

[Firebird]

Processes - batch job

XP like Win2K and NT before runs on a number of processes, some of which are necessary for the system

to work and lots are for non critical systems and tons are absolute junk.

Before doing this its probably a good idea to go to the service manager in Admin Tools of your control

panel and clean up the running services. Things that can be turned to manual startup are;

-Help and Support
-Error reporting service
-Fast User Switching
-Themes (if your serious about performance)
-IPSEC services (use a VPN Router for your VPN tunnels)
-Windows Wireless Zero managemnt (use the control panel which came with your wireless card, dont need if on a CAT5 or no net)
-Security Centre (Get a Router/Firewall/XP has inbuilt FW)
-Firewall and Internet Connection Sharing (Get a Router/Firewall)
-Messenger
-Windows Time (adjust your clock manually occassionally)

You can also run msconfig to dump junk like QuickTime, Realplayer, Updaters of various type etc. If you have more than 3 to 6 items your wasting memory. They dont delete the exe's just dont run them on startup.

-----------------------VVVV Good Stuff VVVVV-------------------------
The link below is to a site which provides a set of tools to monitor and control you processes.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PsTools.html

The most useful from a gamers perspective are:

-pslist
and
-pskill

When you have unzipped the archive, copy the two files listed above into your %system%\system32 folder

Use pslist to get a list of the processes on your system, use pskill to kill off unwanted processes in a short script or batch file you can run before you play your game. Use the cmd.exe to do this.

heres an example (Use notepad)

-----------------------------------------------------
REM Process list to kill off before playing games
REM JPB 2005
REM
REM kill MSN messenger
pskill msmsgs
REM kill Windows update/audit
pskill wuauclt
REM kill off ati driver/helpers
pskill ati2evii

-----------------------------------------------------

I'm sure you can get the jist, just add/change your specific list, save the file as 'yourscriptname.bat' as an ansi file not a txt file.

Keep adding processes until your left with the list below.

spoolsv
smss
csrss
WinLogon
services
lsass
svchost (may be more than one)
explorer (the desktop!)

Norton AV leaves an unkillable process called: Navapsvc (if you know how to kill this tell us pls)

A total of 14 to 16 processes max

You can put your file in your My Documents folder and run it when you want to play X or any other system demanding games

Dont forget to disable your LAN Card and/or your USB ADSL Modem port.

Now your ready to play X3 without doing ctrl alt delete and killing them one at a time with the 'Task Manager'

Good Luck.

[Firebird]

(From a previous post - but worth keeping)

I've been struggling with X3 on my PC with jittering. freeze frame whatever you call it.

I was wondering what besides killing off as many process as possible what else I could do to get the frame rate up.

I have a in built sound card on my ABit Ic7G Mobo, sounds great and I never had a complaint with it on X2 so I was releuctant to beleive it would be an issue on X3.

Out of desperation I ran the X2 benchmark demo with the sound on and with the sound disabled from the BIOS

The demo is run with everything on. and with the same 16 processes running.

Sound on - 54.8 fps
Sound off - 65.7 fps

Bearing in mind that the sound system is still attached to the PCI bus even on the Mobo although directly one can only assume the CPU is doing a fair bit to get the sound out.

The next question is: Will a good quality sound card make a significant difference between the On-board and PCI Card version and which make and model will have the least impact?

Arrrghhh, I'll have to go and buy a sound card now - umm which one?

Jerry

EDIT UPDATE 1
I found a Creative X-Fi Extreem Music sound card for 99 squids and popped ito the old system. Guess what, wow sound and a decent frame rate

X-Fi Sound 63.6 fps

About a 2 fps drop from no sound at all, not bad..
Not like the on-board AC97 which caused nearly 11 fps drop

The moral of the story, get a decent sound card and turn off the 'on-board' one. I wonder if X3 is playable now. I'll go and check, let you know later.

Cheers J

EDIT UPDATE 2 (later that day)
Wow, X3 is ..... ok now. Not sure the frame rates, but its pretty playable. the most noticable stuttering is during SETA (x7) and when looking at a sector map while flying, I assume its the update process.. (X2 didnt do that)

Hope this helps

[nomad2k3]

[The Flash]

[Graphil]

OK a few more tricks and tips.

If you have a dual core processor and a geforce card, upgrading to the 81.85 drivers will give you a massive boost in performance generally. If you don't have a dual core then you may not get any performance benefit over 77.72 drivers.

The biggest single thing to increase your frame rate is to turn off the post processing filter from the graphics options if you have a geforce 5xxx card.

[Seawolfe]

If using an NVidia card, turn off the Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering and Quality setting in the graphics settings (startup screen) for X3 and uncheck the 'application controlled' boxes in the performace options of your driver. There is no checkbox for images settings, but set it to what you want in the driver section and leave it off in the game options.

I currently run my AA and AF at 4x and image quality set at Quality and am doing pretty good. I'm usually at about 35-40fps unless in a really busy sector. I'm going to try a few of the tricks I just read here to get some more. Especially the disabling of on-board sound. I'll just pop in my old SB Live card and see if the frame rate increases.

[toomutch]

In answer to EventHorizon's question (sorry it didn't get answered earlier m to toggle the HUD on and off use 'shift H'. Unfortunately it's either all off or all on at the mo, so if you turn it off you also lose the target crosshair - speed - shields readouts as well. Currently works ok for me cos I'm just trading until I can get some money together.

Toomutch

[EventHorizon]

Cheers toomutch,

I actually ended up finding it by myself...after mucking about with the H key and Key mods.

It does work, but it's c***. I really hope this gets sorted out as soon as possible.

As a side note I have noticed (on my system anyway) that the resolution, colour depth, anti-aliasing, ansitrophic filtering and post processing make no difference to my FPS (subjective viewing) at all, only the HUD and the menus slow it down.

I don't think it is a video rendering bug, but a CPU resource issue. Still, what do I know...whilst I have been a software developer for about 10 years I have never done any graphics development so I could be well of the mark.


**************************
OPTIMISE SYSTEM RESOURCES
**************************

If you want to optimise your running programs use this application:

http://www.kensalter.com/fsautostart/download.htm

Basically it will shut down any and all NON ESSENTIAL applications/services, then run your game. When you exit, it starts all of the programs back up again.

It was developed for Flight Sim (hence the FS bit) but it works for all games (well, any program really). I have not had any trouble with it at all and it does the job very well indeed.

[Lucrativus]

People in this thread are telling you to disable half of your computer. BE VERY CAREFUL!!!

Be VERY sure that you know how to re-enable the things you stopped or you may have a computer that will only play X3.

Also you will not be able to get any more information from the forum or even patches for the game because you will have disabled your modem and cannot connect to the internet and may not know how to restart it (for those that do know how, please ignore this).

EDITED: In the unedited post I was sniping at the MODS on the forum, this was wrong of me and I have deleted the offending remarks. I apologise putting them there in the first place.