Best 3d settings for X3TC and ATI video cards? Also, vsync problem fixed!

[Thurmonator]

I wish I knew or had the time to properly test, but how can you play this addicting game if your testing all the time. I don't even know why I'm here right now...oh, to ask for ATI owners input on their 3d settings in Catalyst or Ati Tray Tool.

For instance, I generally do not use Catalyst AI, and I have my Mipmaps at high quality. My AA and AF are app controlled. The Vsync command doesn't work in Catalyst, but does in ATT. Thanks for whoever posted that fix. It was a major gripe of mine. The screen tearing is insane without it on, especially in a game where your constantly turning in some situations.

Anyway, ATT has AF optimisations, do you guys use that setting.

Waht about Triple Buffering? Force Z buffer? Do these or any other settings make a big difference?

Every frame helps in this game.

Please share your experiences trying to get this game to run better.

[perpiotrredman]

AF optimizations results in slightly faster anisotropic filtering with the loss of non-oblique texture filtering quality. It's not noticably uglier, nor is it really noticably faster with anything newer than a HD 2x00 series card. I use it as it theoretically increases speed at no visually detectable cost.

Triple buffering means the card will keep three images rendered at all time, using up another frame buffer in video RAM (i.e. an extra image the size, color depth and z-buffer depth of your current display resolution) rather than just using two (also called double buffering). It can help "smooth" framerates but not really increase them. In extreme situations it can also increase trigger lag by one frame, as a visual effect. If you have little video RAM, keep this off.

Forcing the Z-buffer to a certain depth will force the drivers to use a 16 or 24-bit Z-buffer. Forcing the Z-buffer can theoretically save some video RAM and data throughput, but ever since the Z-buffer started being compressed in the Radeon 9x00 series (that's four generations ago) this is not so much of an issue. Keep it at 24 or 32 if you can, as the extra precision avoids annoying flickering textures ("Z-fighting") and jagged interfaces between cloudlike objects/particles.


The Z-buffer is an additional component of your frame buffer. As you know, your image is made up of pixels in 24-bit color, meaning every pixel takes up 3 bytes of data. In addition to this, it may contain 8 bits of alpha and 16, 24 or 32 bits of Z-buffer, for every pixel. So depending on your settings, every frame of video will use X resolution times Y resolution times all the data contained in every pixel, which is between 24 and 64 bits, in video RAM. If you use some forms of Anti-aliasing, the size is additionally multiplied by the amount if anti-aliasing, which can mean a HUGE chunk of video memory is used JUST to show the image on your screen.


What about your background processes?

[SieurNewT]

Hello

I also have problems with ATI and CCC

so i use ATT with a dedicated profile for X3TC this give me the best results.

Also the new driver generation 9.x should be release in one or 2 weeks i really hope they will help to have all settings OK when using CCC

So now with ATT i have vsync ON all the time, and AA seems ok but i see all the time "flickering" (some sorts of waves of textures also) on Terrans stations shadows, and on all Cells stations for any races so i wonder if the Aniso Filtering is working or not with my 4850.

Currently i put all to max (AA / AF / vsynch) but it seems that i have some micro freezes with AA to 8x and far less with 2x or 4x, its not fps drop but real micro freezes

[perpiotrredman]

AA seems ok but i see all the time "flickering" (some sorts of waves of textures also) on Terrans stations shadows, and on all Cells stations for any races so i wonder if the Aniso Filtering is working or not with my 4850.

I think FSAA is working as intended, the problem is rather with pixel shaders and texture content on the surface of the station which can also create sharp edges similar to those FSAA affect. FSAA primarily smooths the edges of polygons while newer FSAA methods also smooth the edges of transparent textures. What you are seeing is, rather than edges on objects or textures, sharp lines in the CONTENTS of textures and the results of pixel effects drawing sharp lines. Since these lines are not antialiased, they result in sharp edges.

Currently i put all to max (AA / AF / vsynch) but it seems that i have some micro freezes with AA to 8x and far less with 2x or 4x, its not fps drop but real micro freezes

Could be memory is a little restricted with 8X (are you using Nvidia's setting "8X" or "8X HQ"? The former uses less memory, almost as little as 4X, whereas the "HQ" version is a "real" 8x antialias that uses up oodles of memory in video RAM.

When RAM runs out on a video card, it must fetch data from the computer's RAM or even hard drive which is a significant punch to performance, although it can be very short, if only a very small piece of data was missing.

[Thurmonator]

Thanks for the replies.

Still looking for real world expereince with catalyst AI as well as the "Smart" AA versus normal AA.

MY game has two technical issues right now. Like most others here, I suffer from a drastic frame rate drop when viewing stations or objects in front of your ship. My FPS will be mid 40s to 60FPS when getting ready to go through a jumpgate, but if I turn around to face the opposite jumpgate, the FPS will go down to 15-20.

The other problem is the "micro" freezes that occur, often times before a voice file is accessed but other times with no discernable HD usage going on. These also affect the keyboard as a lot of my keypresses do not get recognized because the game is frozen for a slit second.

I have tried to turn off EAX and turn down the sampling rate, but alas, with no help.

I do not have FFDshow running.

I will post a DXDIAG when I get home for those that may want to help me troubleshoot.

My system has an Intel quad core chip ( can't remember the number, but it is like three months new), two ATI HD4850s in crossfire mode, and 4GB of RAM.

Like everyone else here complaining about their performance in this game, I run Crysis, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 all very very well.

[perpiotrredman]

Catalyst AI
...is something different again. It is a set of more-or-less application specific optimizations that in the good old days of 3DFX vs Nvidia vs ATI would have been called "cheating", i.e. not rendering the image exactly according to spec, but to something that looks almost as good but is a few percent faster. Now most of the time, using Catalyst AI will do nothing at all if your game is not on the secret internal list of games that have been given extra optimizations in the drivers, but I suppose there must be some general optimizations hidden in the "High" setting. Again keep in mind that any performance gain is bound to be small and any impact to image quality even smaller. Occasionally you may see some really odd graphical artifact, but that's when you tone Catalyst AI down, or turn it off off.

"Smart" Antialiasing
I'm not sure what you mean about "smart AA". The latest ATI video cards and drivers features four different types of what we traditionally think of as full-scene antialiasing, where the edges of polygons are smoothed. These four are "Box", "Narrow-Tent", "Wide-tent" and "Edge detect". There are also various levels of AA, but those are the same you select in X3TC's launcher program and only indicate how many samples are made per pixel: The more the smoother.

Box is the earliest type of FSAA sampling. It takes pixel samples from a square area and mix them together to make a new pixel that won't have such sharp edges against it neighbors as a non-antialised pixel.

Narrow-tent and wide-tent samples are taken with a different geometry, sampling pixels from the edges of the "box" or even outside of it, so that there are more samples from the center of the testing area but also some from farther away. "Wide tent" and "Narrow tent" indicate the shape of this sampling. Narrow tent has more samples from center, wide tent has more samples from neighboring pixels, resulting in a "fuzzier" image which some may like and some may hate.

Edge-detect is the knee of the bee, where rather than samples being taken all over the place, pixel shader programs are scouring the image for sharp edges and THEN smoothing where it's needed. It's an old idea but this time it just might work. This means you could save video RAM at the expense of video card shader processing power and maybe even anti-alias things that are really drawn onto a texture, rather than just edges of polygons.

Maybe you're talking about texture antialiasing, also called "adaptive AA" or "transparency AA". This is when antialiasing is applied to the edges of transparent textures such as non-geometrical fences or broken-down signs or windows, which can contain sharp edges that wouldn't be smoothed by standard AA. This is still a very performance-intensive operation so use it only on older games or where it REALLY bugs you to have smooth polygons but jagged transparent textures. Note that this ONLY affects transparent and partially transparent textures - it won't smooth jaggy text on a sign.


I am also having your "micro freezes" with a Core i7, 6GB of RAM and one HD4870 512MB, but I'm guessing I'm getting these "micro freezes" because something is being loaded into video RAM when it won't fit (such as when I have FSAA set too high) or because the game dynamically caches things only when it needs them. The idea that the problem is coming from the sound engine is interesting though. Maybe I'll try to enable FFDshow again to see if that helps, but I don't think it will.

Lowering hardware acceleration of sound could also help, it should be in DXDIAG on the sound tabs - IF you HAVE hardware acceleration. Vista doesn't, for example (which is just another reason for how SILLY it is for Crysis to limit the amount of sounds played in Crysis if you don't have Vista, but that's another story).


Only difference is, I don't complain.

[Thurmonator]

Catalyst AI
...is something different again. It is a set of more-or-less application specific optimizations that in the good old days of 3DFX vs Nvidia vs ATI would have been called "cheating", i.e. not rendering the image exactly according to spec, but to something that looks almost as good but is a few percent faster. Now most of the time, using Catalyst AI will do nothing at all if your game is not on the secret internal list of games that have been given extra optimizations in the drivers, but I suppose there must be some general optimizations hidden in the "High" setting. Again keep in mind that any performance gain is bound to be small and any impact to image quality even smaller. Occasionally you may see some really odd graphical artifact, but that's when you tone Catalyst AI down, or turn it off off.

"Smart" Antialiasing
I'm not sure what you mean about "smart AA". The latest ATI video cards and drivers features four different types of what we traditionally think of as full-scene antialiasing, where the edges of polygons are smoothed. These four are "Box", "Narrow-Tent", "Wide-tent" and "Edge detect". There are also various levels of AA, but those are the same you select in X3TC's launcher program and only indicate how many samples are made per pixel: The more the smoother.

Box is the earliest type of FSAA sampling. It takes pixel samples from a square area and mix them together to make a new pixel that won't have such sharp edges against it neighbors as a non-antialised pixel.

Narrow-tent and wide-tent samples are taken with a different geometry, sampling pixels from the edges of the "box" or even outside of it, so that there are more samples from the center of the testing area but also some from farther away. "Wide tent" and "Narrow tent" indicate the shape of this sampling. Narrow tent has more samples from center, wide tent has more samples from neighboring pixels, resulting in a "fuzzier" image which some may like and some may hate.

Edge-detect is the knee of the bee, where rather than samples being taken all over the place, pixel shader programs are scouring the image for sharp edges and THEN smoothing where it's needed. It's an old idea but this time it just might work. This means you could save video RAM at the expense of video card shader processing power and maybe even anti-alias things that are really drawn onto a texture, rather than just edges of polygons.

Maybe you're talking about texture antialiasing, also called "adaptive AA" or "transparency AA". This is when antialiasing is applied to the edges of transparent textures such as non-geometrical fences or broken-down signs or windows, which can contain sharp edges that wouldn't be smoothed by standard AA. This is still a very performance-intensive operation so use it only on older games or where it REALLY bugs you to have smooth polygons but jagged transparent textures. Note that this ONLY affects transparent and partially transparent textures - it won't smooth jaggy text on a sign.


I am also having your "micro freezes" with a Core i7, 6GB of RAM and one HD4870 512MB, but I'm guessing I'm getting these "micro freezes" because something is being loaded into video RAM when it won't fit (such as when I have FSAA set too high) or because the game dynamically caches things only when it needs them. The idea that the problem is coming from the sound engine is interesting though. Maybe I'll try to enable FFDshow again to see if that helps, but I don't think it will.

Lowering hardware acceleration of sound could also help, it should be in DXDIAG on the sound tabs - IF you HAVE hardware acceleration. Vista doesn't, for example (which is just another reason for how SILLY it is for Crysis to limit the amount of sounds played in Crysis if you don't have Vista, but that's another story).


Only difference is, I don't complain.

Thanks for your explanations. You seem to know what your talking about.

[Mustikos]

I have an ATI x600 pro. I've read posts regarding performance increases related to x3:tc and someone posted that they used several configs and assume it is in the game, not the hardware. My game runs fine, unless I'm in a busy sector then I get mad fps drops. I have everything set to low, though I haven't gone into dxdiag and turned off the acceleration, which I will try soon.

Anyone know how I can view fps in the game? I'm using the Steam version.

[Carlo the Curious]

There's no built-in fps counter. Try Fraps.

[perpiotrredman]

Thanks for your explanations. You seem to know what your talking about.

Thank you. I hope I made the explanations easy enough to read - looking back at them that's a LOT of text...

[Thurmonator]

Thanks for your explanations. You seem to know what your talking about.

Thank you. I hope I made the explanations easy enough to read - looking back at them that's a LOT of text...

Easy enough for me at least. Turning off adaptive AA was a pretty big help, like 4 to 5 FPS increase.

Also I want to remind ATI users out there that the Vsync fix was a big help. That is, you have to get Ati Tray Tool, which also has a built in FPS counter, and set the Vsync to always on, and no more planet cutting and clipping when your turning. I don't know why the CCC control wont activate in the game.

One more tweak which was another big FPS help and that was to get CFF explorer and set the setting for the x3tc.exe file to be able to use more than 2GB of RAm for those of us who have 4GB of RAm or more. Just look up CFF explorer in the search to find the topic in the tech support forum.

And one last "tweak" or oversight was that my Creative Xfi had the CMSS turned on in the Audio panel of the control panel. Turned it off and most of my micro stuttering went AWAY!!

I still get some stutters when the HD seems to be accessing the first voice file if some speech is coming. Maybe a defrag is in order.

All in all , it runs at betwwen 35 and 55 FPS in most systems. Although the Aldrin system was a real bruiser where it dropped down to 7 to 20 FPS while I was there.

I still have an annoying keyboard lag issue that only seemed to start happening after about 10 days of game time. It could ba a script problem.

BTW I am running the game with NO civilians and rocks removed.

Also if anyone is using the Satellite Early Warning Network, that is a BIG FPS stealer. Only use it for one off scans and don't leave it on, otherwise the game is hardly playable in some sectors. Great script though, and very useful, but a real hog if you leave it on.

What about the Station Financial manager, does that use a lot of game "bandwidth"?

And lastly, when looking at the scripts running page in the script editor, it had one script that constantlly runs up the page and that is the jumpdrive.gonship script. It seems to be always running. Is that normal?

What does it do?

Thanks for everyones help as well.

[perpiotrredman]

Also I want to remind ATI users out there that the Vsync fix was a big help. That is, you have to get Ati Tray Tool, which also has a built in FPS counter, and set the Vsync to always on, and no more planet cutting and clipping when your turning.

True, but VSYNC means the machine will wait until a whole image is rendered to put it onto the screen, resulting in a slightly higher display lag. I still haven't after many years, decided which I prefer - the slightly higher responsiveness of vsync off, or the "whole images" of vsync on. Sometimes, vsync will also have some very unwanted results, such as noticable mouse lag by several frames.

Maybe a defrag is in order.

Hmm, good idea. I haven't defragged since I installed X3TC.

[Thurmonator]

Also I want to remind ATI users out there that the Vsync fix was a big help. That is, you have to get Ati Tray Tool, which also has a built in FPS counter, and set the Vsync to always on, and no more planet cutting and clipping when your turning.

True, but VSYNC means the machine will wait until a whole image is rendered to put it onto the screen, resulting in a slightly higher display lag. I still haven't after many years, decided which I prefer - the slightly higher responsiveness of vsync off, or the "whole images" of vsync on. Sometimes, vsync will also have some very unwanted results, such as noticable mouse lag by several frames.

Maybe a defrag is in order.

Hmm, good idea. I haven't defragged since I installed X3TC.

I agree that it depends on the game as to whether I want Vsync on or off. In X3 there is a fps boost with it off, granted, but IMO this game screams for Vsync because of the high degree of contrast between the planets and the space background. In a turning dogfight, the clipping was just really bad. But if you need every possible frame, then i'd go without it. I bought my latest rig, quad core-4gb ram- crossfired 4850s, so I hopefully wouldn't have to

Anyone else here have key press lag? I often have to hit the key twice to get it to recognize the keypress.

[perpiotrredman]

I think it comes from the game making a distinction between "press key" and "hold key". It's really hard to rename a ship "dilligence", for example.