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

[Crypton]

Here are a couple of guides for ATI and nVidia users, while it is not specifically for X3, it should help gain something overall in most games.

nVidia Users:
http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_1.html

ATI Users:
http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_8.html

[NZ-Wanderer]

Hokay, using these settings

THANKS Crypton for you tips which I used as a base to start at

Driver: Xtreme-G 81.89.v2

Video Card
Refresh Rate: 75Hz
AntiAliasing (AA): 4x
Anisotropic Filtering (AF): Application Controlled
Image Settings: High Performance
Vertical Sync: Off

X3
EAX: Off
Screen Resolution: 1024x768x32
Texture Quality: High
Shader Quality: High
Window Mode: No
Automatic Quality: On
Antialising: Off
Anisotropic Texture Filtering: Off

Then

THANKS Graphil for your tips with Rivatuner I set

pixel shader to v1.3.
vertex shader to v1.1

Now when I go into X3 I get:

Main Menu smooth = 50-51 fps
Game great = anywhere between 15 and 42 fps in Argon Prime (averaging in the high 20's most of the time.)

My System
AMD 64 3000+
1 gb DDR Ram
FX5900XT Graphics Card

Just thought I would share my settings incase anyone can use them

Thank you all

[Darth Ratty]

Thanks to all the people that suggested using the FSAutoStart utility. This does seem to make a difference for me and it's a lot less painful than having to manually stop and restart things.

The patch 1.2.01 has make quite a differnce to frame rates with the HUD turned on.

One thing I've noticed is that whatever changes I make, Argon Prime never seems to get any better. I have tried Xenon sectors again and there have been improvements there. Getting 4 x the frame rates I was getting there (now about 8 FPS). I think this was mainly the patch that improved this. Some sectors are now up to approaching 30 FPS. Argon prime frame rate is about 8 - 25 depending what's on screen. This is with HUD on

AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8 MHz)
Asus A7V333
GF 6600GT
1GB RAM (PC2700)
SB Audigy
Win XP Pro SP2

My current settings are:

BIOS:
Pretty much default board settings. Changing the various AGP settings just seem to make things worse. So I've left Fast Writes off and Graphics Apeture Size to 64MB.

Gfx driver:
XTreme-G 81.89 v2 default settings, except
Vysnc off
Pixel shaders: 1.3
Vertex shaders: 1.1

Game:
1024x768
Textures: low
Shaders: low
AA: off
AF: off
EAX: off
ADQ: on
Full Screen

FSAutoStart:
Memory defragging: on
Stopping/restarting all processes it recomends stopping
Stopping/restarting explorer.exe and ActiveSync

[Droflek]

The biggest issue with the large sectors isnt the Graphics handling, but that they are so CPU intensive.

My game performance is much iimproved after adjusting (Overclocking) my AMD XP 2500+ to a 2800+ PR rating. Although this worked for me I do NOT recommend this as a course of action for other users unless you know your hardware capabilities intricately.
Also, something you might want to try is running the game in Windowed mode(suggested earlier in this thread) as the overall performance seems to improve considerably (on Win 98SE/ME), although at the cost of some of the imersiveness of gameplay. I don't know how well this works on other operating systems as they generally handle application processes slighlty differently.

[rustamk]

Someobody mentioned that getting the newest drivers can cause your Graphics Card to function less efficiently. I have confirmed this to be true with 3Dmark2005. Let's put some figures on the issue:

My Card is a geForce6 6600 256MB AGP.

Drivers 81.87: 2011 Marks
Drivers 81.85: 2031 Marks
Drivers 78.01: 2130 Marks
Drivers 77.72: 2144 Marks

That's about 5% improvement! Of course, 5% is not much, and the program is called "3DMark" so the overall performance improvement will not be 5%, but for those of you who go to the trouble of stopping "explorer" before starting X3, and want to squeeze every drop, this is a good way to do so.

Rustam

[antyrrian]

HI all,

Just a quick tip. I was suffering as much as the next person with the poor performance believing my system more than met the minimum requirements. I went through all the other suggestions on the site with regarders to drivers, unnecessary processes etc and saw no difference. I was confident in my system specifications and my software build. Turns out I wasn't quite right. I had 1.5GB of PC3200 Ram in 3 512MB Sticks...! I'd forgotten that in order to get the most out of the memory it needed to be in pairs. As I wasn't suffering such poor performance in other games I didn't consider this to be the problem. However after reading another thread on this issue (which I can't find now) just after the latest patch which detailed the need for match pairs of Ram to get max performance I removed the third 512MB stick leaving just the pair......and wow! I can play X3 now! Performance still drops to around 10fps in busy sectors and still drops in SETA mode but otherwise it is perfectly playable and combat is now possible! Much less jerkiness FPS is running at around 25-50 depending on whats going on, I even don't have to go through the process of stopping unused processes, AVG antivirus runs happily in the background!

I checked this out on my other games where I didn't believe I had performance issues and the difference in those is dramatic as well. I can essentially max out FEAR, Serious Sam II with not FPS loss at all. Far CRY here I Come.

So the moral of the story, just check that you are running with dual memory sticks to get the best out of your memory. Oh and thanks to everyone here for posting suggestions, advice and offering help. Same to the EGOSOFT people....I had great fun over the weekend, glad I hadn't ditched the game.

Cheers

Jez.

[The_Mess]

Thanks to all, just got X3 yesterday and 1.0 Enlight version is running between 15-30 fps. Used Rivatuner to force pixel shader 1.4, and vertex shader 1.1, everything else is on minimu settings...

[UncaPathy]

I don't have fraps or any other reliable fps counter but after installing the latest/beta drivers for my SoundBlaster Audigy there was a noticable drop in "lag" during the game. The verson number for the drivers is 2.08.0002 or something like that.

[kmiller1610]

Thought I'd throw in a before and after story.

Before Rig

P4 2.6 GHZ
1 gig RAM
Nivida Gforce FX 5900 with 128 ram. This was a middle of the pack card in last sumer's VGA Cards benchmarks off Tom's Hardware guide

Used all the tips I found in this site. Beginning of first mission is a slide show. In most sectors, I'm getting 5 - 8 FPS for the first minute or so, then it improves quite a lot, probably to about 15 - 20. Some sectors with colored gasses slow the display down to maybe 10.

After

Picked up a ATI Radeon X850 card, near the top of the same VGA test, with 256 RAM. Same settings. Start of Mission is still a slide show, but loads are faster and in a minute os so, I'm cooking at 25 - 35 FPS.
The game is now playable. I can ignore the occasional slowdowns.

[alex hall]

I've been playing X3 on the following low spec machine:

AMD Athlon XP 2400+
784 MB Ram
ATI 9200 SE 128mb PCI (not express!)

Playing the game at 1280*1024 (or 1024 * 768) on the absolute lowest quality was ok, and with the 1.2.01 patch even having the HUD on was not so bad, however the performance wasn't good enough for combat, just flying around, exploring and trading. Worse though was that the keyboard/mouse were very very slow making navigating through the menus or pressing a key a complete nightmare.

I ran Aquamark benchmarking utility on my PC and obtained the following:

Graphics: 405
CPU: 2275
Total: 3710
Avg FPS: 3.71

So not very good.

I have just upgrade my PC with the following:

2GB Corsair memory
Nvidia 9800 XT 128Mb AGP
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 card.

Playing X3 now at highest quality (1280*1024) is excellent, such a big difference, even better the mouse/keyboard issues are gone and these work at the correct speed.

I ran Aquamark benchmarking utility on the new hardware PC and obtained the following:

Graphics: 5094
CPU: 4130
Total: 31518
Avg FPS: 31.52

i.e. a massive difference!

This is without a reinstall of XP which I will be doing sometime later.

So one happy X3 player now in terms of performance and visual quality! The bottleneck on my machine is now the CPU, however that can wait for another time. In reality the Graphics card made the big big difference which for £100 isn't too bad!



Alex

[Odemit]

This one is wierd....

At first I was getting 12 to 20 fps on my 6800go ultra at the lowest resolution (1024x768) using driver version 78.11.

At the driver level I forced the vsinc ON and suddenly Im getting a smooth 60 fps

Could this bug be related to how some people get higher FPS in a window too?

[Dr.Sid]

My config: P4 2.4, 512M, ATI 6800SE (128M, 1.3PS), onboard AC97 soundcard.

I play with all settings set to minimum.
I don't have any fps metter, but I hope I can do some educated guesses.

There are several areas of 'slownes'.
For me, in first place, there goes heavy stutters (5 seconds) in dense sectors (like argon prime), low framerate in these sectors (under 5fps), long pauses (up to 1 minute) during sector loads and so on. This is MEMORY problem. I've tried to upgrade to 1Giga and it is much better. No stutters, faster sector load.
Dense sectors are still somewhat slow even with 1Giga. Argon prime makes some 10fps, if I look from the gate to the sector center. It is much faster when I don't look in that direction. 10 fps is allright if you go to buy new ship. It would be problem if you had to fight.
Next things which slows down are the nebuleas. It is again nothing dramatic, nothing 'unplayable', but it can be problem during fights. I think it is because my video card is really a minimum one. I don't play any game in 1024x768, unless I have to (like here). 800x600 or even 640x480 would be much faster I KNOW. I've tried to modify registry entries wor screen size, but this does not work, game still runs in 1024x768.

I've tried to change ACQ settings in registry (to absurd values like 50-100), no visible change. Of course, it seems that in argon prime there is just too much ships. In the nebulaes it is my card being slow because of the number of pixels it has do draw, not because of the number of polygons it has to draw.

Game runs quite fine, it is playable, but it is no 'joy' how it was with older X games.

Things which would make me happy:
- lower resolution available
- more GFX settigs - sparser nebulaes for example, even more agresive polygon reduction, even more agresive textures reduction (thee still looks quite good event with the lowest settings), maybe some HUD simplifications.

And once again, what helps a lot:
- to have at least 1 Giga of RAM memory.

What did not help me:
- changing registry
- disabling sound card
- changing advanced 3D settings
- enabling/disabling VSync
- playing in window

[pja8]

This performance increase is for mobo using VIA chipset and AGP graphics cards.

I came across it because I installed a new mobo and processor this week and yes I got a performance increase but I was a little dissappointed. I also had the problem that no video file would play in the windows player. After searching the net I went to the VIA forums and there is alot of chat about the 4 in 1 drivers and specifically the VIA CPU TO AGP controller.

THe simple fact is that in win XP there are two drivers you can use one supplied by VIA and one by MS. I had the VIA one installed which has caused a lot of problems for a lot of people.

So via device manager, system devices then selecting update driver for this controller I changed the driver to the MS one. Took all of two minutes.

The result was that my video played but better still on all my games including X3 my FPS has lept up by 10 - 20 FPS. The difference is remarkable for such a simple change and I now have no issues with X3 performance.

[mikaelis]

Hi

Can you specify, what is the name of this driver (which version), and where did you download it from?
I have also found VIA Hyperion v. 5.0 on Guru 3D site. This are the newest from VIA I guess, but it is not MS.

cheers

[pja8]

The microsoft driver should already be on your system waiting to be used, mine is version 5.1.2535.0, 1.07.2001. Clearly an older driver but unlike the VIA driver that came with my mobo it did not create the bottleneck in the system like the VIA one. As for the VIA version it must be a fairly recent 4 in 1 driver set as the mobo came with the latest bios updates so it was not old stock.

If I am correct although the 4 in 1 VIA set has been updated VIA have not updated the AGP to CPU controller driver for a few years.

It worked for me on a MSI K8M800 chip set, socket 754, I would recommend checking out the VIA forums especially the topics under the heading of the 4 in 1 driver. I should also state that it relates to nvidia cards more than ATI.

[Crypton]

For VIA Chipset users, if you have XP SP2 installed, you do not need VIA 4-in-1 drivers, however.

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?Pa ... bCatID=148

There are VIA IDE Acceleration Drivers which are compatible with all IDE, RAID & SATA setups.

Windows 2000, XP, 2003 Only!

While, I didnt get a gain from performance from them, other may! So download and try em, (Click the "STORAGE" logo to download them)

didn't want to Direct Link the download since I didnt read their rules *tsk tsk*, but there is the page they are on.

Remember they are Beta drivers, so no garantees. But I have installed them on 6 systems thus far and not had any problems, so give em a try, may help.

// Regards,
Crypton

[Bobleg]

I've got a P4 3.0 with 1Gb mem and an x850xt pe - using catalyst 5.12.

No matter what I do - min res/settings or max res/settings + aa etc I get 30 fps in most sectors and 15 fps in AP - if I take the HUD off I can get 40-50. I really would like some more fps in AP and I'm stuck on how to achieve it! Is it purely a CPU capacity thing? I found no difference at all turning Norton on and off.

Any suggestions?

B.

[swisstony]

Bobleg I have an almost identical spec, 3 gig, x800xt. I went and bought an extra gig of memory to go to 2gig and that made a major difference.

It plays much better now at high screen res.

[Droflek]

I found unpacking the game files using x2tool.exe and running the game with the -r command line switch seemed to reduce the load times for everything drastically.

[misterSpikes]

System tricks:
Kill the Explorer task

I did this and the FPS increased dramastically, but there was one drawback. With this tweak my fully patched games runs in V1.0

I assume since the patch installs in the X3 directory it's still running even though the game reports the lower version?