Oki in general a "good" setting is what the game set's by default, but since there are unlimited combinations, nothing is perfect and depends on personal preferences.shawnburton wrote:Before my OP I had my settings all to "global" (except SLI had been turned on) in the nVidia Control Panel Program Settings for X3:TC (and rolling demo). I ran the rolling demo as a benchmark and received an overall average framerate of 71.
I did some research and changed the prog settings to what I thought would be best. I now have an overall average framerate of 76.6 AND the game looks much more cinematic! Egosoft, please take a look at these settings and tell me if I'm on the right track:
(showing only items I changed, rest are default)
Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
Force mipmaps: Trilinear
Multi-Display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Single Display performance mode
SLI Performance mode: Force alternate frame rendering 2
Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization: on
Threaded optimization: on
Triple Buffering: on
Some quick notes on the settings:
Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
This may improve the visual quality, but the textures are not made for it. It may still work but some alpha textures will appear thicker/thinner than supposed. So we would have to rework all alpha channels and check all objects.
U can experiment with this setting and it should cost around 20% fps, the supersampling mode is looking even better but will cost 50% fps.
Force mipmaps: Trilinear
This wont do anything except may screw up UI textures. This will generate automatically mipmaps to improve performance, but we already generated mipmaps for all textures that need mips and we also use a much better filter algorithm then trilinear filtering.
So pls turn this to default/off
Multi-Display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Single Display performance mode
This may improve performance but is also driver version dependent, cant recall what driver version it was first added. But using "Multiple display performance mode" and make sure to run the game on the "primary" screen should also work with the same fps.
So u have to test it and see if the fps drop with multi monitor setups.
SLI Performance mode: Force alternate frame rendering 2
Simply use what works for u and is faster without crashing the game
Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization: on
This will reduce the anisotropic texture filtering and might gain some fps.
My advice is to leave it off if u use 2-4x filtering and turn it on on 8x. But recheck if the fps actually is going up, since modern cards will filter textures faster than older and the driver revision also play's a role. Means ati/nvidia always will try to "optimize" texture filtering
Threaded optimization: on
My first guess was to leave this on, but i read somewhere that some games might run better with off. So just test this, it also seems to depend on the driver version and card.
Triple Buffering: on
This is tobe used in conjunction with vsync. If u force vsync off, than all this does is creating an extra backbuffer so wasting like 5MB depending on resolution.
If u turn vsync on, than make sure tripple buffering is enabled since otherwise the fps is always synced to monitor refresh rate which means that u loose fps.
By default we use vsync and also have tripple buffering enabled, which is also my advice here.
Antialiasing:
My advice here is to start with 6-8x on highend cards and 4x on midrange cards. If u switch to 2x u may gain liek 10-25% depending on the card.
I hope this helped a bit, but in general most of the settings are dependent on the driver version + card and we try our best to have the game look as good as it can on most pc's.
Dont using transparent AA is again only because we do not directly support it, like we also not directly support SLI.
If u have more question feel free to post them.
by Andy
![[ external image ]](http://i242.photobucket.com/albums/ff172/Pelador/Pelador-DDRS-sig.jpg){kind=link}