Graphical tweaks to help improve gameplay

[Lain]

Aloha!

I decided to make a post about some graphical tweaks i did to my client in order to improve my gameplay experience. These changes may or maynot work for everyone but ive done my best to check each setting and see what kind of performance boost i am getting Mostly by Tests outside of Serbule keep looking directly at town where the lag comes from and in Serbule hills with april 15th's patch adding in back tree's and grass.

Now some notes I run on Ultra settings in the game some of you might not but running in ultra settings does significanly take toll to your video card which im running a older GTX 980 SC with 4GB on a i7 6700K /w 16gb a small screenshot below on how much gorgon is using my GPU


So first things you want to do is go to your options and graphics setting and set it to the desired setting profile you want ( my case is ultra ) and Disable Auto Adjust Quality Level so the game doesnt make adjustments on the fly, Then Enable Show Advanced Options and it will extend the options list further. We'll start from the bottom of the list.



Bloom - Disabling this will make it so that the world isnt flashing brigh blurry lights at you, This effect can be seen the most during Dawn, and for me it was just a mess of bright lights to everything and the sunlight comming out at dawn looked like a sploch of color, Disabling this will even the lighting out for some of you.

Color Correction Curves - make color adjustments using curves for each color channel. Depth based adjustments allow you to vary the color adjustment according to a pixel’s distance from the camera. For example, objects on a landscape typically get more desaturated with distance due to the effect of particles in the atmosphere scattering. This setting is on as a preference to myself a personal setting it doesnt affect much you might not even see a change.

Tilt Shift - is a local blur effect that blurs the image based on distance to the center. I turn this off because i stream alot and i want to make sure my streams are in high quality, this blur is at the edges of the screen and makes it seem wierd to me so i shut it off as it feels like im looking out a fish eyes lense

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - (SSAO) image effect approximates Ambient Occlusion in realtime, as an image post-processing effect. It darkens creases, holes and surfaces that are close to each other. In real life, such areas tend to block out or occlude ambient light, hence they appear darker. I personally shut this off, older computers should also disable this, it has a very minor performance increase you may not notice it

Now we get in to the more Heavier settings that do affect the performance of your game.



Terrain Shadow - This adds shadows to the terrain from lightsources of the game or just by how the landscape is formed, Shutting this off will make the game look alittle brighter, Any type of Shadow producing setting will always affect performance, This one is a minor one but may help with older machines.

Soft Vegetation - A nother minor effect, it softens up the plants in the area with anti-alias effect, aka the edges of the plant to give it a better look, ( i may be wrong about this desc) this is a personal choice to turn it off it has very little effect on the game from my experiments.

Water Quality - This is the water quality it affects how nice your water looks, reflectives of the water and transparency i dont know what the default is but by experimenting it i set it to 1 finally and its helped abit as if with some games if project gorgon is anything like them sometimes the water is seen but still rendered because its under the landscape so playing with this setting mayt help your FPS situation

Camera Far Clipping Plane - This is a big culprit Default setting is 1000 and thats -WAY- Father then the eye can see in the game, This means the game is rendering al lthose plants tree's players and npc's FAR FAR away Weither you can see them or not This makes a HUGE diffrence in FPS so you should lower this to atleast 400-500, How i tested this was standing far West of Serbule keep and then looking in its direction, lower this improved fps as it stoped rendering whats in town.


More settings



Tree Draw Distance - Another large Culprit for loss of FPS, the tree's are beautifull dont get me wrong and we want to see all the game in its beauty, But unfortunatly i was in Serbule hills on apr 15th patch and tree's were added back in and grass as well i lagged very heavily, As you can see i have Tree's turned off saddly as in serbule hills i was droping to 15FPS in some places! Here is a video with just a sparse amount of tree's in my view affects the amount of FPS i get.



Max High Res Tree's - i didnt have much luck with this setting but it affects how pretty the tree's are, but even setting it to lowest possible still didnt provide me alot of performance back to viewing alot of tree's at once, lowering this may help you if you do not wish to turn tree's off.

Grass Draw Distance - Another good setting to decrease, its set to 1000 default and basicly your rendering grass thats out of your vision, save alittle performance and adjust this to your preference.

Grass Draw Density - This is either turning the grass on or off , its either 0 for off or 1 for on

Ground Basemap Distance - Basicly for pretty high res ground and how far it will render as high grade ground, This one too is like far cliping plane and so you'll want to lower this to your prefrence for alittle performance gain.

Shadow Distance - This is your shadows and how far in the distance they will render, lowing this will improve your performance, and Setting it to 0 will disable shadows completly, this has some performance impact older machines should lower it or disable it.

Well this is all i have played with currently but there is a Special Settings under options that i have also enabled, there is a view document peice for it and i'll list the settings i have but i know little of it other then NoSlowbox which helps some in Serbule keeps lag. so try them at your leisure.

MaxActiveLoads=10
EasyDropItems
NoSlowBoxes
NoCull

Entity Animation Distance Multiplier - TY to a viewer of mines [slaypassion] for bringing this one to my attention, Setting this to 0 While you are in Serbule keep stops the jerking lag, But everyone will be standing still as animations are turned off, But no lag in Serbule keep, Turn it back on when you leave the city. Unfortunatly Names of NPC will be below them sometimes

=========== edit =================

Blacked out group members?
go to Options and GUI and go to the Featured section and Toggle Compact UI setting on/off and save this will eliminate the need to kick someone from the group just to fix the ui group bug



- Tesslara

[HardRock]

Thank you for this!

[Saints]

This is fantastic, thanks much!

[Mechant]

Even closing your inventory panel will increase your FPS try it lol

[ArkadyRandom]

Even closing your inventory panel will increase your FPS try it lol

I'm so bad about running around with in my inventory open in town. There is so much to track and so many NPCs I have to track that leaving it open is a helpful reminder of who I have to visit, or what storage I need to manage.

Closing it helps me a bit, but I still stutter in Serbule regardless.

Thanks to the OP for posting their graphics experiments. I'll visit those and report back. I'm running a less powerful system, but really only see problems in Serbule with stuttering and that's mostly only when I'm using RMB mouse-look. Post patch those are far fewer. Out in open areas of Serbule Hills, Serbule, and Eltibule, I usually run around 60FPS, but sometimes drop down to 40s. I do hit drops to the 15 - 25 sometimes at odd times, but those aren't consistent as far as I can tell.

Hardware: i7/4790, 16GB, GTX970, installed on a Samsung 850EVO (that's the main gaming drive).