FPS improvement for everyone.

[TheHawk]

Hi.

I was becoming irritated with low fps arround places like the Dark Forest and Erothin. Like so many I had started to mess with Nehrim launcher settings/ different software and tweaks and almost forgot my own belief of look inside the box and know whats there before looking outside it.

What I have done is easy, easy,easy. Not fully tested yet, in that I have only took a couple of save games and ran through the Dark Forest and Erothin.

All I have done is alter some settings in the video options. Hit esc while in game goto options then video.

Two settings I have tried, maybe some other settings suit you better. The first left distant land on, the second turned it off. Dark Forest on the first (two tiny stutters of 8fps for less than a second) ran through at appx avg 60fps, second setting appx avg 40fps.

All I have done within options/video is lower tree detail to 30 and visibility settings in order as follows , 20,5,20,25,70. Set last figure lower distant land turned off.(which would be best setting for Dark Forest, Erothin).

Do not believe me!!!!! Take a save game, type in tdt at consul and watch top right fps. Change settings and do again. No harm done. Tell me if wrong.

Below 2 pics in Dark Forest. First distant land off, second distant land on. Click to enlarge image.

[+]

Dis Land Off

[+]

Dis Land On

Let me know how you get on. Love to make it so much more playable for you all.

[arvisrend]

The "trick" with Distant Land is in the readme. For some reason, the Dark Forest has a habit of reducing the framerate down to one-digit numbers if distant land is on and light effects (e. g. spells) are active. Nobody has yet understood what is causing this lag.

[TheHawk]

Hi.

Yes, I knew about the "trick" with distant land from some months back. What I am trying to show ( I hope some others try,just in case its how my pc is set ) is that by tweaking some other settings, which will not affect the rest of the game, certain areas which had a lot of stutters/ low fps will improve.
I think my communication/presentation skills lacking in my screenshots, I should have put one showing fps before tweaks. You will still get stutters no matter what, but you can improve overall playability. With distant land on and no tweaks, my game almost comes to a complete standstill, but make a few tweaks and it improved to the point where the only time it slowed to single fps was when I put in 2 dark elves throwing fireballs, a skeleton, a wolf and an acolyte attacking me. With distant land turned off plus the tweaks went through the fight at 25 to 30+ fps.
Yes, there are (I believe found 3 spots now in Dark Forest) where game just crawls for a second or two, exactly the same as the first time you cross Erothin bridge.

edit:
I'm back because I think should try to explain what I am trying to do. My opinion on the slow downs in Nehrim is that there are certain "hotspots" where so much info (sound, textures etc)
are being loaded to cache, which overloads and slows you down. Easy test is run across Erothin bridge once, you get a blip where fps goes down. Run back again, no blip. Everything is now in memory. Turning off distant land alleviates this by having less info needed to cache. The tweaks I am looking at are similar in a way to turning off distant land without the need to actually turn it off. By making the distance to viewing objects smaller, less info is required to cache. Of course it all depends on how you wish to play, how much you can see without spoiling your gaming pleasure. An example/tweak is turn of tree canopy shadows, in the dark forest this improved fps by an avg of 3, not a lot, but by tweaking all the rest the fps has risen a good bit (well on my pc anyway).
Which would be nice if someone else could spend 10 minutes to test and tell me if it works for them or is it just me!!!!!

[arvisrend]

Well, it's no wonder that you get good FPS with this here:

All I have done within options/video is lower tree detail to 30 and visibility settings in order as follows , 20,5,20,25,70. Set last figure lower distant land turned off.(which would be best setting for Dark Forest, Erothin).

These are the most important graphics settings. But I don't think that many people would want to play with visibility settings at 20,5,20,25,70. As for me, I prefer maxing them out and having lag in Erothin...

[TheHawk]

Hi.

I did say depends on how you like to play.
At the same time apart from the tree detail which is a 50% drop to what starts as a default. The other drops are minimum. In fact it is only a -3,-2,-9,-9 to what the default is.
Distant land turned off with these in Dark Forest and Erothin you do not see (my opinion) any major difference in detail. Distant land on with these tweaks, I still do not see much difference in detail, but the tweaks only improve FPS by a small percent. Mainly trying this to improve fluidity of gameplay in areas where it could be annoying, but without affecting the beauty of Nehrim.