Guide to Optimizing Display Performance, Rebooted

I found that Special Effects > Sun Shaft tanked my FPS in some places (hence you won't notice an immediate effect, depending where you're standing). FPS would drop from 60 to 25-ish, and moving the camera was sluggish. For example some alley way in Qeynos. So I'd look at that if you find FPS varies wildly in some places, or the framerate tanks while looking around..

Once I switched that off, I enabled Ambient Occlusion which wasn't the culprit and that has a much more noticable impact on overall picture quality.

I have a GTX 670 which should be okay for running such an old game with old shader model. I'm pushing 1440p though, and maybe that takes a harder hit with some effects.

2. Choose your Performance Profile. Under Performance Profile, select "Very High Performance". You should now have a very smooth game, with decent graphics. Don't worry, we are gonna build the graphics quality back up and find the sweet spot. Older graphics card users may want to stick with this, or even choose "Extreme Performance".

^^^ this was the answer to a slow computer I have a work. I totally gave up on playing on lunch break for the last few years due to choppy lag. It's gone. I can move and run again!

Thanks for posting this Sigrdrifa.

Outstanding write up. Thanks for taking the time to write it up. It will help a lot of folks fine tune their machines. Not everyone knows about these things.

Just wanted to say thanks for this, it really helped.

Bit of a necro, but didn't think it was worth its own thread. There's settings that are altered by the "Performance Profile" setting that aren't available in the GUI even if the actual individual settings are the same. You can see it by saving the profiles and comparing them by using diff.
Comparing an "Extreme Quality" to "Extreme Performance" with all the latter's settings similar to the former, here are the primary differences:
Extreme quality:

Extreme performance:

Settings that seem to give me the biggest performance increases are "r_particle_lod_scale" and "r_fast_layer_min_distance". Particles seem to be really unoptimized and used everywhere. The so-called "fast-layer" seems to just do basic rendering past a certain distance.


The "r_shadows_other" option makes a very nice difference indoors btw. Seems to do nothing outside. To see it in action, go into antonia bayle's chambers and switch between true/false.