UserOptions.ini Tweaks.

Discussion in 'Player Support' started by wavefunction, Dec 7, 2012.

  1. wavefunction

    There are some options that can be tweaked to improve performance until the game is better optimized for lower end systems. I have 220GT which is good enough to play the games I play the most with good graphic quality and performance. Unfortunately, Planetside is not one of those games.

    You can reduce the render quality below 50% in the .ini file.

    RenderQuality=0.350000

    Thats what I use. The game looks worse than Half Life 1, but I can shoot people with a max fps around 60-80. This approximately a 80-100% improvement over the lowest setting available via in-game settings, since I normally max around 30-40.

    If you know of some other setting that have a large impact on perforamnce, share them here! :)

    Good luck, and happy shooting. (reds and blues, not purples, they are cool) :p
  2. tigerchips

    Some of these are the lowest settings in the game...

    [Rendering]
    GraphicsQuality=1
    TextureQuality=3
    ShadowQuality=0
    RenderDistance=1000
    Gamma=0.000000
    MaximumFPS=200
    UseLod0a=0
    VSync=0
    OverallQuality=-1
    LightingQuality=1
    FogShadowsEnable=0
    EffectsQuality=1
    TerrainQuality=1
    FloraQuality=1
    ModelQuality=1
    ParticleLOD=0
    MotionBlur=0
    AO=0
    VerticalFOV=55

    [Sound]
    MaxVoices=45

    [Terrain]
    RenderFlora=Off

    [General]
    ReduceInputLag=0
  3. tigerchips

    You could get FPS lower by changing the resolution to 1280x720 or below (in UserOption.ini). Don't think the height goes under 700 though.

    You can lower verticalFOV although it's going to look funny. Turning the hud off and drawing your own crosshairs on the screen might save you one or two frames, lol. You can turn off the 3d spotting and terminal icons (see key layout) but i don't think that would be a very good idea.

    I tried to overclock my CPU and the only thing that worked was increasing the bus speed. But i put it back as it's not worth losing a CPU, etc, over Planetside 2. They promised a good patch in January so i'm going to wait.
  4. ZeroX

    Looked like I was playing minecraft when I screwed with the renderquality, anything below 50% looks horrible.

    LightingQuality=1
    EffectsQuality=1
    TerrainQuality=1
    FloraQuality=1
    ModelQuality=1

    Why not set these to 0, might save you like 4-5 fps?
  5. Ghodere

    Oh yeah guys, I tweaked my render quality and was able to make the game much more playable.

    [IMG]
    • Up x 14
  6. JeebusCAN

    Holy Zombie Jesus, it's Doom!
    • Up x 4
  7. KiloWhiskey82

    Shoot hurry!!! Oh wait.. maybe??? lulz
  8. ZeroX

    30 FPS at warp gate, wtf.
  9. Morfildur

    Amazing Screenshot. And you are still GPU bound at 30 FPS :)

    For optimization, it really depends on wether you are CPU or GPU bound.
    If you are CPU bound, reducing graphic quality won't do much.

    After testing around on my machine, I'm using:
    RenderDistance had no effect at all since i was CPU bound, the biggest effect game from ShadowQuality=0.
    This config increased my FPS to a playable 20 FPS in bigger battles (from 12-15). I didn't make tests for the individual changes but the overall increase is noticeable enough to have an effect on my K/D :)
    It most likely won't help if you are GPU bound though.
  10. Silver Pepper

    I don't see why you're complaining about 40FPS? Hell, my screen refresh rate means it can't go above 60FPS, so anything above that is just epeen waving. I can understand not wanting the joltiness that you get at under around 25FPS, but honestly, stuff above 45 is just silly - as a human, you don't have the reaction time to deal with that stuff. And then it also depends on your screen - what sort of display delay it has - before you start bashing FPS.

    I'd rather be able to see crisp outlines of stuff and identify friend or foe at 20 FPS than have something that looks like I rubbed bacon on my screen at 60FPS.
  11. Wibin

    Thanks for some good options to change in here guys. I wasn't sure on changing some of them. I hope this helps my old tired computer out.

    It seems i'm GPU dependant with this setup, I wish It would use some of my CPU though.
  12. wavefunction

    It always says that I am GPU bound. The reason why I like having higher frames is that I have noticed hitching at around 30 fps, even on the warpgate. Sitting at 60 or so the hitching stops. I can deal with low fps, but when the screen has gaps in rendering, the mouse starts jumping all over the place and you start overshooting your target. Or, at least that what happens to me.

    AFAIK, the slider settings cannot go below 1. I've also lowered my render distance to 1000, but there is no noticeable effect.

    Make fun all you want, but the game is playable below 50% render quality.

    I should also note that I've disabled most of the fancy features on my GPU via the nvidia app, but there is no noticable effect. Whatever causes the low frames appears to be quite un-willing to be tweaked outside of the render quality slider. Normally, with low frame I would be looking a shadows, aa, and bloom effects, but no such settings appear to be able to be tweaked. Even with aa disabled, I still see what appears to be smoothing on edges in game.
  13. Zakuak

    lmao I love that screen shot!! DOOM yeah hahah!
    • Up x 1
  14. badname02

    ... you must be one of those people who claim the human eye can't see more than 24 frames a second.
    Well dude, if you can't see, and more importantly than that, or feel the difference between 25-60 fps something is very wrong with your eyes and your eye-hand coordination.

    You go ahead and pick your class of choice and I'll pick the same one. You go ahead and play with 20 fps and see everything nice and crispy. I'll turn down everything I have to to stay around 60 fps.

    I will guarantee you that I will win 100% off the time unless I'm really really drunk.

    30 fps is very playable for most games. 60 fps, however, is fluid. Anything above 60 is gravy even if you have a 120herz monitor. I myself can notice instantly if my fps drops below 60. Turn your screen while that happens and you'll see the motion is no longer fluid. @ 30 fps things are perfectly playable, but start feeling a bit ''sluggish'' and it is actually tiresome to your eyes compared to 60. For a game like skyrim 60 fps is very lovely, but if the game looks 4x better when due to higher settings and playing at 30 fps: I'd pick that option. But in a shooter, fluidity -> everything because sluggish feeling that comes with lower fps just makes you feel slow even if it doesn't actually impact most players unless they're veterans in shooters.

    This all has nothing to do with the human reaction time not being fast enough to handle anything about 45 at all. It is about the perceived fluency of the moving image in front of you. I have the game set in such a way that it's 60 fps in barren areas and around 30 in big fights: perfectly playable. But I would do noticably better in larger fights if I could get my fps to stay @ around 60 at all times.

    Hell this entire issue is the ONLY reason that CoD (yes CoD) is run at a low resolution on consoles: to keep a steady 60 fps.
    • Up x 1
  15. Hatamoto

    30 fps i would consider playable if the goal of the game is to crawl on the ground and look for insects .. Is that a meta game i wasnt aware of? After this performance patch i dont want to see fps drop below 50, unless they can make 40 fps feel alot smoother than it does today. Ive just about had it with the sluggish frames below 50 fps in large fights, slowly finding myself picking up those old shooters again just to experience fluid gameplay.
  16. Skurcey

    also low FPS affects recoil a bit
  17. Nagant

    If you are CPU-bound try adding a new line to the .ini file. Find the [Sound] field and insert "SampleRate=44100" (without the quotation marks ofcourse). This will force your game to render sound at a lower level - which still means CD-quality, but not studio quality. You won't notice it.

    Some say it will even prevent some mass-crashings too, as that error may be sound related.

    I play on a relatively strong processor (core i5 2500k) but without a graphics card. I play in 1366*768 resolution, render quality is around 65-80 depending on the situation - I often change it), turned off shadows in ini, set render distance to 1000. But I have medium general quality, but the flora, terrain and model quality is set to low.

    With this setting I often got GPU-bound ofcourse, but crowded areas also meant CPU-bound too. After this new line in the .ini, I cannot tone down my settings enough to get CPU-bound again. Set render quality to 50, lowered everything that I could without restarting the client, and I was still GPU-bound. So I assume that this sound thingy really helps. BTW you can also lower the number of sound channels ingame. Mine is around 40-50? and I still hear enough to fight well. There are no obvious missing sounds.
    • Up x 2
  18. bishopau

    Great idea and sound has been th cause of many a games issue over the years.

    I'm guessing the sounds are adding more work to your CPU especially these days with onboard sound pretty much standard. You've got VOIP going as well as and I had been thinking about switching that off to check the difference out.

    Nice find Nagant.
  19. Nagant

    Thanks mate, but the find is not mine, just read it in another topic. Though some may miss that topic when searching for .ini tweaks so I summed it and brought it here. (But lowering the number of sound channels was an own idea - at least hadn't read it before I lowered them...)
  20. TomoB

    Hmmm, gotta try that.
    One time someone used C4 and killed me+god knows how many guys around me and there was just one massive AAARGHHH sound, then just *click* and complete silence. Apparently there were too many simultaneous death screams and it caused some kind of sound overload, lol.