I can add that texture filtering settings and whatever form of AA you use would be very nice to be able to set. I would like to set high settings but turn off AA while increasing texture filtering. I am an adult give me options. Edit also it would be nice to use the high settings with the texture effects on but not the effect you use for the haze. The haze reminds me of getting out of the pool after a long swim with the chlorine in my eyes. Or coming out of the doctors office after my pupils have been dilated.
You can already turn them off via the ini. file so it's not going help those that are computer literate. One more thing while i'm here can you tell me if Hyper threading on or off will make a difference in this game?
Why have people been asking for no shadows? Partly maybe because they hear shadows impact fps but theres another reason entirely. Im worried itll create the same situation we see in other games. Namely that pros feel they have to play on the lowest settings to gain the advantage of no shadows (or whatever else they can strip out of the game to gain advantage). If SOE really want PS2 to start being shown as an ugly stripped out graphics game on youtube then take away shadows and many will follow blindly, even if they have a perfectly good PC to handle shadows.
At some point we will be playing a game that looks basically like PS1 just to squeeze out every last FPS because it's five rapid-fire shots to kill, and less to the head.
Sorry but it is totally about the FPS hit, it is MASSIVE. There is no advantage to turning them off, as now I can't see your shadow around that corner alerting me to your presence. As for hiding in a shadow, don't make me lol, FPS games are about constant movement. this isn't sniper elite here. What we need is explanations of what the settings in the UserOptions.ini do and what the valid ranges are for the settings in there. Such as a breakdown like so.. ShadowQuality=0 // Range 0 - 3. Affects CPU load UseLod0a=1 // Range 0 - ?. Affects ?
LOL all you like, you obviously dont play competitive FPS, no matter how good the pc they strip the graphics and game down to bare minimum so they see people in places like shadows. Secondly, your strawman sniper elite claim ignores the fact night time creates many big shadows around buildings and structures for troops from all types, to have those removed and everyone bright and clear on a bleached out zero settings game would be a distinct advantage driving pros to play on low just to get that advantage, no matter what their PC power. To not understand this fact is to not understand how (so called) pro gamers have set their games up for decades now. Right now theres not a lot of gain to be had running on low, its swings and roundabouts but itll only take 1 thing (like all shade and shadow removal) and itll become the norm to play on super low if you want to increase your KD ratio.
Let's see, SOE can allow me turn off flora and shadows and collect $15/month from me or they can force shadows and flora on, such that I can no longer play game, and collect $0/month from me. The likelihood of SOE buying me a new computer so that I can play with shadows and flora on is slim to none, so SOE allowing those to be turned off is better for SOE. By all means, if "elite gamerz" out there want to play this game with 3,000 other "elite gamerz" until SOE shuts it down in less than a year, for being a colossal waste of money and a completely inviable business, then by all means encourage forced shadows and flora. Heck, force them to make an i5 3570K @ 4.5GHz with a GTX690 and 16GB RAM the required specs to even load the launcher. You people make me laugh, at you.
Awesome thread thanks. You guys might want to take a look at Anisotropic Filtering too though... Multiple players who've turned it down along with A.A. from Application-Controlled to the Driver-Software controlled minimum (2x?) have reported notable FPS increases even though they were CPU bottlenecked which further suggests that there's some "Feedback" / redundancy going back and forth between it and the GPU on both AntiAliasing & Ani-filtering ...neither of which we can shut off entirely. <-- Also consider the "MultiThread" support to the GFX drivers might be buggy, we've already established it interacts even more directly with the CPU/cache in a very unfriendly fashion in your engine more than all other games apparently Wrong shadows... No online game with PvP allows you to turn Geometry/Structure shadows off. They're only talking about non-VisCulling animated Models, IE: player shadows/etc in which case you can actually put yourself at a DISADVANTAGE if someone is on a catwalk directly above you and the angle of lighting would normally give away their position if their shadow touched the ground around you (have won dozens of 1 on 1's in various games using this "hint" ... the best part being when they yell "OMG!!! How'd you know I was there??!!")
So important. Thanks SOE. You have a beautiful looking game here, in my opinion, but by it's very nature many of us need to squeeze out as much performance as possible.
is there some interdependency in the graphics settings? for example, it appears that you can only get high quality textures and lighting if you set graphics quality to high as well as setting those settings to high. But if these settings do nothing on graphics quality medium, maybe they should be greyed out or something to prevent confusion.
Yes, it will, but I think you will reduce the performance.(As I don't has a desktop to try it, I can't say 100% sure) First, I need my old picture. http://puu.sh/21aSI You can see, after every Frame is done by the GPU, we has at least 4 thread is processing the data Planetside 2 has 2+ threads, PhysX has 2 threads(yes, this is what they call as multi-threads), and other threads like sound thread. From the 10ms, you can know they will process finish in 0.5-1ms, after that, there is only the heavy main thread(that is the devs need to decrease the work/offload other works to other threads) and many small work like sound thread(process like 0.1ms). So, did it increase the FPS after you disable Hyper threads? I will say nope, as many people are using computer as multi-task, you will increase the chance to switch the PlanetSide2 main thread away and doing other works, then switch back. When the thread-switching happen, you will loss the L1 L2 cache, and the cache will drop to L3 cache, or Ram. It is bad than only reduce the L2 L3 cache to using the Hyper thread and process other light process.
Ive been playing with no shadows for some time now anyway. What I really need to see is an increase in FPS in huge battles. It dips to 20fps and I feel that is nearly unplayable. My GPU can handle things fine; heck my kids' 9800 Gt 1GB cards can handle the game fine.
Its still part of FXAA. I use a program called RadeonPro, which for ATI users, is the only way you can turn FXAA off, with out editing the game files to get banned . In using this option it turns off EdgeAA, so I can then turn on SMAA which is better. Which also lets me set the quality of eitehr or both settings. As for the shadows part, it turns off player shadows, and reduces all other shadows to real crappy looking.
Well I know Nvidia has a button to turn off FXAA, in there CC, unlike ATI, not sure if it turns EdgeAA off as well though, like RadeonPro does.
