My wife is beta-testing both Vanguard and Lord of the Rings Online.
LOTRO runs as smooth as a baby's ass, except in extremely high traffic areas. VANGUARD runs around 1 frame a second with 5 second lock-ups. Looking at the ground does not help. All the tweaks listed above did not help. As is, the game is UNplayable.
EQ2 with much of the detail on runs mostly good on her system.
I smell a router issue. Maybe a particular port needs to be dedicated. So far, I haven't read S*i7 about port forwarding for Vanguard. Going to try fiddling with port ranges...
Games: WAR, LotRO, AO, GW, EQ, EQ2, AC, AC2, Vanguard, CoH, EVE, HZs, SO, MxO, SWG, DAoC, WoW, WWIIOL --------------------------------------
There's a world behind the world, Professor Robinson. Lie once, cheat twice and everything becomes clear. Do not mistake my deception for a character flaw. It is philosophical choice, a profound understanding of the universe. It is a way of life. - Doctor Smith
Yep, most of her problem is a port range issue. I plugged her in directly and she ran about as smooth as EQ2, and I even turned up her graphics to mid-range.
However, the game stuttered and froze on occasion when turning to draw. I noticed the lockups when the game hammered the hard drive. Not unplayable, though.
Games: WAR, LotRO, AO, GW, EQ, EQ2, AC, AC2, Vanguard, CoH, EVE, HZs, SO, MxO, SWG, DAoC, WoW, WWIIOL --------------------------------------
There's a world behind the world, Professor Robinson. Lie once, cheat twice and everything becomes clear. Do not mistake my deception for a character flaw. It is philosophical choice, a profound understanding of the universe. It is a way of life. - Doctor Smith
Hey everyone. I just started BETA Testing Vanguard Last night. When i went on their it was rly laggy, so i had to put it down to highest performence. After about 10 mins of game play i went into my quest log, and i started to scroll down my quest description and all of the wirtting went black and started to smudge over so i could not read a thing. I have been having moe of these now, like when i am changing the settings. Its rly annoying and werid. I wondering if anyone new what was going on? Just in case u need to know, why PC specs are: 2.4Ghz AMD 64 3800 1GB RAM G-Force 7300 512MB//Clock speed. 1.3Ghz Plz help, i rly wanna play vanguard.
Maybe this is related to a problem I've noticed a lot and reported a lot on. Assuming you are running full-screen, try hitting the Windows key or alt-tab to another program. This should minimize VGClient. Then, double-click VGClient to get it back up. For me, this worked the one or two times I tried it. My problem is that a pop-up dialog fails to display properly. It causes the screen to flash as it evidently tries to take it over, and locks out some keys in the main window. In some of the flashes, I see larger-than-appropriate text from the dialog box, like the dialog box is coming up in full-screen mode.
Originally posted by Poldano Originally posted by shaunpat90 Hey everyone. I just started BETA Testing Vanguard Last night. When i went on their it was rly laggy, so i had to put it down to highest performence. After about 10 mins of game play i went into my quest log, and i started to scroll down my quest description and all of the wirtting went black and started to smudge over so i could not read a thing. I have been having moe of these now, like when i am changing the settings. Its rly annoying and werid. I wondering if anyone new what was going on? Just in case u need to know, why PC specs are: 2.4Ghz AMD 64 3800 1GB RAM G-Force 7300 512MB//Clock speed. 1.3Ghz Plz help, i rly wanna play vanguard.
Maybe this is related to a problem I've noticed a lot and reported a lot on. Assuming you are running full-screen, try hitting the Windows key or alt-tab to another program. This should minimize VGClient. Then, double-click VGClient to get it back up. For me, this worked the one or two times I tried it. My problem is that a pop-up dialog fails to display properly. It causes the screen to flash as it evidently tries to take it over, and locks out some keys in the main window. In some of the flashes, I see larger-than-appropriate text from the dialog box, like the dialog box is coming up in full-screen mode.
Try using the /flush command.
“Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.”
―
William S. Burroughs
Thanks Som, I'm going to try some of these as well.
Word of ADVICE to those of you who are not techies, make a backup copy of your .ini first before changing it. That way if something goes horribly wrong, you can restore it.
Copy the .ini and paste it somewhere else where you can find it again. Or when you open it with Notepad, do Save As and change the name to VGCLIENT.oldini, then close it and reopen the original for tweaking. If something goes wrong, you can always save your copy back on top of the tweaked version.
Tweaking has always been important for me. I have that Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein competition mentality. On these games, I've always been playing with a FrameRate lock at 120FPS (If you want to compete, you need that). before you say anything, yes 29.5 frames per second is the maximum an eye can see but that doesn't mean you do not feel it when it goes beyond. An in-game bullet tracer that travels at around 500 meters per second will not always display under 76 frames per second. While this rule is not really usefull in an MMO... low FPS always bothered me... It's really a habit thing (TWEAK EVERYTHING!!!). On FPS games, I do not care about the graphics as long as I have a perfect gameplay but on MMOs, I will always try to have a balance between graphics and gameplay.
So here's my own steps in order to tweak your game experience with an ATI card. I am not an expert GFX guy btw, i'm just a gamer :P
I hope it helps (If not, sorry... at least I tried )
IN-GAME TWEAKS
Well before playing around the INI file, I tried many different combinations of settings. I can't really say what you should do since it's really based on your preference but if you wish a guideline, here's my steps...
In your settings, make sure you are at the lowest resolution possible and ensure that your settings are set to balance. Run around big areas, towns and open fields... look at the sky and keep an eye on your HD loading light and your gameplay. If it really feels too choppy start lowering the settings that you really couldn't care less. I really couldn't care less about the super cute clouds but I really wanted the water to at least not look like it does on lower settings. I lowered pretty much everything by 10% and kept the shadows at around 5%. If I can at least have a small shadow under my character then all is good, The shadow simply makes a point of contact on the ground for you character. Without any shadows, you have will have the impression tha your char is floating around. (At least in my own little mind)
So after spending an hour tweaking my graphics, I managed to get stable 15 FPS no matter where I was. (give or take... inside a house my FPS would jump 50-60FPS)
15 FPS is playable but do you really want 15FPS in a PVP situation or a raid? 15 FPS also means that if ever you visit a high detailed area, your game will transform into a beautifull slide show.
So this is where you jump out of the game and start tweaking your computer!
This is my machine.
AMD64 3500+ - 2.2GHZ 3D NOW
3 GO PC3200 DDR Ramz
ATI X1600 Pro 512 DDR Crossfire PCI-E
HD 16000RPM (not sure of the brand)
Motherboard: Nforce something
Because my machine has alot of Ram, I have the chance to just test graphics without the HD or anything else slowing my computer down. If the gameplay actually slows down, it's really the fault of my card then.
CATALYST TWEAKS
The first thing I did was making sure that I had the minimum running on my machine. Anything that is beyond your firewall, Anti-virus, MSN/X-fire and ventrilo is basicaly not needed really. However, for ATI users, you should use: Cataclyst
The ATI X1600 PRO 512 DDR Crossfire is a cheap and stable. Don't be fooled by the rams, it's really not that amazing... However, it's stable and that's what I like about it. Still, no matter what card you use, you should be able to pull out more juice with these simple tweaks. Please take note that I am not responsible if my tweaks make your game look like crap or you encounter any issues. All the tweaks I've used are within the scope of Catalyst.
So you open Catalyst and at first it looks like a crappy control center but wait!!! If you click on view, you will find an option to enable the advance mode. Fromt that point, you should be able to see more options available inside the left window of your control center. If you don't then I think in prefence you can enable another advance option.
The only thing you really want to tweak is the 3D graphics capabilities of the card so don't go mess around with your AVIVO video settings or other possible options.
Here's my tweaks:
Standard settings: Performance
Won't really change the GFX quality but you will gain some speed. Basically, Performance settings will kinda transform your card into an NVIDIA card.
Anti-Aliasing: "Let the application decide"
If can you don't mind the ruff edges and little pixels then just leave it as it is.
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: Disable
Hurray, now I'll really have more pixels but hey come on, we used to think that the original Nintendo graphics were unbeatable.
Anisotropic Filtering: 4X
Well this is up to you but the more you let your GFX work on that, the slower your game gets. Mine is at 4X because as I said before, I want speed and quality.
Catalyst AI: I didn't touch it
I have no idea what it does... On/Off doesn't seem to do much.
Minimap Detail level: Performance
I didn't see a reason to choose quality hehe.
API specific: Default for now
I am still playing around with that, i'll give more details later on.
So with these simple tweaks, I now have a very stable 25 FPS. What I did is pretty obvious but I know that some people here won't feel comfortable when they play with the control center.
If you don't see an improvement then you might want to check your actual OS. Tweaking Windows XP is important too. If anyone needs a small guide on how to get more juice out of Windows, just let me know.
My goal is to stick with the Stock configuration as much as possible. If this was an FPS then I would have used console commands to tweak my game and computer but since it's not, I might as well try to get the best out of the easy to use tools! I'll probably play with the INI files later on but for now.. bah! I'm a happy guy!
For now, my main opinion is Sigil went stupid when making this game. making a third generation MMO doesn't mean making a game that requires the ultimate gaming machine. They should have made the game a bit lighter on machines, I actually think this game is going to have a hard time just because of their computer requirements. Sigil needs to optimize their engine a bit because it's rather ridiculous, most of my guildies won't even play Vanguard because of the GFX hog. Think about it, my best friend can run Quake 4 at full details without any problems but she has a hard time playing Vanguard. Yes the scale is different...
Anyway, time to go play! If you have any comments or you wish to add some additional information, please let me know. Like I said, i'm not a GFX expert
Not really a graphics improving tweak or anything, but I found that when I disabled the game's audio it really really smoothed out. Like night and day for me. I have an older computer AMD3200, GeForce6800GT, 1 gb mem (2gb in mail), and like a 433mhz motherboard (dont remember the name). Anyways, after disabling the audio, i was able to turn up the far clip plane and a few other options and have the game run very smoothly. MMO Audio is usually pretty needless, especially if you listen to music. Hope this helps someone.
Not really a graphics improving tweak or anything, but I found that when I disabled the game's audio it really really smoothed out. Like night and day for me. I have an older computer AMD3200, GeForce6800GT, 1 gb mem (2gb in mail), and like a 433mhz motherboard (dont remember the name). Anyways, after disabling the audio, i was able to turn up the far clip plane and a few other options and have the game run very smoothly. MMO Audio is usually pretty needless, especially if you listen to music. Hope this helps someone.
A good alternative is to change some software to hardware if you have a card. Onboard cards are memory hogs at time
Not really a graphics improving tweak or anything, but I found that when I disabled the game's audio it really really smoothed out. Like night and day for me. I have an older computer AMD3200, GeForce6800GT, 1 gb mem (2gb in mail), and like a 433mhz motherboard (dont remember the name). Anyways, after disabling the audio, i was able to turn up the far clip plane and a few other options and have the game run very smoothly. MMO Audio is usually pretty needless, especially if you listen to music. Hope this helps someone.
A good alternative is to change some software to hardware if you have a card. Onboard cards are memory hogs at time
I don't use onboard audio, i have some kind of creative soundblaster standard deal. Maybe youre talking about something else I could put in? I'd be interested in that... I get sick of hearing the same combat music in a game anyways
I caught someone's post where they said Vanguard doesn't support dual-core CPUs, but will after launch. Is this true?
If so, it might explain why I was getting such bad performance compared to my RL friend who has a crappier computer than me. I followed a lot of these tweaks, but the game still didn't run all that well. Even when I turned down a bunch of the graphics setings.
My specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
RAM: Mushkin 2GB XP4000 DDR SDRAM
Harddrive: Western Digital 320GB 16MB cache SATA II
Video Card: ATI Radeon X1900XT 512MB
Sound: On board nForce (crappy, I know)
If the game eventually does support dual cores, I might give it another shot. But that'll only be after they fix some of other things first.
Hey everyone. I just started BETA Testing Vanguard Last night. When i went on their it was rly laggy, so i had to put it down to highest performence. After about 10 mins of game play i went into my quest log, and i started to scroll down my quest description and all of the wirtting went black and started to smudge over so i could not read a thing. I have been having moe of these now, like when i am changing the settings. Its rly annoying and werid. I wondering if anyone new what was going on? Just in case u need to know, why PC specs are: 2.4Ghz AMD 64 3800 1GB RAM G-Force 7300 512MB//Clock speed. 1.3Ghz Plz help, i rly wanna play vanguard.
Ok, all the responses to your issue are temporary work arounds. The real problem is your Nvidia drivers. You have to roll back to the older drivers, I don't remember the exact number (I'm at work). It's the one that was released in March of 06 I think. I had the same problem and found a post on Vanguard's site that mentioned it, rolled back and everything's running fine now. I just hope they fix the issue soon, I have an 8800gts on the way from Newegg and I'd like to be able to use the latest drivers with it.
My system currently is running a E6300 Core 2 Duo 1.86
1gb Kingston 533mhz Ram
MSI 6200TC vid card
Viewsonic 22' Widescreen LCD
The game is playable for me on High and Highest Performance, a bit laggy in Balanced. I'm surprised it runs as well as it does with ony a gig of ram and a TC budget card. With the 8800 and another 2gb of ram, it should run perfectly.
Can someone else try this and let me know the results? It shot my FPS through the roof, and I didnt notice and difference in graphics (I could even get better results by being able to turn up the settings now.)
DisableShaderModel3=True
DisableHighDetailShaders=True
I was a little leary about changing these, but when it increased my FPS tremendously, I had to test some more.
I'm just gonna throw something else out there that helped me out quite a bit:
Last week i upgraded both my hard drive and my sound card. Changed from:
- Creative SB Audigy2
- WD Caviar 160GB 7200RPM 8MB cache HD
to
- Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Series
- WD Raptor 150GB 10k RPM 16MB cache HD
I know that upgrading these parts is never high on anyone's list when it comes to MMOs, but i'll be damed if these two upgrades didnt net me at least 20-30% more performance. Hitching is noticably smoother. It still hitches, but instead of the full 1-2 second pause, it's a slight stutter now. FPS is up ~20% in all areas.
Of course i'm not throwing this up here to brag or anything. The point is that if you have a decent processor/vid card/amount of memory and are still running things poorly, there are other upgrades that can be made that will net you a decent amount of performance. The total of these two upgrades was ~$300 and made my experience much smoother all around. It was well worth it IMHO.
A) FIRST, be sure to defragment after install. Seriously, this has a HUGE impact on the game's performance.
Possibly consider turning off your AV program and/or Firewall. I know you hate the idea of it but try it, to see how much load it's taking.
C) Generally try to eliminate any processes you don't need at boot or via taskmanager. Loads of programs clutter your cpu cycles & memory with junk utilities you only need once in a blue moon. Almost everything you've ever installed probably put some junk utility to ensure you get the latest autodownloaded version of Postage Stamp Collecting Deluxe v8.17.b automatically the second it was released to the web - if ytou haven't cleaned house recently, taskmanager processes tab, and going to the run area of start and doing msconfig.exe are good places to start.
D) In the in-game settings, change sound settings to "Hardware"
E) Use a lower resolution.(I use the lowest widescreen res.)
F) In the in-game settings, turn off HDR
G) NVidia 6xxx series users, Tru using the older "71" series drivers.
H) ATI users with AMD proc's tend to be having the most problems aside from the Nvidia 6xxx users. I've been told to try the catylist 6.8 drivers.
I) Also for ATI peeps, Rumor has it that the Omega drivers (www.omegadrivers.net) give some folks SIGNIFICANT increases in quality and speed. UPDATE!!! His test shows only a ~1 FPS gain and what's worse is that the Omega drivers don't support OC'ing for the 1300+ series of cards. DOUBLE worse is that reverting back to the Catalyst 6.8 drivers no longer allow ATI tool to OC his ATI 1300pro and deleted his openGL drivers which the ATI installer didn't like re-installing (I know, weak card. Give it a rest already)
I) Someone previously suggested starting the client and then Alt+Tabbing to desktop, bringing up the Task Manager, Going to processes, selecting the VGClient.exe file and setting the priority to high. might work for some - wasn't stable for me though.
J) TURN OFF Hardware Occulsion while in the field and TURN IT BACK ON in town. The FPS gain in the field (for me) is close to 10!!!
Open it using notepad and make the following changes:
AnisotropicFiltering=off (which supposedly works for NVidia folks VERY well) Side Note: ALSO go into your card's propertied and change this there as well
UseJoystick=False (I don't know why but this did give me an extra 3-5 FPS)
UsePrecaching=True (For NVidia folks and some ATI folks, this is the holy grail)
UseTrilinear=False (For some folks this was an incredible boost)
UseCubemaps=False (I only noticed an ugly load screen, the game still looks fine to me)
ReduceMouseLag=False (this has worked for a few folks as well)
UseTripleBuffering=True (This is a tricky one, some people work better with it and Vsync off some with it on, it will produce a little staggering of the image doing fast pans if off, as it won't draw one entire top to bottom frame at one go, however that was worth the FPS gain on my system)or UseTripleBuffering=False
UseVSync=True (see the above explanation, either vsync true & tripleB true or both false) or UseVSync=False
UseSound=False (You lose the sound but can pick up nearly 5-10 FPS!!!)
Side note: instead of turning sound off you CAN set LowQualitySound=True instead!
GlobalHardwareSkinning=True (gave me a noticable bump 2-5FPS-ish)
TextureDetailWorld=5 (or 6, this controls the texture details, raising this to 5-7ish can save you a significant amount of memory and reduce stuttering. This can range from 0-7, 0 being the most detailed textures to 7 being lowest texture detail)
RenderQuality=5 (Setting this to 5 sets the game into "very high" mode but coupled with a higher TextureDetailWorld setting, it will give you the special effects of very high with the memory requirements/stuttering of a low or medium settings)
(NOTE: Changing the in-game drop-down graphics settings to Medium or High (or whatever you change it to) changes BOTH RenderQuality and TextureDetailWorld to their default settings. The trick is to adjust all the in-game settings FIRST, THEN mess with the .ini settings for these two and don't flip between low/med at all in-game since that would reset this change)
I'm sorry, but turning off the volumetric clouds is a piss poor way to increase your FPS and one of most grandure reducing things you could do.
The skies look amazing, until you turn off the clouds, then it looks like any other unreal2 skybox out there.
If your FPS suck then deal with it and stop whining. You realize there are prectically 14 gigs just of textures. The reason it runs so slow is that every, EVERY, surface has a shader and or alpha channel, and they are twice if not 4 times larger than texture maps in any other MMO out there.
Tweeaking settings will only help so much. Though the color issue is easy to fix. So for now I'll just address the Gamma, Brightness, and Contrast settings. Respectively I set these to:
tonnes of empty space on the opperating drive, and on the install drive, latest drivers yada yada....
I'm not saying you can't sqeeze(sp) any more FPS out of the game with carefull finessing of the settings. I have got it to a point where I'm happy. In some major cities your FPS will drop to 8-14, but outdoors it's usually around 30-45. Not spectacular but playable. I have almost all the settings maxed(or near max), except a few that become buggy after 80%(shader). Draw distance at default already shows the entire viewable map, before occlussion from zone fog(not draw distance related) blocks your view.
Now I'm not sure exactly sure how much testing you did. Obviously you have done some. My experience has been that no matter how much you finagle with the settings, you will always drop FPS dramatically in heavily populated and or polygon heavy areas. Both with the settings maxed and at minimal the FPS in these situations, you will never top 20fps. So really you're not removing any of the jitters even at low settings. Anything below 24 FPS tends to make your eyes jump. Though admittedly 20 is better than 8. Go to the Tanvu crafting area and see what I mean.
What I'm saying is: If you don't have a system to run this game at its intended beauty, then why even play it? Oblivion isn't much fun at reduced settings, and this isn't either.
When you have to reduce the settings to a point where it looks worse than anyother game(third gen MMO) on the market, what have you accomplished besides proving that you could?
I've been playing Vanguard since pre-release, and it has moments where it is the most beautiful game ever rendered. However I cancelled my subsciption yesterday. There simply is nothing new about this game.
I hope funcom pulls the magic rabbit out of its hat with Age of Conan. That looks like it may actually break a few design molds.
Curious does reducing your resolution to 800 x 600 (I know you'd have to make your desktop match) work along with changing settings around help FPS on lower end machines? Does that change have to be made via the .ini file or can that be done in game?
Curious does reducing your resolution to 800 x 600 (I know you'd have to make your desktop match) work along with changing settings around help FPS on lower end machines? Does that change have to be made via the .ini file or can that be done in game?
Yes it does help with older machines and you have to do it in the ini file, because the lowest resolution is 1024 x 768 through the ingame settings.
This does quite a bit to enhance performance and prevent 'hitching' and delays when loading chunks
The textures and meshes in your Vanguard folder are uncompressed, this means your HD has to do far more reads than it should. If you use NTFS compression, these will load from the disk faster. You might think that compression would reduce performance but if you think about it the HD is the slowest component in your system and the quicker it can lift files from it the better. There is also little CPU usage from decompressing on the fly.
To enable compression:
Firstly, the volume that your Vanguard folder is on has to formatted with NTFS (duh).
In your vanguardassets folder, right click on the Textures folder, click properties, click advanced and check 'Compress contents to save disk space'. Click OK, then Apply and let it do its thing. Repeat for the Maps and Meshes folders. There are other folders that look like they would compress quite nicely but I haven't tried them.
And the bonus prize for doing this is your Vanguard folder will now be under 10GB!
I feel it's a bit ridiculous you have to make the game look bland without being able to enjoy the view just to be able to get good performance out of it.
Sigil really layed an egg making this game so hard on computers. I also feel there are many people who didn't buy VG due to they not having the computers to play this game. While others stayed away because of all the negative complaints regarding game performance. Sigil lost out on many more customers because of this. Not to mention all the ones who've quit due to the horrible lag, crashes and overall game performance after they tried VG.
I fortunately am not having the huge problems with the game anymore.
The game is very CPU hungry and after clocking my 4400 X2 to 2.41GHz (4800 X2) I received a performance boost.
I then used my Asus Smart Doctor to enable hyperdrive for CPU usage, which again increased ingame performance.
Finally I downloaded an AMD Dual Core Optimiser via http://www.snipurl.com/jf28 which once again increased performance.
I am now quite happily running the game at 1600x1200 with viewing distance maxed, clouds, shadows etc at ave 30fps.
The ingame loading of new areas is a hard drive issue. If you want to minimise this invest in some fast hardrives (10,000rpm) and set up a raid 0 array.
Yes, there was some initial performance issues that were down to poor coding, but these are over with now. If you want to play the game that badly make the necessary upgrades / overclocks / utility tweaks for it to be so.
Problem. When I attempt to save the changes to the VGClient.ini file, it will not let me save it. Is there any advice anyone can give me? Thank you. I first receive the message "cannoit find file or path." Then it will just not let me make the changes. Any tips would help. Thank you!
Comments
LOTRO runs as smooth as a baby's ass, except in extremely high traffic areas. VANGUARD runs around 1 frame a second with 5 second lock-ups. Looking at the ground does not help. All the tweaks listed above did not help. As is, the game is UNplayable.
EQ2 with much of the detail on runs mostly good on her system.
I smell a router issue. Maybe a particular port needs to be dedicated. So far, I haven't read S*i7 about port forwarding for Vanguard. Going to try fiddling with port ranges...
Games:
WAR, LotRO, AO, GW, EQ, EQ2, AC, AC2, Vanguard, CoH, EVE, HZs, SO, MxO, SWG, DAoC, WoW, WWIIOL
--------------------------------------
There's a world behind the world, Professor Robinson. Lie once, cheat twice and everything becomes clear. Do not mistake my deception for a character flaw. It is philosophical choice, a profound understanding of the universe. It is a way of life. - Doctor Smith
However, the game stuttered and froze on occasion when turning to draw. I noticed the lockups when the game hammered the hard drive. Not unplayable, though.
Games:
WAR, LotRO, AO, GW, EQ, EQ2, AC, AC2, Vanguard, CoH, EVE, HZs, SO, MxO, SWG, DAoC, WoW, WWIIOL
--------------------------------------
There's a world behind the world, Professor Robinson. Lie once, cheat twice and everything becomes clear. Do not mistake my deception for a character flaw. It is philosophical choice, a profound understanding of the universe. It is a way of life. - Doctor Smith
Dang, I meant to quote...
Maybe this is related to a problem I've noticed a lot and reported a lot on. Assuming you are running full-screen, try hitting the Windows key or alt-tab to another program. This should minimize VGClient. Then, double-click VGClient to get it back up. For me, this worked the one or two times I tried it. My problem is that a pop-up dialog fails to display properly. It causes the screen to flash as it evidently tries to take it over, and locks out some keys in the main window. In some of the flashes, I see larger-than-appropriate text from the dialog box, like the dialog box is coming up in full-screen mode.
Try using the /flush command.
“Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.”
― William S. Burroughs
Thanks Som, I'm going to try some of these as well.
Word of ADVICE to those of you who are not techies, make a backup copy of your .ini first before changing it. That way if something goes horribly wrong, you can restore it.
Copy the .ini and paste it somewhere else where you can find it again. Or when you open it with Notepad, do Save As and change the name to VGCLIENT.oldini, then close it and reopen the original for tweaking. If something goes wrong, you can always save your copy back on top of the tweaked version.
Heya!
Tweaking has always been important for me. I have that Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein competition mentality. On these games, I've always been playing with a FrameRate lock at 120FPS (If you want to compete, you need that). before you say anything, yes 29.5 frames per second is the maximum an eye can see but that doesn't mean you do not feel it when it goes beyond. An in-game bullet tracer that travels at around 500 meters per second will not always display under 76 frames per second. While this rule is not really usefull in an MMO... low FPS always bothered me... It's really a habit thing (TWEAK EVERYTHING!!!). On FPS games, I do not care about the graphics as long as I have a perfect gameplay but on MMOs, I will always try to have a balance between graphics and gameplay.
So here's my own steps in order to tweak your game experience with an ATI card. I am not an expert GFX guy btw, i'm just a gamer :P
I hope it helps
- IN-GAME TWEAKS
Well before playing around the INI file, I tried many different combinations of settings. I can't really say what you should do since it's really based on your preference but if you wish a guideline, here's my steps...In your settings, make sure you are at the lowest resolution possible and ensure that your settings are set to balance. Run around big areas, towns and open fields... look at the sky and keep an eye on your HD loading light and your gameplay. If it really feels too choppy start lowering the settings that you really couldn't care less. I really couldn't care less about the super cute clouds but I really wanted the water to at least not look like it does on lower settings. I lowered pretty much everything by 10% and kept the shadows at around 5%. If I can at least have a small shadow under my character then all is good, The shadow simply makes a point of contact on the ground for you character. Without any shadows, you have will have the impression tha your char is floating around. (At least in my own little mind)
So after spending an hour tweaking my graphics, I managed to get stable 15 FPS no matter where I was. (give or take... inside a house my FPS would jump 50-60FPS)
15 FPS is playable but do you really want 15FPS in a PVP situation or a raid? 15 FPS also means that if ever you visit a high detailed area, your game will transform into a beautifull slide show.
So this is where you jump out of the game and start tweaking your computer!
This is my machine.
- AMD64 3500+ - 2.2GHZ 3D NOW
- 3 GO PC3200 DDR Ramz
- ATI X1600 Pro 512 DDR Crossfire PCI-E
- HD 16000RPM (not sure of the brand)
- Motherboard: Nforce something
Because my machine has alot of Ram, I have the chance to just test graphics without the HD or anything else slowing my computer down. If the gameplay actually slows down, it's really the fault of my card then.The first thing I did was making sure that I had the minimum running on my machine. Anything that is beyond your firewall, Anti-virus, MSN/X-fire and ventrilo is basicaly not needed really. However, for ATI users, you should use: Cataclyst
The ATI X1600 PRO 512 DDR Crossfire is a cheap and stable. Don't be fooled by the rams, it's really not that amazing... However, it's stable and that's what I like about it. Still, no matter what card you use, you should be able to pull out more juice with these simple tweaks. Please take note that I am not responsible if my tweaks make your game look like crap or you encounter any issues. All the tweaks I've used are within the scope of Catalyst.
So you open Catalyst and at first it looks like a crappy control center but wait!!! If you click on view, you will find an option to enable the advance mode. Fromt that point, you should be able to see more options available inside the left window of your control center. If you don't then I think in prefence you can enable another advance option.
The only thing you really want to tweak is the 3D graphics capabilities of the card so don't go mess around with your AVIVO video settings or other possible options.
Here's my tweaks:
Standard settings: Performance
Won't really change the GFX quality but you will gain some speed. Basically, Performance settings will kinda transform your card into an NVIDIA card.
Anti-Aliasing: "Let the application decide"
If can you don't mind the ruff edges and little pixels then just leave it as it is.
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: Disable
Hurray, now I'll really have more pixels but hey come on, we used to think that the original Nintendo graphics were unbeatable.
Anisotropic Filtering: 4X
Well this is up to you but the more you let your GFX work on that, the slower your game gets. Mine is at 4X because as I said before, I want speed and quality.
Catalyst AI: I didn't touch it
I have no idea what it does... On/Off doesn't seem to do much.
Minimap Detail level: Performance
I didn't see a reason to choose quality hehe.
API specific: Default for now
I am still playing around with that, i'll give more details later on.
So with these simple tweaks, I now have a very stable 25 FPS. What I did is pretty obvious but I know that some people here won't feel comfortable when they play with the control center.
If you don't see an improvement then you might want to check your actual OS. Tweaking Windows XP is important too. If anyone needs a small guide on how to get more juice out of Windows, just let me know.
My goal is to stick with the Stock configuration as much as possible. If this was an FPS then I would have used console commands to tweak my game and computer but since it's not, I might as well try to get the best out of the easy to use tools! I'll probably play with the INI files later on but for now.. bah! I'm a happy guy!
For now, my main opinion is Sigil went stupid when making this game. making a third generation MMO doesn't mean making a game that requires the ultimate gaming machine. They should have made the game a bit lighter on machines, I actually think this game is going to have a hard time just because of their computer requirements. Sigil needs to optimize their engine a bit because it's rather ridiculous, most of my guildies won't even play Vanguard because of the GFX hog. Think about it, my best friend can run Quake 4 at full details without any problems but she has a hard time playing Vanguard. Yes the scale is different...
Anyway, time to go play! If you have any comments or you wish to add some additional information, please let me know. Like I said, i'm not a GFX expert
good night
I don't use onboard audio, i have some kind of creative soundblaster standard deal. Maybe youre talking about something else I could put in? I'd be interested in that... I get sick of hearing the same combat music in a game anyways
If so, it might explain why I was getting such bad performance compared to my RL friend who has a crappier computer than me. I followed a lot of these tweaks, but the game still didn't run all that well. Even when I turned down a bunch of the graphics setings.
My specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
RAM: Mushkin 2GB XP4000 DDR SDRAM
Harddrive: Western Digital 320GB 16MB cache SATA II
Video Card: ATI Radeon X1900XT 512MB
Sound: On board nForce (crappy, I know)
If the game eventually does support dual cores, I might give it another shot. But that'll only be after they fix some of other things first.
__________________________________
Playing - Waiting on GW2
Formerly played - Aion, CO, CoX, EVE, GW1, LotRO, RIFT, Ryzom, SWG, SWTOR, WAR, WoW
Trialed - AA, DDO, EQ2, L2, MxO, RYL, TERA, VSoH
Beta'd - HGL, GW2, PotBS, SWTOR, TCoS, TR
Anticipating - GW2, PS2
Ok, all the responses to your issue are temporary work arounds. The real problem is your Nvidia drivers. You have to roll back to the older drivers, I don't remember the exact number (I'm at work). It's the one that was released in March of 06 I think. I had the same problem and found a post on Vanguard's site that mentioned it, rolled back and everything's running fine now. I just hope they fix the issue soon, I have an 8800gts on the way from Newegg and I'd like to be able to use the latest drivers with it.
My system currently is running a E6300 Core 2 Duo 1.86
1gb Kingston 533mhz Ram
MSI 6200TC vid card
Viewsonic 22' Widescreen LCD
The game is playable for me on High and Highest Performance, a bit laggy in Balanced. I'm surprised it runs as well as it does with ony a gig of ram and a TC budget card. With the 8800 and another 2gb of ram, it should run perfectly.
DisableShaderModel3=True
DisableHighDetailShaders=True
I was a little leary about changing these, but when it increased my FPS tremendously, I had to test some more.
AMD 3500+ Winchester
Leadtek 6800GT 256 PCIe
2G DDR 333MHz RAM
I'm just gonna throw something else out there that helped me out quite a bit:
Last week i upgraded both my hard drive and my sound card. Changed from:
- Creative SB Audigy2
- WD Caviar 160GB 7200RPM 8MB cache HD
to
- Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Series
- WD Raptor 150GB 10k RPM 16MB cache HD
I know that upgrading these parts is never high on anyone's list when it comes to MMOs, but i'll be damed if these two upgrades didnt net me at least 20-30% more performance. Hitching is noticably smoother. It still hitches, but instead of the full 1-2 second pause, it's a slight stutter now. FPS is up ~20% in all areas.
Of course i'm not throwing this up here to brag or anything. The point is that if you have a decent processor/vid card/amount of memory and are still running things poorly, there are other upgrades that can be made that will net you a decent amount of performance. The total of these two upgrades was ~$300 and made my experience much smoother all around. It was well worth it IMHO.
#1 GENERAL Tweaks
A) FIRST, be sure to defragment after install. Seriously, this has a HUGE impact on the game's performance.
C) Generally try to eliminate any processes you don't need at boot or via taskmanager. Loads of programs clutter your cpu cycles & memory with junk utilities you only need once in a blue moon. Almost everything you've ever installed probably put some junk utility to ensure you get the latest autodownloaded version of Postage Stamp Collecting Deluxe v8.17.b automatically the second it was released to the web - if ytou haven't cleaned house recently, taskmanager processes tab, and going to the run area of start and doing msconfig.exe are good places to start.
D) In the in-game settings, change sound settings to "Hardware"
E) Use a lower resolution.(I use the lowest widescreen res.)
F) In the in-game settings, turn off HDR
G) NVidia 6xxx series users, Tru using the older "71" series drivers.
H) ATI users with AMD proc's tend to be having the most problems aside from the Nvidia 6xxx users. I've been told to try the catylist 6.8 drivers.
I) Also for ATI peeps, Rumor has it that the Omega drivers (www.omegadrivers.net) give some folks SIGNIFICANT increases in quality and speed. UPDATE!!! His test shows only a ~1 FPS gain and what's worse is that the Omega drivers don't support OC'ing for the 1300+ series of cards. DOUBLE worse is that reverting back to the Catalyst 6.8 drivers no longer allow ATI tool to OC his ATI 1300pro and deleted his openGL drivers which the ATI installer didn't like re-installing (I know, weak card. Give it a rest already)
I) Someone previously suggested starting the client and then Alt+Tabbing to desktop, bringing up the Task Manager, Going to processes, selecting the VGClient.exe file and setting the priority to high. might work for some - wasn't stable for me though.
J) TURN OFF Hardware Occulsion while in the field and TURN IT BACK ON in town. The FPS gain in the field (for me) is close to 10!!!
#2 VGCLIENT.INI Tweaks
go to:
[install drive]:ProgramFilesSonyVanguardinvgclient.ini
Open it using notepad and make the following changes:
AnisotropicFiltering=off (which supposedly works for NVidia folks VERY well) Side Note: ALSO go into your card's propertied and change this there as well
UseJoystick=False (I don't know why but this did give me an extra 3-5 FPS)
UsePrecaching=True (For NVidia folks and some ATI folks, this is the holy grail)
UseTrilinear=False (For some folks this was an incredible boost)
UseCubemaps=False (I only noticed an ugly load screen, the game still looks fine to me)
ReduceMouseLag=False (this has worked for a few folks as well)
UseTripleBuffering=True (This is a tricky one, some people work better with it and Vsync off some with it on, it will produce a little staggering of the image doing fast pans if off, as it won't draw one entire top to bottom frame at one go, however that was worth the FPS gain on my system) or UseTripleBuffering=False
UseVSync=True (see the above explanation, either vsync true & tripleB true or both false) or UseVSync=False
UseSound=False (You lose the sound but can pick up nearly 5-10 FPS!!!)
Side note: instead of turning sound off you CAN set LowQualitySound=True instead!
GlobalHardwareSkinning=True (gave me a noticable bump 2-5FPS-ish)
TextureDetailWorld=5 (or 6, this controls the texture details, raising this to 5-7ish can save you a significant amount of memory and reduce stuttering. This can range from 0-7, 0 being the most detailed textures to 7 being lowest texture detail)
RenderQuality=5 (Setting this to 5 sets the game into "very high" mode but coupled with a higher TextureDetailWorld setting, it will give you the special effects of very high with the memory requirements/stuttering of a low or medium settings)
(NOTE: Changing the in-game drop-down graphics settings to Medium or High (or whatever you change it to) changes BOTH RenderQuality and TextureDetailWorld to their default settings. The trick is to adjust all the in-game settings FIRST, THEN mess with the .ini settings for these two and don't flip between low/med at all in-game since that would reset this change)
Thanks for the post! Very helpful stuff!
I'm sorry, but turning off the volumetric clouds is a piss poor way to increase your FPS and one of most grandure reducing things you could do.
The skies look amazing, until you turn off the clouds, then it looks like any other unreal2 skybox out there.
If your FPS suck then deal with it and stop whining. You realize there are prectically 14 gigs just of textures. The reason it runs so slow is that every, EVERY, surface has a shader and or alpha channel, and they are twice if not 4 times larger than texture maps in any other MMO out there.
Tweeaking settings will only help so much. Though the color issue is easy to fix. So for now I'll just address the Gamma, Brightness, and Contrast settings. Respectively I set these to:
137%
46%
65%
The colors look better and not washed out at all.
My system:
core duo 930 @3.48
4 gigs of ddr2
x1900xt w/512mb
audigy2
tonnes of empty space on the opperating drive, and on the install drive, latest drivers yada yada....
I'm not saying you can't sqeeze(sp) any more FPS out of the game with carefull finessing of the settings. I have got it to a point where I'm happy. In some major cities your FPS will drop to 8-14, but outdoors it's usually around 30-45. Not spectacular but playable. I have almost all the settings maxed(or near max), except a few that become buggy after 80%(shader). Draw distance at default already shows the entire viewable map, before occlussion from zone fog(not draw distance related) blocks your view.
Now I'm not sure exactly sure how much testing you did. Obviously you have done some. My experience has been that no matter how much you finagle with the settings, you will always drop FPS dramatically in heavily populated and or polygon heavy areas. Both with the settings maxed and at minimal the FPS in these situations, you will never top 20fps. So really you're not removing any of the jitters even at low settings. Anything below 24 FPS tends to make your eyes jump. Though admittedly 20 is better than 8. Go to the Tanvu crafting area and see what I mean.
What I'm saying is: If you don't have a system to run this game at its intended beauty, then why even play it? Oblivion isn't much fun at reduced settings, and this isn't either.
When you have to reduce the settings to a point where it looks worse than anyother game(third gen MMO) on the market, what have you accomplished besides proving that you could?
I've been playing Vanguard since pre-release, and it has moments where it is the most beautiful game ever rendered. However I cancelled my subsciption yesterday. There simply is nothing new about this game.
I hope funcom pulls the magic rabbit out of its hat with Age of Conan. That looks like it may actually break a few design molds.
Disk compression is your friend!
This does quite a bit to enhance performance and prevent 'hitching' and delays when loading chunks
The textures and meshes in your Vanguard folder are uncompressed, this means your HD has to do far more reads than it should. If you use NTFS compression, these will load from the disk faster. You might think that compression would reduce performance but if you think about it the HD is the slowest component in your system and the quicker it can lift files from it the better. There is also little CPU usage from decompressing on the fly.
To enable compression:
Firstly, the volume that your Vanguard folder is on has to formatted with NTFS (duh).
In your vanguardassets folder, right click on the Textures folder, click properties, click advanced and check 'Compress contents to save disk space'. Click OK, then Apply and let it do its thing. Repeat for the Maps and Meshes folders. There are other folders that look like they would compress quite nicely but I haven't tried them.
And the bonus prize for doing this is your Vanguard folder will now be under 10GB!
I feel it's a bit ridiculous you have to make the game look bland without being able to enjoy the view just to be able to get good performance out of it.
Sigil really layed an egg making this game so hard on computers. I also feel there are many people who didn't buy VG due to they not having the computers to play this game. While others stayed away because of all the negative complaints regarding game performance. Sigil lost out on many more customers because of this. Not to mention all the ones who've quit due to the horrible lag, crashes and overall game performance after they tried VG.
The game is very CPU hungry and after clocking my 4400 X2 to 2.41GHz (4800 X2) I received a performance boost.
I then used my Asus Smart Doctor to enable hyperdrive for CPU usage, which again increased ingame performance.
Finally I downloaded an AMD Dual Core Optimiser via http://www.snipurl.com/jf28 which once again increased performance.
I am now quite happily running the game at 1600x1200 with viewing distance maxed, clouds, shadows etc at ave 30fps.
The ingame loading of new areas is a hard drive issue. If you want to minimise this invest in some fast hardrives (10,000rpm) and set up a raid 0 array.
Yes, there was some initial performance issues that were down to poor coding, but these are over with now. If you want to play the game that badly make the necessary upgrades / overclocks / utility tweaks for it to be so.
Thank you, it is nice that some of you have taken the time to post these fixes.
But when you get down to it, why in the world should anyone have to go through such a complicated process just to play a game?
These developers are so out of their league it is pathetic. Here's hoping Sony realizes it and puts some decent designers and coders on their staff.