Easiest post ever.
by AC - permalink
If you have Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PC and you want it to run fast, here you go:
Step 1: Disable MIP mapping.
Step 2: Set Visual FX Quality to Low.
Congratulations, you've doubled your frame rate. I'll elaborate. The Visual FX Quality setting, like the MIP mapping setting, is under Options/Display Settings/Advanced. Raising it from low to medium will give you more translucent fog, which doesn't make it look much better but makes it easier to see where you're going in thick fog at night. Upping it to High or Very High will give you detailed shadows for player models and slightly increase the heat shimmer effect. But anything over low will dramatically affect your frame rate.
The MIP mapping setting is a bit mystifying. It never occurred to me to disable it before. As it turns out, disabling it does nothing whatsoever to the appearance of the game except give it a huge boost in framerate. I'm running San Andreas with anti-aliasing set in-game to 3, which I think means three passes, or 6X AA, and with anisotropic filtering hardware-forced at 16X, and even at 1280x1024 the game is rock-steady at 60fps. This is with Visual FX at Low. Any higher and the frame rate is halved, and it doesn't look any better sitting still.
I'm stumped on the MIP mapping thing because I have games like Doom 3 and Far Cry that rely heavily on it, and they run smooth as silk.
In fact, let me tell you about how I'm running Doom 3 these days. Doom 3 and Quake 4 are my only games that don't require any anti-aliasing to look good. I don't know what it is about them, but that engine just doesn't need it at all. That really helps performance, because I'm running Doom 3 now at 60fps at 1280x1024 with all in-game settings (except AA, of course) on max, and hardware-forcing 8X AF. This is on an ATi vidcard with an ancient set of drivers, and Doom 3 has always worked best on NVIDIA cards. And it looks fucking incredible.
The only wild-card here is "Truform," whatever that is. My vidcard's stock drivers give me the option of disabling it; the newer ones don't. I think that might be why I'm suddenly seeing these huge performance gains with no visual quality trade-offs. For the record, Doom 3 runs on OpenGL, so I'm also using triple-buffering. I wish more games used OpenGL over Direct3D because, I dunno, it's better.
Anyway, I finally beat San Andreas this week. I spent the next day or so moving across Los Santos systematically taking over every gang territory until I controlled the entire city. I can roam around San Andreas now spending my hard-earned $3 million without worrying about rival gangs trying to take over my territory, because all the rival gangs are fucking dead now. So I can wear my $10,000 tweed Didier-Sachs suit with green high-tops and a pink mohawk and nobody can say shit about it. How many games let you say something like that?
by AC - permalink
If you have Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PC and you want it to run fast, here you go:
Step 1: Disable MIP mapping.
Step 2: Set Visual FX Quality to Low.
Congratulations, you've doubled your frame rate. I'll elaborate. The Visual FX Quality setting, like the MIP mapping setting, is under Options/Display Settings/Advanced. Raising it from low to medium will give you more translucent fog, which doesn't make it look much better but makes it easier to see where you're going in thick fog at night. Upping it to High or Very High will give you detailed shadows for player models and slightly increase the heat shimmer effect. But anything over low will dramatically affect your frame rate.
The MIP mapping setting is a bit mystifying. It never occurred to me to disable it before. As it turns out, disabling it does nothing whatsoever to the appearance of the game except give it a huge boost in framerate. I'm running San Andreas with anti-aliasing set in-game to 3, which I think means three passes, or 6X AA, and with anisotropic filtering hardware-forced at 16X, and even at 1280x1024 the game is rock-steady at 60fps. This is with Visual FX at Low. Any higher and the frame rate is halved, and it doesn't look any better sitting still.
I'm stumped on the MIP mapping thing because I have games like Doom 3 and Far Cry that rely heavily on it, and they run smooth as silk.
In fact, let me tell you about how I'm running Doom 3 these days. Doom 3 and Quake 4 are my only games that don't require any anti-aliasing to look good. I don't know what it is about them, but that engine just doesn't need it at all. That really helps performance, because I'm running Doom 3 now at 60fps at 1280x1024 with all in-game settings (except AA, of course) on max, and hardware-forcing 8X AF. This is on an ATi vidcard with an ancient set of drivers, and Doom 3 has always worked best on NVIDIA cards. And it looks fucking incredible.
The only wild-card here is "Truform," whatever that is. My vidcard's stock drivers give me the option of disabling it; the newer ones don't. I think that might be why I'm suddenly seeing these huge performance gains with no visual quality trade-offs. For the record, Doom 3 runs on OpenGL, so I'm also using triple-buffering. I wish more games used OpenGL over Direct3D because, I dunno, it's better.
Anyway, I finally beat San Andreas this week. I spent the next day or so moving across Los Santos systematically taking over every gang territory until I controlled the entire city. I can roam around San Andreas now spending my hard-earned $3 million without worrying about rival gangs trying to take over my territory, because all the rival gangs are fucking dead now. So I can wear my $10,000 tweed Didier-Sachs suit with green high-tops and a pink mohawk and nobody can say shit about it. How many games let you say something like that?
No comments:
Post a Comment