Keeping High FPS, While Maintaining EyeCandy

[Mathew Steel 151]

This quick tutorial is how to keep your FPS high while maintaining decent eye candy. It's important to note that these will work for other games, not just games in the Stronghold series.

 

Screen Resolution- This is the easiest way to increase FPS. Screen resolution is the amount of pixels on screen, the more pixels the better quality. For best graphics set it to- 1920x1280. For a mix of good performance/graphics (FPS) set it to- 1280x720

 

Anisotropic Filtering- This is used to make corners of graphics look smoother and more realistic. You won't notice this unless close up with an object. Set it to low or off for best performance.

 

Antialiasing- This is similar to Anisotropic Filtering. The graphics notice isn't a big difference, so again for best performance set it to low or off.

 

VSync- This will balance your PC's setting to not allow the CPU to work to what it can. This of course will not allow the FPS to be as high as they could. Disable VSync for best performance. Graphics will not be affected.

 

Bloom Effect- Not really noticeable in most games, just makes some games seem a bit more alive. Disable for best performance.

 

Postprocess Quality- Set this to disabled. This simply renders 3D graphics. Not highly noticeable or important.

 

Ambient Occlusion- Similar to postprocess. This decides the shading level of most 3D graphics. Is quite noticeable but for best performance, disable it.

 

Shadow Quality- Set this to disabled or low. Of course this is highly noticeable so if you want to maintain eye candy, set it to low.

 

Clouds (if any)- Clouds don't make a huge difference in FPS, but turning them off slightly increases FPS.

 

Terrain Quality- Simply explained. Higher the quality, lower the FPS.

 

Object Quality- Simply explained. Higher the quality, lower the FPS.

 

 

There are so many other in game settings that are available, that to cover them all would take hours. If anyone can think of more, then add it in the comments. Thank you for reading!

Edited September 1, 2014 by Mathew Steel

[Lord Vetka 63]

Good article, worth a rep point.

 

Same idea different situation, the PC I have now is a dual AMD 64 bit running W7, without making any suggested changes I have to have SH2 set on medium, where all of my older PCs could run at high settings, plus this incompatibility is disappointing, most of the older games I like can't be played on this PC, any ideas?

 

I have been trying to have XP dual boot on a separate drive, so far no luck and no time to make it work, W7 is installed first and is causing the problem for the XP start files, I know how to make it work, I just don't have the time right now. Then I could play the older games no problem.

[Mathew Steel 151]

Game incompatibility- It seems running the games in comparability mode is your only choice there. As far as I know anyway.

 

Performance issues- Fear not, so do I. SH2 runs at medium with anisotropic filtering and antialiasing off. On an older laptop the game could run at highest no problem. My system specs are well above the games requirements, NVidia graphics cards seem to run the game fine. So my only assumption there is poor optimisation for AMD graphics.

 

Just to prove this, my system-

 

Intel Core i7 QM CPU 2.1GHz (Clock Speed) 3.1GHz (Turbo Boost)

Intel Graphics 4000 HD

AMD Radeon 7730M (2GB)

1TB Internal SSD

1TB External HDD

8GB DDR3 RAM