Tip to get better graphics in AO

[Praetos]

http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/7325/aabk7.jpg

Here is a sample screenshot of AO with/without AA.

I think trading 32-bits with AA is satisfying deal. Can't live without AA now once I see the difference.

BTW, I can't really see the difference in running 16-bits or 32 bits...

-S

I can see the difference, but I still prefer having AA over 32 bits.

[jorricane]

...snip.... The Engine is using the CPU only. ...snip...

Unfortunately this is a common misconception. The only semi official comment on that is from Eponyx (not an FC employee, but a bughunter) is that to his knowledge AO only uses HW for the input devices and not graphics. AO does use your video hardware - _IF_ it detects it. The trick is getting a hardware/software combination that allows AO to detect and therefore utilize your hardware. I have done exhaustive testing with various cards on various systems. When AO detects your hardware, regardless of whether its a 10 year old Savage4 or a new 9800GT, you get great performance (60-100 FPS). If it doesn't, and you have to use "Primary Display Driver" options you get much, much less.

Recently I upgraded the drivers on my 9600GT. AO stopped detecting it by name. My FPS dropped from 80-100 to 10-30. Rolling back the drivers wasn't enough, I had to do a full system restore to get back my performance.

below is a screenshot of what you need to see in you AO options to get the best performance (as well as full capability to use AA and AF)

http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/b...ao-options.jpg

Since I'm running dual monitors I get the card listed twice.

If you can find the right combination of HW and software to get your card detected, AO runs absoloutely beautifully in every zone, even in large crowds with view distance maxed.

Until the new engine is out, I'd like to see the dev team fix the detection system so most if not all capable cards are detected. That might let me run AO decently on some of my other systems as well.

[wormx]

... I had to do a full system restore to get back my performance....

...If you can find the right combination of HW and software to get your card detected, AO runs absoloutely beautifully in every zone, even in large crowds with view distance maxed...

Interesting indeed. I wonder how I can get AO to detect my card (What file tells AO what kind of card you have?)

What I simply did was move my AO folder from my old comp.
I did try to install a brand new AO client but iirc it wouldnt show my card anyways.

Using a Gigabyte 8800GT card btw.

[Mekh]

Could a FC employee tell us what makes a card detected fully and what makes it not detected?

What makes the difference?

[jorricane]

I wish I had been able to figure out how AO was finding the card. I CAN tell you exactly what systems that the cards detect on tho.

My current desktop: Vista Ultimate 64, ECS Geforce6100M-PM2 mobo, athlon 2400BE dualcore, 4gb of Corsair Value DDR2, Geforce 9600GT PCIE, detects the 9600 fine with my current driver version (7.15.11.7792) and not with any other version i've tried, but will not detect the onboard GF 6150LE under any circumstances.

Secondary Machine: Soyo (some Socket A dragon board), XP SP2, AthlonXP 2200+, 1.5gb of DDR, does not detect GF 7900GS, 4600Ti, GF3 Ti500, and 5700 (all AGP) but does detect 6600GT (agp) and an ancient Stealth III (Savage4 chipset, PCI), and can detect both cards concurrently with a clean install with default windows drivers. Installing nVidia drivers for the 6600 causes AO to only show the Stealth, no matter what driver version.

My roomate's PC : Dell mobo, p4 2.4hHz, 1gb RDRAM, XP SP2, does not detect 7600GS, or 4200.

I do not have any ATI cards at this time to test on save a semi-burnt Radeon 7000, which doesn't run stable enuough to get into windows to test it.

I really wish I knew what the factor was, but I'm guessing some registry key somewhere that is either non-standard or an obsolete standard that only gets set with some specific driver versions.

[wormx]

It doesnt seem to be a registry key since I installed the small client, picked my gcard, exited. Then tossed my old AO into that folder.

I've found two files in the small client that seems to have with the settings to do but I can't get them to "stick" when I copy them to my AO folder:

\Prefs\Main.cfg

and

\cd_image\data\launcher\AnarchyLauncher.prefs

Not sure if that depends on the fact that I cba to go through the patching from 15.8 one damn patch at a time.

I also have 41 .dll files in the small clients AO folder that is not there in one of my two play accounts.
Both accounts work fine apart from the fact that I cant pick my gcard...

[wormx]

Ok I just finished patching the small client and I no longer have the option to chose my gcard

Seems like some patch between 15.8 and 17.10.3 removed that option...
I suspect the patch that took away the ability to store the password in the launcher.

Would be really nice to hear from the devs regarding this.

I no longer have the \Prefs\Main.cfg and \cd_image\data\launcher\AnarchyLauncher.prefs files that I had earlier with the old launcher...

[Megasis]

A lot of important notes were missed to improve your graphics/performance in AO

This is my current system

OS xp-pro
AMD x2 3800 (939)
4 Gigs of ram - only 3 are used.
AiLife Asus gaming Motherboard SLI
2 x Nvidia 6800gs SLI.

I can run AO max settings - including Res, details and distance. including 4 instances running at once.

Yes in a few area's I can get bogged down a bit but 90% of the time I can averge 25FPS+ except for APF and a few cities where I drop down to 10-15 with 4 instances running.

Depending on what card you are running - a lower resolution will not increase perfomance. It will actually decrease it. Anyone running SLI beblow 7000's seriers should not run no less then 1920x1200x32. There is no reason for you not too. Anything lower will decrease performance. If your monitor does not go that high just pick max res.
If you are running single GPU 1280x1024 is best.

Once you get into the 8000 - 9000 serioes cards single GPU can only do so much. Its not your card its the game itself. My 2x6800gs out perfomr a 9800GTX in AO. Its just how AO is built. In any other game the 9800GTX will smoke the 6800''s. I found that SLI plays a huge important roll in having performance in this game. I want a set of 9800GTX's SLI but I dont need to fork out 700 bucks for the 2 of them. I'll wait. If you can afford SLI and AO is your only game. Then get 7800's cards SLI. AO will perform wonders.
9800's and 280 cards single are nice cards but they wont give you the performace in AO you expect. If yoU SLI them. Hell ya. AO is very CPU dependent.

If you can Raid your harddrive, Partition or have a second hard drive do it!!! having AO independent increases amounts of Perfomance. I have a second harddrive only 200 gigs just for AO. Duel Core cpu's are cheat. Computers are so cheap now if you use last years hardware. You can spend 400 bucks for a new system using last years parts if AO is that important to you and have it run like a dream.

Bottom line - You need to play and tweek your system to fit AO. Lower settings may not increase overall performance.

[Mannystk]

Hmm If Ao Shows Graphics Card Name Then Obviously it can work with the graphics card properly else it will just use other hardware for everything... Makes sense.

Gonna try roll back my drivers to get ao to pick it up

Btw my Gfx Card is an XFX 9600GT - So lets see how things go eh? ^^

[wormx]

Yeah lower settings was actually making AO laggier for me back in .. um I dunno a few years back. On my old single core p4 @ 2.8ish with a GeForce ti4200 card. By chosing 32bit high res and running on a higher resolution I got the game alot smoother.

[Mannystk]

Yea i wondered why my dads pc and my laptop got more Fps

and they both have the graphics card recognized in the launcher..


Now im trying to find what driver version i need for my 9600 on Windows Xp

[Mannystk]

Atm im on this website

http://www.versiontracker.com/php/search.php?mode=basic&action=search&str=nvi&plt[]=macosx&x=0&y=0

I see your drivers there but im trying to find an equivilent for XP



Edit: Tried some old drivers didnt work, so im going to update to the lastest one and see if anything happens - Doesnt recognize my Gfx Card Still... :/

Hmm I wonder what the difference is in the Xp and Vista Drivers that can causes the Xp one not to recognize as easy..

[jorricane]

Like I said before the detection is pretty random. I don't really think its based purely on driver version, rather a combination of unknown factors. Something somewhere in the system is being set that allows AO to see the card. Whether its in the registry or somewhere in Windows' HAL, or maybe just something in DirectX itself, I'm not really sure. It would be absoloutely GREAT to get something official from FC devs, at least to hold us over till the new engine.

edit -

...
I'll wait. If you can afford SLI and AO is your only game. Then get 7800's cards SLI. AO will perform wonders.
9800's and 280 cards single are nice cards but they wont give you the performace in AO you expect. If yoU SLI them. Hell ya. AO is very CPU dependent.
...

Actually its been the case for most people that SLI either did nothing or caused slowdown in AO - SLI only functions in applications that support it (same with ATI's crossfire, even using alternate frame rendering technique). Have you tried just using a single 6800 rather than SLI? Maybe you could actually be getting more FPS - 25 is rather low, at the border of what is considered unplayable (most reviews will state 24fps is minimum for enjoyable 3d gameplay). I don't drop below 65 FPS with a single 9600GT except in a very few SL static and mission dungeons, even dual/triple logged (I never tried quad logging unless xfering since I only have access to 3 paid accounts), those drop me below 40FPS in some sections.

Other than that your post is full of great tips, lower res can actually lag up gameplay in AO, and if you're using an LCD/plasma monitor, anything other than native is going to look relatively crappy.

AO runs great from RAID, or its own partition/HDD, if you keep it religiously defrag'd. Apparently SSDs run even better with the virtually nonexistent seek times, and RAM drives will net you the best performance by far, but that's true for any game/application.

I found a dual core CPU to be kind of a mixed bag with AO - multi logging can be improved by setting proccesor affinity for the various instances, but a single instance will not really experience a gain unless you are running other CPU-heavy tasks concurrently.

One question tho - are you seeing the SLI'd cards by name in the launcher selection menu? Or just the primary display option? It would be good to know for purposes of compiling data on what setups detect properly.

one more edit - actually, I think I'm going to start a thread specifically to compile said data...

[Mekh]

I can see the difference, but I still prefer having AA over 32 bits.

I turned back to 32bit and no AA... I simply found the color banding horrific and a lot more noticable than non-AA'ed edges.

[Shining]

I can see the difference, but I still prefer having AA over 32 bits.

After reading your post, I have tried comparing 32 bit and 16 bit screenshots.
And I think now I know the difference since I now know there IS difference.

It seems to me that there should be an independent thread to focus on Anti-aliasing related issues, or is there one that I do not know?

-S

[Megasis]

Like I said before the detection is pretty random. I don't really think its based purely on driver version, rather a combination of unknown factors. Something somewhere in the system is being set that allows AO to see the card. Whether its in the registry or somewhere in Windows' HAL, or maybe just something in DirectX itself, I'm not really sure. It would be absoloutely GREAT to get something official from FC devs, at least to hold us over till the new engine.

edit -


Actually its been the case for most people that SLI either did nothing or caused slowdown in AO - SLI only functions in applications that support it (same with ATI's crossfire, even using alternate frame rendering technique). Have you tried just using a single 6800 rather than SLI? Maybe you could actually be getting more FPS - 25 is rather low, at the border of what is considered unplayable (most reviews will state 24fps is minimum for enjoyable 3d gameplay). I don't drop below 65 FPS with a single 9600GT except in a very few SL static and mission dungeons, even dual/triple logged (I never tried quad logging unless xfering since I only have access to 3 paid accounts), those drop me below 40FPS in some sections.

..

After sometime I did some testing and research. SLI is not application controlled by games. If you have SLI your OS uses it. I recently got a 9800GTX. I put it in and I got better frame rates but longer zoning time and I could only run 1 instance nicely.. If I ran 2 I was lagging with them both window tabbed.

I put back in my 6800's x 2 SLI and it was heaven. Same FPS but I could run 4 instances with out hesitation. Well I wasnt going to let my 9800GTx go to waste that I got for christmas from my fiance - so I went out and bought another one and a new power supply. There goes a few bucks. I installed the other 9800GTX and it runs smooth as glass.. APF was a dream while running 4 instances at once.

[sanglier]

bump

This still works on 7

[Dethrattle]

I've done this in the past with nvidia cards but now I'm a ATI user. Haven't stumbled into a similar option yet in catalyst drivers. Should I look harder?

I think your problem is that you're using an ATI card :P
joking aside, I've found that ATI has horrendous drivers and customer support compared to nVidia chipsets. It isn't fanboi-ism, it's true! You know something's wrong when you have to get 3rd party drivers to do the same thing nVidia cards do with box software/drivers

AA is causing havok on my planetmap :\

mine as well. But I can live with it.

[Essessceeaych]

I think your problem is that you're using an ATI card :P
joking aside, I've found that ATI has horrendous drivers and customer support compared to nVidia chipsets. It isn't fanboi-ism, it's true! You know something's wrong when you have to get 3rd party drivers to do the same thing nVidia cards do with box software/drivers

*cough* 2008

[Xatgunner]

I got the AA done on my ati-card (with Calalyst)
got a Radion HD 5850. Forced every 3d setting to the max and forced the settings on everything (since i can't select applications.)

AO looks very nice to me now
When i bought this card, everything actualy looked even crappier. Everything was very wavy (when moving) and sloppy.