Performance/Speed Tweaks
Here are some tips to help you get better frame rates.
Most of these tips involve going to the Options->System->Graphics menu. The tips are sort of listed in the order we suggest changing options, but you should experiment to find the combination that gives you the best rates with the best quality.
To display your frame rate see the console commands.
To Increase Frame Rates:
- Texture Filter - Use Bilinear filtering; Trilinear is slower and not much better looking.
- Texture Detail - Turn this down to Normal (or Low); High texture detail looks better but isn't very important.
- Video Mode - Reducing the resolution will improve speed but will also reduce quality. Find a good balance for this setting (maybe 800x600).
- Lighting - The game looks much better with Light Maps, but you'll probably get significant speed improvements with the Vertex setting. You'll have to decide which you want more.
- Geometric Detail - Turning this down to Normal (or Low) will slightly increase performance by reducing the number of polygons used. This means that objects/models won't look as good, but there is already so much detail, that losing some isn't going to hurt.
- Texture Quality - Using 16 bit Textures may or may not improve speeds; the affect on the apearance is minimal too.
- Color Depth - just put on the same setting as the Texture Quality.