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This page comes from a topic posted on our forums. You can find its comments, and add any comments of your own here :
http://www.clanorb.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5045 Revisions and updates will be posted here (and not on the forum) Hardware recommendation Before I start this guide, I cannot stress enough that no amount of tweaking will save you if you fall short on RAM. RAM by itself is responsible for a significant portion of bf2's performance. A gig is a suggested minimum. At 2 gigs you should start feeling more comfortable with how bf2 handles graphics data and how this affects frame rates. If you are sitting on 512 megs of RAM, forget this guide and go out and buy yourself some RAM. Optimization Guide I decided that despite the recent crapness with the expansion, that I would look into trying to make the game run better when I do happen to play when a bunch of orb members are on, might as well make the best of the times we aren't dying to f2000's. Let me describe my system specs so you can get an idea of the performance -> quality I'm working with : AMD Athlon 3000 XP+ (internal clock : 2108 Mhz) 400 Mhz Bus DDR 1 GB DDR, unknown speed (decent but not top of the line) ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (latest catalyst drivers) System drive : 100 gb IDE bf2 is on an partition of my 250 GB SATA drive This hardware and settings yields me suitable framerate, poor texture quality. But also causes lots of slowdown in desperate situations, like enemies in your face, running from artillery, lots of visible gunfire. This kind of performance only comes out of bf2. In hl2 i can max the settings at 1280 resolution and see little or no fps drop, bf2 is just not efficient with video resources. Before and After : BEFORE : Average performance : Acceptable, but not good, lots of slow points Quality of Graphics : Bleh BF2 Video settings : All set to lowest @ 1024x768 AFTER : Average Performance : Very good, still slow during firefight (but much much better) Quality of Graphics : Much clearer and enjoyable BF2 Video Settings ; Mostly medium @ 800 x 600 After using this guide and everything I'm going to mention here, I can play the game at 800x600 with a majority of the settings on medium and it runs great and maintains an enjoyable video quality. Still a little bit of slowdown in certain areas during lots of action. Crashes to desktop are more common now, but by a small percentage and are still very rare. I did drop my resolution but I think it didn't help as much as the other tweaks. The first section of this, I am going to just summarize some of what I read here : http://www.tweakguides.com/BF2_1.html . I can't sit here and pretend I made all this up, I'm just going summarizing what I did without you having to read a 9 page guide. BF2 In-Game Video Settings Terrain : Set to medium -No gameplay benefit. Grass looks a little nicer, lower if you just don't care Effects : Set to medium -Very minor gameplay benefit. Low does not display bullet holes, for a minor performance hit, you can get the minor advantage of seeing bullet holes in walls, if by some reason that would help somehow. Geometry : Set to High -Very high gameplay benefit. I recommend this on high, simply because this setting affects the distance at which vehicles appear into view. Each object, as it comes into view and approaches you goes through a process through which it goes from a low poly simple model and progressively gets more and more complex, until it becomes the full complex model. This obviously allows priority to go to closer objects, where it matters. Turning this option on high tells bf2 that it can start this process much earlier and therefore will start rendering objects farther away. Texture : Set to medium -No gameplay benefit. Adjust this setting based on 'loading pauses' if you get lots of these then go down to low, if you never get pauses while in game, try to increase it for more enjoyable textures. Lighting : Set to Low -Good gameplay benefit. Affects shadows on static objects. Setting this to Low causes there to be no 'indoor' shadows, this can help you spot people in buildings since there are no more shadows. Dynamic Shadows : Set to off -No gameplay benefit. Causes all the spiffy shadow effects. Doesn't look very good for the performance decrease. Dynamic Light : Set to Low -Minor gameplay benefit. Controls the dynamic flare from gunfire. On my setup, I found having this on hurt my fps very badly, especially while firing support gun, but this just might let you spot gunfire from distance better if it doesn't bog down video during gunfire. Anti-Aliasing : Set to off -No gameplay benefit. If you can handle it, this option makes things look awesome, but is a huge fps hog if your card isn't powerful enough. Texture Filtering : Set to Off -No gameplay benefit. Affects the way textures change quality at distance. Textures in general serve no gameplay benefit regardless of high or low. View Distance : Set to Max 100% -Necessity gameplay benefit. There is no reason to turn this down. If you feel you need to, to improve performance, turn down other options first. After making these changes, Hit apply. But don't quit yet. Audio can be a tricky thing to deal with. In some games it makes next to no difference how good or bad the audio quality is, performance wise. In bf2, just to get those extra few fps, there are some settings that can have an effect, while not much, having your sound settings set wrong can cause some undesired effects. Audio Renderer : Set to Hardware If you have a dedicated sound card (and as far as I know onboard sound works) you should turn this to hardware. Software uses more processor to produce the sounds manually, setting this to hardware puts the load on the card, as it should be. Sound Quality : Set to High High sound quality provides on a slight decrease in performance, and I'm a bit picky about sound so I recommend this on high. Enable EAX : Checked Again, little performance drop for a great feature. if your sound card supports this, use it. It'll help you tremendously in locating enemies and just getting a general sense of location of sound. This is significantly more important if you play with headphones. If your card doesn't support this or your computer speakers are 2 really cruddy speakers, turn this off. Game Volume : whatever 0 or 100% makes no difference, the game still processes all the audio even if your volume is set to 0% Okay now apply those settings and quit. Now onto part B of this section : The cache flush. Every time it applies new settings and optimizes shaders, it saves that information to a folder. \My Documents\Battlefield 2\mods\bf2\cache Cleaning up this folder can help ensure your texture and shader cache is clean and created from scratch. So delete all of its contents (delete folders that look like '{D7B71EE2-0D08-11CF-....."), but not the folder itself. Then relaunch bf2, start a single player game and let it re-optimize shaders. Do this flush every time you make significant changes to your video settings. Now onto part 2. Changes to your computer outside of bf2. Quick note : Its a no-brainer, but defragmenting can always help. I'm sure you knew this, but maybe this can remind you to do it if you haven't tried already. In this section I go over the use of a tweak program called TuneXP I found and tried out and appeared to make a decent difference. I saw it mentioned in a few places in regards to bf2 performance. Now, I am almost always skeptical at the proposition that there is a 1 meg program I can download and with a click of a button or two, I can magically make everything run faster and sacrifice little or nothing for it. However, I gave TuneXP a shot, and got real results, and as such, it receives my faith. I am not absolutely sure how much this program really helped in tandem with changing the video settings. Logically however, all of my video settings.. were actually turned up from their previous settings and I got a better result. If you feel hesitant about using this program or what it does, just ignore this whole section and see if your bf2 runs at a much more acceptable performance level and come back if not. You can download TuneXP from here : TuneXP . If you'd rather get it from a more 'official source', you can try here, as the software homepage had a bad download. This program has a ton of options, a lot of them designed to just tell windows to do things a certain way. NOTE : Before you start plugging away options, be sure to go to Help > Documentation. Its very simple, very easy to read, and is very clear and to the point about what each function does and who should use them. The one option you may want to be prepared for is the Ultra-fast boot setting. this will defrag all of your boot files and has no cancel button, so it can occupy your computer for a while. And DO NOT attempt to run any other programs while you are doing this. If you do something that causes your computer to crash and have to reboot while its doing that, your boot record will be bust and the hard drive will be unbootable. One of the reasons these miracle tweaks are possible is because windows is an all inclusive environment, It has settings designed to run any hardware, and any programs. These tweaks make seem like they are pulling performance out of its arse, but really its dropping irrelevant and useless compatibility overhead and pointing it towards places you can use it. For example, disabling all of the XP 'Theme' crap frees up a ton of resources, and if you don't use it, you aren't loosing anything at all and gaining free resources. Also tunexp has a few options designed to let you tweak windows to do things faster if your computer is capable ( two or three settings you can tweak based on total RAM which allow you to really get the most out of your hardware). After using this program and using a majority of the features, one of the biggest difference in regards to bf2, is that bf2 loads just like other programs now. Before I could double click bf2 icon, the splash screen would show up, and I'd have enough time to close down trillian, xfire, disable norton, disable spyware blocking tools, close gmail notifier, and I could load teamspeak and connect to the (MA) TS server, minimize it and then have the game start loading. Now, it loads a brief second or two after the splash screen. Also, while I have no facts behind this assumption, but it seems as though the changes in increased file access abilities has allowed my bf2 to load files off my hdd faster resulting in quicker load times and optimization. Outside of bf2, one thing I am really noticing is the responsiveness of windows file explorer. It still chokes up on my super slow cdrom when I open my computer but everything after that is instant when I open folders. All in all, it helped me a bunch, and from what I've seen with it, I recommend it. |
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