Best graphic card settings?

[Darki]

So, after my old motherboard (almost literally) melted and died of old age, I got new parts for my desktop this Christmas. Being poor and having to play at graphic settings 1 and with all the graphic drivers set to "performance", "basic" and sad labels like that, now that I got the juice in the machine I'm not really sure of how to set my graphics card driver and overall settings to have the game full of shiny and awesome...

After seeing that many people here have pretty good computers and seeing some threads about the matter, the question is: considering that now I run an i5, 8GB RAM and GTX660 (which may not be the best but it's way over what the game requires), what exactly are the settings I should be using on my graphics card driver and game, so I get it to the best possible quality and effects that the game (and/or my computer) allows?

[Ezodagrom]

In the launcher options put the slider in 5. Also put the game in virtual full screen (faster to alt-tab than proper full screen) and limit the framerate to 60fps (that is, if you have a 60Hz screen). Virtual full screen and limiting at 60fps is good to stop screen tearing.

In the graphics drivers, look for an option called anisotropic filtering and set it to 16x. Anisotropic filtering makes textures in the distance look better (don't know where exactly that feature is in the Nvidia drivers, since I have an AMD card... it's also possible that the Nvidia drivers anisotropic filtering may not work with PSO2, I'm only sure that it works with AMD cards).

Other than this, it's better for someone else who has a Nvidia graphics card to help out. ^^;

[Meji]

I'm on a GTX670 2GB, i7 3770K and 32GB RAM, and play the game at highest settings (in Full-HD, 120FPS).
I believe your machine should be able to play at the highest standard as well. Game will get laggy for you at some points though. But it even lags for me (and all other players out there) when the lobbies gets too crowded, due to texture overloads.

The setups you do in your nVidia Control Panel does affect the game. You should try tinkering around with the settings until you find something you're fully comfortable with.

[Darki]

I've been tinkering with the drivers, enabled the anisotropic filter and also forced ambient oclusion and the game goes very well, just wanted to know if it's possible even more. I've been playing with crap craphics for so long (running a 2002's motherboard, with all the obsolete components except pretty much the graphics card, but it was kinda bottleneck situation), that I'm not really sure of how good can it look for real. xD

[blace]

With the way PSO2 was built that's as best as it can get.

[Lumpen Thingy]

dude I have a 550ti and can play at max settings your pc should be fine for max lol

[Darki]

dude I have a 550ti and can play at max settings your pc should be fine for max lol

I have no worries about being able to reach the max, I just wanna know what the max is. xD

I mean, other than moving the graphic slider to 5.

[SolRiver]

http://www.pso-world.com/forums/showthread.php?t=196162

[consume]

http://www.pso-world.com/forums/showthread.php?t=196162

Is...is this real life?
[SPOILER-BOX]http://i.minus.com/ivL85MLuLeN6H.bmp[/SPOILER-BOX]

[NoiseHERO]

1 - Nintendo DS

2 - Early PS2

3 - XBOX

4 - XBOX 360

5 - You can tell the difference between 4 and 5?

Forced AA and that other thing that makes your game look like blurry clay animation - Wii-U

[Darki]

I think that looks awesome. What is that other thing?

[Ezodagrom]

I have no worries about being able to reach the max, I just wanna know what the max is. xD

I mean, other than moving the graphic slider to 5.
I guess another thing you could try for better quality is downsampling. I never did that, so I don't really know how to do it, I don't even know if it works at all with PSO2 (I guess if it works, it would only work in proper full screen)?
Here's a guide about downsampling with Nvidia cards:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=346325


1 - Nintendo DS

2 - Early PS2

3 - XBOX

4 - XBOX 360

5 - You can tell the difference between 4 and 5?
There's a rather noticeable difference between 4 and 5, look at the ground and the rock in the bottom left in the next 2 pictures, the first is setting 4 and the second is setting 5:

[spoiler-box]http://imageshack.us/a/img838/4879/quality4.jpg[/spoiler-box]
[spoiler-box]http://imageshack.us/a/img546/8646/quality5.jpg[/spoiler-box]

Basically setting 5 has better quality textures than setting 4.

[Touka]

Basically setting 5 has better quality textures than setting 4.
This.It's more noticeable on bosses like Vol Dragon and Falz Hands when set to 4.

[Akaimizu]

Ezo's got a pretty good advice for helping with the screen tearing. Bear in mind, some games just have screen-tearing issues by programming and it's not a thing against your system spec. Rage, especially at launch, was prone to it regardless of system; and to a degree, still is a bit.

So sometimes you should set up a setup and limit fps to 60, like he said, to reduce it. Otherwise, pump it up to 5.

The only thing that may make you say, "huh???" Is that you may still, even with that rig, possibly have slowdown issues all throughout sections of Magicka. (Great game, but probably one of the worst optimized games in today's PC library. It's amazing how many relatively high-end gaming rigs can toast most games and yet Magicka runs a heck of a lot slower than stuff that's throwing way more graphics around)

The only thing that kind of confuses me about this game (Maybe I'm missing a setting or something) is the way that snapshots look a lot blurrier than the actual game looks. When I play it, it's pretty sharp, but the picture itself is blurry. Perhaps, it's a jpeg encoding thing?

[Darki]

Gotta try that downsapling too. And I remember Magicka, although I don't remember having any graphic issues at all, I suppose in places with a fucking crapload of enemies would slow down no matter the specs. I remember that part where there are two or three enemies that kept popping zombies like crazy and at the end the room was like a "Where's Wally?!" page. <_<

Thank you very much all for the advices. One thing, is that other effect that Rock was talking about the downsapling thing, or is it something else? I actually liked the clay-like effect on those enemies.

[Ezodagrom]

The only thing that kind of confuses me about this game (Maybe I'm missing a setting or something) is the way that snapshots look a lot blurrier than the actual game looks. When I play it, it's pretty sharp, but the picture itself is blurry. Perhaps, it's a jpeg encoding thing?
Maybe it's because of the motion blur the game has? There's an option to disable motion blur in the in-game options.


Thank you very much all for the advices. One thing, is that other effect that Rock was talking about the downsapling thing, or is it something else? I actually liked the clay-like effect on those enemies.
No, it's not a result of downsampling. Downsampling is basically playing the game at an higher resolution than what the screen supports scaled down to the screen's resolution, if I'm not mistaken it's considered by many the best method of anti-aliasing.

[Darki]

Hmm, then I gotta know what was that.

On a side note, I managed to pick a really high screen resolution with the downsampling thingy but the game doesn't let me use that big of a resolution. Is there a manual way to do this, or should I just settle for the max resolution available?

EDIT: Hmm it doesn't seem to work well with my screen. Still, the game works pretty neat already, so I guess I can do with normal anti-aliasing. Thanks!

[Akaimizu]

Maybe it's because of the motion blur the game has? There's an option to disable motion blur in the in-game options.

That's the thing. There is no motion or blur on the game proper, and that's why it looks so sharp, but when I take the snapshot, even when motionless, the image appears blurrier.

[ZIE creations]

That's the thing. There is no motion or blur on the game proper, and that's why it looks so sharp, but when I take the snapshot, even when motionless, the image appears blurrier.

Image compression. Game is down at the moment but when back on try changing the screenshot format to PNG if available, which is a (nearly) loss-less file type.

---

I just got my GTX660 in the mail today, good to know it will work well (waiting for my PC case to show up so I can finally build >.>)

[Darki]

So.

I've been tinkering with Nvidia Inpector, got it with anti-aliasing and ambient oclusion working but I've noticed some thingies...

As expected ambient oclusion have some minor glitches (and I think the shadows look a tiny bit too cold, too grayish, I wish you could change the base color used to something more warm), I suppose it's because the game using settings that are not for itself. But looking at some threads I found a japanese blog that shows a "Phantasy Star Online 2" ambien oclusion mode, which bugged me a bit because it doesn't show in any of my settings. Any idea about this?

Currently I use the Warmonger game settings, but I'd like to know if there's any other game that works better for PSO2.

[SociableTyrannosaur]

So I've been messing with this down sampling thing and I have it all setup, but I noticed that virtual fullscreen uses your monitor's desktop resolution settings. Is there a way to bypass this or do I have to play in fullscreen (which causes the game to crash if you try to alt tab out)?

[Darki]

Does it even work? I tried using downsampling, had everything set, but nothing ever worked no matter what setup I used. =/

In any case, yes, you need fullscreen mode for it, FFS won't do it.

[SociableTyrannosaur]

Yeah it works in full screen. I have it set to run in 2560x1440. you have to set it up so that your video card will run that resolution with your screen then set the resolution in your game settings. you do NOT set your everyday resolution to the new setting. PSO2 doesn't seem to work at resolutions that high by default. I had to edit the text file.

I ran into a new problem though.

Interface is way too small now xD

any way to set it above 1.5 in the text file all you settings gurus??

[Darki]

Yeah it works in full screen. I have it set to run in 2560x1440. you have to set it up so that your video card will run that resolution with your screen then set the resolution in your game settings. you do NOT set your everyday resolution to the new setting. PSO2 doesn't seem to work at resolutions that high by default. I had to edit the text file.

You gotta describe me what exactly did you do then, because it never worked for me.

What I did was to go to the Nvidia Control Panel and create a custom resolution, but then, when I tried to set the screen scaling to "aspect ratio" and by "GPU", the program always falls back to "full screen" by "screen" scalling (and sometimes it doesn't even allow me to put it by GPU, when I click on Apply it reverts to default, I think that happens when I tick the option below that). =/

I'm not sure if that is the exact issue, because when I enable the custom fullscreen as the default one (it's 2304x1440), the screen changes to that one alright, but when I enable that same resolution in the game (by editing the text file) and try to play, it doesn't seem to work, in fact it looks more like the game is running at 800x600 resolution. =/


any way to set it above 1.5 in the text file all you settings gurus??

Hmm, it doesn't seem to be possible unless there's some manual tweaking around. In the file there are some settings on that section other than the direct size modifier, maybe playing with that... I don't really know what are half the settings there. D:

[Darki]

EDIT: Whoa, it does work now. What the actual fuck? Now I don't know what did I do wrong when I tried last time. =/ I feel that it goes a bit slower than in normal resolution though. Not sure if it's just a mindfuck or it's for real, might need to lower the frame rate a bit and see what happens.

About the menu, it's true that it looks a bit too small, but anotherproblem I see is that it looks kinda blurry too. =/ I'm not sure I notice much improvement for the trouble it takes to set this shit.

[SociableTyrannosaur]

well it definitely looks smoother. I think the blur on the menus comes from the scaling being off. probably would look better if we could get the menus up to x2

[Darki]

It doesn't look that much smoother to me, to be honest. If it was a great increase maybe but I can't really notice much improvement to the point that I might prefer to play normal so I can play in fake fullscreen mode. <_<

I don't really care about the menu being smaller as it doesn't really make any difference for me, it's big enough at x1.5 but I dunno. I'll try to see if changing the values there do anything.

Did you actually try just putting the number to 3 or so, and see if it has any effect?

[SociableTyrannosaur]

I did. 3 does nothing and actually locks out screen settings from the launcher with an error saying that "3" is not a recognized value for that parameter. I also tried setting scaling from 1.4 to 2.0. I also tried changing the reference from 1280x720 to 2560x1440.


nadda

[Seany1990]

2560x1440
Damn that's nice, does it run in 120hz too?

[SociableTyrannosaur]

It does. Game looks gorgeous but the text is too small for my tastes

[Darki]

I must be doing something wrong or be getting real blind, because for me, at 2304x1440 (which is more or less the same as yours, just not as wide), the only thing I notice is those horrendipilous crusty edges on long shadows and not much improvement at all. o_O

[SociableTyrannosaur]

yeah that's probably because your aspect ratio is off you have the picture being squeezed horizontally.. your monitor is 16:9 right? adjust it to 2304x1296 and see if that helps

[Darki]

My "normal" resolution is 1680 x 1050. According to this list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions) my screen's ratio is 8:5, so I picked the closest resolution of that ratio to a 150% size of my screen (which would be the one I posted before).

Now when I just change the game resolution for that, everything looks fine, menus look very small but they don't look blurry so I don't think it's a matter of it being squished, it's just the menu that is not being scaled properly. I wouldn't even care for this except for the chat being so small, as having the rest of the hud that tiny doesn't really affect my game (if anything, I'd say it's better because I have less shit on screen).

The only thing is that I don't really notice any improvement at all. I'm using already Anti-Aliasing settings, so could it be that? It's just that for the little improvement that seems to be, I don't find it worthy of having the game in FS mode and making my graphics card work more. =/

[SociableTyrannosaur]

yeah idk...I have a GTX 680. everything is on...AAx16 AFx16 AO...etc. It looks better with downsampling than without for sure.

[Valimer]

As mentioned previously, Anti Aliasing is one of the few and in my opinion the best way to make the game look better. You have to use Nvidia Inspector for Nvidia cards.

here are my settings with a gtx 560Ti http://i.imgur.com/VnIhX.jpg

[Darki]

When I try that antialiasing mode, for some reason the game (while looking better) makes the shadows go crazy. Like they move when I move the camera, instead of staying in place, and they never incide on my character. =/

But when I use the settings at 16x [16x CSAA (4 color + 12 cv samples)], it show some ugly lines in places like the hair, like the texture didn't join well. This is starting to get boring. <_<

[Ezodagrom]

When trying anti-aliasing from drivers, it's probably better to turn off the game's own anti-aliasing filter.
No idea if it'll make a difference to the issues you're having though.

[Seany1990]

It does. Game looks gorgeous but the text is too small for my tastes

I'm very jelly, I'm torn between a 120hz monitor or 500gb SSD. Can't decide.

[bitCrusher]

my question is, if my Pixel Shader is 5.0 and this game requires 2.0, why does the game take a major performance hit when I turn shaders on?

got a new laptop recently with 6 GB RAM and Nvidia GeForce 610M graphics card and apparently I should be able to run this pretty well with high settings.

I can get 60 frames with Shaders on and the lowest texture settings, but even then, the 60 frames isn't constant and I have to turn off all shadows from the in-game settings.

[Aeris]

Because its for shadows and such for all objects in game, those put a load on the graphic's card and slowdown your game if yours don't have the performance to render it all along with huge mpas and all the action going on.

[Akaimizu]

Should be interesting. I'll keep a watch on this to try it out on my new GTX660 SC card. I'm waiting on one other thing before I install it.

[Ezodagrom]

my question is, if my Pixel Shader is 5.0 and this game requires 2.0, why does the game take a major performance hit when I turn shaders on?

got a new laptop recently with 6 GB RAM and Nvidia GeForce 610M graphics card and apparently I should be able to run this pretty well with high settings.

I can get 60 frames with Shaders on and the lowest texture settings, but even then, the 60 frames isn't constant and I have to turn off all shadows from the in-game settings.
A graphics card may support recent features, but that alone isn't enough for a card to be powerful, the Geforce 610M is a bottom low-end laptop card, even though it's a dedicated card, there are integrated graphics that are better than it.

[Akaimizu]

From what it looks like, it seems the 610M is hovering around the 320M Integrated card. A bit slower in some, faster in others. Looks like they found an angle to provide a bit more performance out of the X10M line. Maybe a drop in GDDR3 ram cost? I do find it interesting that the particular configuration, on the little card, seems to put a whole lot of emphasis on shading. The shading of it seems to blow away some of the older X20 line.

This usually gains the advantage over the Intel 3000, but not so much the improved Intel 4000, which finally compares well against the low-end non-Intel laptop cards. (This is the first time I ever could say that. Normally no matter what circumstance, Intel always under-performed just about every single one of the competititor's current line of similar-scale cards in the graphics department. Even if they were integrated.)

Now of course, your Laptop is probably not running any resolution close to 1080p, which a lot of people are benchmarking. Running things at 1280x800 or maybe a bit less in Windowed Mode, makes a big difference and allows you to push up the graphics a bit since you save a lot in the fill-rate.

Still, the fact that laptop cards can generally have good playable rates on PSO2 with pretty-decent-looking graphic settings is a definitely plus for on-the-go gaming. It allows me to have a laptop as a nice little mobile secondary system (where I take it places), from my desktop rig.

[Valimer]

When I try that antialiasing mode, for some reason the game (while looking better) makes the shadows go crazy. Like they move when I move the camera, instead of staying in place, and they never incide on my character. =/

But when I use the settings at 16x [16x CSAA (4 color + 12 cv samples)], it show some ugly lines in places like the hair, like the texture didn't join well. This is starting to get boring. <_<

Yes, same results here. I made a mistake posting that set-up, please ignore it.. haha ;>_>

here is a setting that works correctly for me. http://i.imgur.com/Swgw9.jpg

I have run into a problem that I can no longer ignore... that is shimmering textures. It really is quit distracting especially in the lobby. I've done some research and discovered that LOD set to Clamp should fix this problem as long as Anisotropic filtering is enabled, but it does not help me. Maybe this combined with the right type of anti-aliasing could solve the issue?

[bitCrusher]

Ah, I see. Thanks for the info guys. I'm not too familiar with PC graphics since I'm more of a console gamer.

[Akaimizu]

Ok. I upgraded to the GTX660 SuperClocked model and I'm rather floored by the performance. I'll probably upgrade my CPU later since I'm still clocking the top of the Sandy Bridge Line and I want to pop out that i3 for the i5.

Still, just upgrading from the GT640 gave me about a 3X boost in graphics. That's pretty insane. Even pre-i5 I'm probably going to have to figure out what to do with the extra juice since I don't have any displays greater than 1080p, that I can use it on. I'll probably have to go back over these configs and see what I can get away with, at least with my limited resolution.

[Seany1990]

Ok. I upgraded to the GTX660 SuperClocked model and I'm rather floored by the performance. I'll probably upgrade my CPU later since I'm still clocking the top of the Sandy Bridge Line and I want to pop out that i3 for the i5.

Still, just upgrading from the GT640 gave me about a 3X boost in graphics. That's pretty insane. Even pre-i5 I'm probably going to have to figure out what to do with the extra juice since I don't have any displays greater than 1080p, that I can use it on. I'll probably have to go back over these configs and see what I can get away with, at least with my limited resolution.

Battlefield 3 on ultra is a good benchmarker for a GPU. Crysis 3 when its available too but it'll be a terrible game.

[Emberghost]

Not sure if it really fits in here.

I am playing PSO2 on a 3D monitor using AMD and Tridef. Anyone else on the board gave 3D a shot for PSO2? Or is it just me who gets attracted by 3D instead of resolutions above 1080p? To say something informative: 3D is kinda cool, but as there is no profile for PSO2 yet, it isn't perfect. No clue if it would be better with Nvidia's 3D solution.

As System specs are discussed. I am using a Laptop with Core i7 2630QM (2,4 Ghz), AMD Radeon 6970M and 12 Gigs of Ram for this. (Those 12 Gigs are so useless... but at least cheap. xD) Of course I am using the latest drivers for the hardware. PSO2 runs smooth with everything set to the max. Using 3D I have to disable Anti Alialising for decent gameplay.

[Akaimizu]

Hmm. That's cool. I do have one of Nvidia's 3D solutions, but I haven't even tested it out to see if it even works right. I'm very new to the 3D thing though I have the capability and at least 1 pair of glasses that'll work with it. Yeah, the red&blue ones, but I'm not ready to invest in the actual 3D hardware, yet. Of course, I'm probably a bit bottle-necked by my current CPU, but a CPU upgrade is planned for the not so distant future.

Edit: Ok. I've given it a go with the Red/Blue ones. Obviously, not a great way to see 3D, but was used just as a tester. Not surprisingly, for whatever setting, it kind of cuts the framerate down by more than half. For a card like mine, it still manages to maintain a fairly smooth framerate on the top settings for a 1440x900 screen, but on the lower aspect of it. I also did the Character Creator test on my GTX660 Super-clocked. The same test, with the same graphics settings I could post a score around 11000. With stereoscopic 3D on, it falls to something closer to 1900, or barely scraping 2000 at times. Of course, I could think of a number of factors why it falls so far, and maybe it could be that I need to up my CPU to help against that.

[moorebounce]

After finding the native resolution of my monitor (which is 1920x1200) all the screen size ratios I try to use now look squished up. Can I edit a text file or something to get a letterbox screen size?

[Darki]

If you mean that the game's default resolutions from the launcher don't cover your screen, then yes, you can go to My Documents/SEGA/PHANTASYSTARONLINE2 and in that folder there's a file named "user.pso2". Open that with a text reader like Wordpad and there's a section where you can freely change the resolution.

In any case, are you playing in fullscreen? Unless you're trying to use the downsampling method, playing in fake fullscreen is more comfortable (it allows to alt+tab without much trouble, some people even get the game crashing when they try that), and that mode should automatically adapt to your screen size.

[Emberghost]

Hm, has the benchmark all graphical features the real game has? Downloaded it today and ran it both on 2D and 3D and both ran bugfree, but I had the impression it looked a bit different. As 3D was bugfree, I disabled some of the features in the game and sicne then 3D seems to be bugfree there aswell for me. Anyone knows, what features the benchmark is missing? Anyway, finally no unsharp enemies while playing 3D, yay.

[Akaimizu]

I believe the Benchmark does have just about every graphical feature the real game has mostly due to how late it was developed, in the process. They basically grabbed code from a late pre-beta release version of the game (as far as graphical systems are involved) and set up a demo to run the benchmark. What I'm a bit unsure is whether the user, in the benchmark, has as many features they can turn off (in terms of detail switches). A basic setting of 5, in the graphical slider, for the Benchmark basically sets everything to max settings.

[Valimer]

I'm still getting shimmering textures... like they are too sharp and creates aliasing while the screen is moving. Does anyone else experience this?

[moorebounce]

If you mean that the game's default resolutions from the launcher don't cover your screen, then yes, you can go to My Documents/SEGA/PHANTASYSTARONLINE2 and in that folder there's a file named "user.pso2". Open that with a text reader like Wordpad and there's a section where you can freely change the resolution.

In any case, are you playing in fullscreen? Unless you're trying to use the downsampling method, playing in fake fullscreen is more comfortable (it allows to alt+tab without much trouble, some people even get the game crashing when they try that), and that mode should automatically adapt to your screen size.

I don't like playing fullscreen so I can do other stuff while playing. Sweet Thanks that did the trick.