Warhammer Online is a beast of a game, and by far the biggest complaint I hear about it is how poorly it performs on players PCs. I can’t argue, Mythic still needs to do a lot of work on tuning things up. Patch 1.2 (which goes live tomorrow) improves performance a bit but there are still some measures you can take to improve your frames per second right now. I’d like to point out that some of these tweaks may potentially reduce the visual quality of the game for you… that’s the way it always is with this stuff: you sacrifice quality for performance. I leave it to you to balance the options and decide what you’re willing to sacrifice.
Ingame Tweaks
Lightmaps & Specular — By far the biggest performance booster. Disable these options and restart the game client. You will notice a drop in visual quality, but get a huge boost to your FPS in return. This impacts the lighting quality of the game.
Shadows — I recommend setting this to Balanced. This will set all NPC and PC (including yourself) shadows to simpler, non-dynamic textures. They still look pretty decent, and this tweak can help a lot in crowded areas like Altdorf or Inevitable City, or during keep, fortress or city raids. I haven’t noticed a huge performance difference disabling them completely, and I think the effect they give is worth the few frames.
Disable EAX — If you have a Creative card that supports EAX, I don’t recommend using it. Especially if you’re an unfortunate soul running Vista.
XML Hacking
Open up C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsWarhammer Online – Age of Reckoning, and look inside the User folder. Inside you’ll find UserSettings.XML. Open this file up in your favorite text editor (I recommend Notepad++.)
What we’re looking for is two lines that define the custom quality settings ingame, Custom 1 and Custom 2. These lines begin with “perfcustom”. Here’s what mine looked like, for example:
What you want to do is change the texture_Cache=”0.00″. This variable indicates how much room to reserve for texture cache memory. The value you decide to go with here is very relative to your graphics hardware. I have a graphics card with 640MB, and found that 1.00 works nicely. So, I changed my lines to look like this:
Remember, you’ll need to set your ingame quality preset to Custom 1 or Custom 2 for this effect to register with the game, and you may need to restart the game for it to work it’s magic. I’ve noticed a significant performance boost with this tweak.
Graphics Driver Tweaks (NVIDIA)
First, ensure you have the most recent NVIDIA drivers installed. If you’re on a desktop, you’ll find those here. Laptop users can grab theirs here.
- Right click your desktop, and launch the NVIDIA Control Panel. If asked, launch with Advanced options. If you aren’t asked, you may need to switch to Advanced by going to the View menu and selecting that option.
- In the treeview on the left, select Manage 3D Settings, then pick the Program Settings tab. This is important- if you do not pick this tab, you’ll be changing your graphics settings for all your games, which is something you don’t want in this case.
- Press the “Add” button, and navigate to your C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsWarhammer Online – Age of Reckoning folder, and select WAR.exe.
- I applied the following overrides to my default settings:
Antialiasing- Transparency: Multisampling
Force mipmaps: Trilinear
Maximum pre-rendered frames: 1
Texture filtering- Antistropic: Off
Texture filtering- Negative LOD: Allow
Texture filtering- Quality: High Performance
Texture filtering- Trilinear optimization: Off
Threaded optimization: Auto
Triple buffering: On
Vertical sync: Force on - Press the Apply button at the bottom of that window, then close the NVIDIA Control Panel. You’re ready to play.
The Usual Suspects
Defragment! — Do it often, especially after game patches. I recommend JkDefrag for advanced users, or AusLogic’s Disk Defrag for those who want less of a hassle. They’re both freeware, and much more effective than the built-in Windows defrag.
CCleaner — I run CCleaner (freeware) at least once a month. Use it to clear out the numerous temporary files your system is holding onto, but more importantly use it’s registry cleaner to get rid of old, garbage registry entries slowing down your system. You’ll be shocked at how much garbage this tool will find on your system.
Ditch the garbage antivirus suites — Seriously, McAfee? Norton? The big name antivirus and Internet security tools are absolute garbage. These are the biggest culprits in slowing your system down. I recommend switching to ESET Smart Security (a strong, lightweight commercial security suite) or a combination of Sygate Personal Firewall (freeware) and AntiVir Personal. Just make sure you completely uninstall any existing suites before you install these, as they will not be compatible. I also recommend installing and immunizing your system with SpyBot Search & Destroy rather then using memory-resident anti-malware clients like Windows Defender. Just my opinion here, take it or leave it.
Tags: hacking, performance, warhammer online
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Copy and paste guys… one line of code
Would forcing a greater texture cache have any effect on a 256 MB card, in particular a GeForce 8600 GTS? If so, what setting would you recommend?
Great stuff, thanks for posting this
Looks pretty good! Only question I have about this is the Vertical Sync setting… my limited understand of such things is that Vertical Sync being On hurts performance but is necessary for CRT monitors to make things smooth… ie it should OFF if you have an LCD monitor, and that should improve performance ever so slightly without making things look worse.
You are correct that there are pros and cons to Vertical Sync. All vertical sync does is limit your frames to the refresh rate of your monitor. This was useful back in the days of CRTs, but for LCDs this is less so. Most LCDs have a refresh rate of 60. So, by enabling this you are limiting yourself to a theoretical 60 frames per second. The catch here is that (1) few machines can run WAR at a stable 60 FPS, so it doesn’t really matter, and (2) by enabling vertical sync you can unlock pre-rendering. This allows the game engine and your graphics card to pre-render scenes a frame or two ahead before they’re really needed. This makes for a smoother looking experience in situations where your frames are already low, such as keep/fortress/city sieges, and can sometimes be beneficial in other circumstances as well.
So, you are correct, for most games vertical sync would be a no-no; but in WAR this is a little different. If your PC is one of the few that can run above 60 FPS, don’t enable it. Otherwise it’s good to have.
Thanks!
yea a good game.i am playing now.kool
It couldn’t hurt to try, but you probably won’t be able to get much more out of that 256MB. I would start with a very low value, something like 0.5, and work up/down from there based on the performance you’re seeing. If you get crashes, or a lot of hard drive activity (indicating textures being swapped in and out of memory from the swapfile) or corruption in the appearance of textures, I’d lower it in small intervals.
Very cool, thanks!