Tweak guide
This will reset your graphics
First you need to locate a file called ROEngine.ini where it resides will depend on your O.S. for us, using Windows 7, it was located at:
C:\Users\YOUR-USER-NAME\Documents\My Games\RedOrchestra2\ROGame\Config\ROEngine.ini
For XP it will be something like: Documents & Settings\My Games\UnrealEngine3\ROGame\Config
Make a backup of this and keep it somewhere safe. (Drag it to your desktop maybe!)
Then simply delete it, when you next start your game this file will automatically be generated and your graphics will have been reset to default.
before we did this we were getting 69-70 FPS with the game fully tweaked, after we deleted the file we were getting 99 FPS a 30% increase, default is about mid-way, So we then played with the settings.
| Before deletion | 69-70 FPS |
| With Default settings | 98-99 FPS |
| Maximum setting and AA High | 91-92 FPS |
| Maximum settings and AA Ultra | 80-81 FPS |
| Maximum settings and AA Off | 99-100 FPS |
If you're on a 1080p (1920x1080) monitor or better, you don't need your AA cranked up to the max. The higher the resolution the less and less that AA matters. This will increase your FPS a fair amount.
So now we use the last setting for our game.
Now before we go any further with tweaking we would first like to do some Myth Busting:
1). Disabling the Steam Community will increase your frame rate
2). SLI/Crossfire is not supported
3). Disabling SLI will increase your FPS
Disabling the Steam Community overlay makes absolutely no difference to your FPS, although it may help you if your game crashes a lot (for some people), something to do with Punkbuster not Steam. Punkbuster and overlays EH!
We can not speak for Crossfire as this wasn't tested with an AMD ATI card but SLI is supported (even if not officially). It is reported that there is an issue with Crossfire. ATI guys should Google this over the next few days as this will be an issue that affects you. There is a temp Crossfire fix that you can use meanwhile: see http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2121606
Using two ASUS GeForce GTX 460's which normally scale at almost a 100% for most games, when we tried the game with SLI disabled we were only getting 48-50 FPS but with it re-enabled we were getting 99 to 100. In our case disabling SLI crippled us!
Back to the AA business, here are two screen shots to compare.
| AA On Ultra | AA OFF |
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And now the difference between the various graphic settings:
| LOWEST | SETTINGS |
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With texture quality at lowest and everything else low there is barely any texture detail at all, the lighting is awful, it may perform but it looks ugly.
| LOW | SETTINGS |
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With everything low we get a little texture detail but not much more, the lighting is greatly improved but it still doesn't look good.
| MEDIUM | SETTINGS |
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At medium we get a lot more texture, the lighting looks good and we now have shadows, foliage and grass. I could play it at this level.
| HIGH | SETTINGS |
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On high the texture starts to look good, the lighting looks great, there is a big difference to the shadows which look much crisper and also more things now generate shadows. There is more grass, it's in greater detail and the foliage is now lusher.
| ULTRA | SETTINGS |
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On Ultra the game looks fantastic, superb texture quality, shadows flicker and you get better light reflection off objects. Unfortunately this isn't the best map to illustrate that as it is a bit too dark and due to connection issues we were lucky to get these shots!
You may have noticed that in order to get our 99-100 Framerate we have switched off Bloom, Motion Blur*, Ambient Occlussion Framerate smoothing and One Frame Thread Lag. *Due to a bug even though we have set motion blur to off in the game options, it is still set to on (True) in the ini file.
You need to open the new replacement ROEngine.ini file in notepad and search for the [SystemSettings] section, there you will find the entry MotionBlur=True change this to MotionBlur=False and save the file.
You just need to play around with the graphic setting and adjust them to suit your own machine. For instance, just turning shadows from Ultra to High can give you a huge increase in FPS, because as mentioned above on Ultra these flicker. looks good but do you need it?
One other point concerns the Gameplay settings, in there you have your POV setting (Field Of View although P is for Point here), This we changed from the default 70 to 75, although this looks like the maximum it isn't, normally we would have changed this in the ini file to 90 to suit a widescreen monitor but if we did that then our graphics cards would have to render around 40% more then they would at the 70 setting and we would expect this to have a huge impact on our framerate, we will try this though, once we have our optimum settings for everything else, just to see. Let us know the result if you do too.
[SystemSettings]
bUseMaxQualityMode=False
StaticDecals=True
DynamicDecals=True
UnbatchedDecals=True
DecalCullDistanceScale=1.000000
DynamicLights=True
DynamicShadows=True
LightEnvironmentShadows=True
CompositeDynamicLights=True
SHSecondaryLighting=True
DirectionalLightmaps=True
MotionBlur=False
MotionBlurPause=True
DepthOfField=False
AmbientOcclusion=False
Bloom=False
UseHighQualityBloom=False
bAllowLightShafts=True
Distortion=True
FilteredDistortion=True
DropParticleDistortion=False
bAllowDownsampledTranslucency=False
SpeedTreeLeaves=True
SpeedTreeFronds=Trueg
OnlyStreamInTextures=False
LensFlares=True
FogVolumes=True
FloatingPointRenderTargets=True
OneFrameThreadLag=False
UseVsync=False
UpscaleScreenPercentage=True
Fullscreen=True
AllowD3D10=False
AllowRadialBlur=True
SkeletalMeshLODBias=0
ParticleLODBias=0
DetailMode=3
ShadowFilterQualityBias=0
MaxAnisotropy=16
MaxMultisamples=1
MinShadowResolution=64
MinPreShadowResolution=8
MaxShadowResolution=1536
MaxWholeSceneDominantShadowResolution=2048
ShadowFadeResolution=10
PreShadowFadeResolution=16
ShadowFadeExponent=0.250000
ResX=1920
ResY=1080
ScreenPercentage=100.000000
SceneCaptureStreamingMultiplier=1.000000
FoliageDrawRadiusMultiplier=1.000000
ShadowTexelsPerPixel=4.000000
PreShadowResolutionFactor=0.500000
bEnableVSMShadows=False
bEnableBranchingPCFShadows=False
bAllowHardwareShadowFiltering=False
bAllowBetterModulatedShadows=False
bEnableForegroundShadowsOnWorld=True
bEnableForegroundSelfShadowing=True
bAllowWholeSceneDominantShadows=True
ShadowFilterRadius=2.000000
ShadowDepthBias=0.012000
CSMSplitPenumbraScale=0.500000
CSMSplitSoftTransitionDistanceScale=4.000000
CSMSplitDepthBiasScale=0.700000
UnbuiltWholeSceneDynamicShadowRadius=20000.000000
UnbuiltNumWholeSceneDynamicShadowCascades=3
WholeSceneShadowUnbuiltInteractionThreshold=50
bAllowFracturedDamage=True
NumFracturedPartsScale=1.000000
FractureDirectSpawnChanceScale=1.000000
FractureRadialSpawnChanceScale=1.000000
FractureCullDistanceScale=1.000000
bForceCPUAccessToGPUSkinVerts=false
bDisableSkeletalInstanceWeights=falsegg
MotionBlur=False :As mentioned above
DepthOfField=False :Makes your game crisper and you will see people clearer.
AmbientOcclusion=False
Bloom=False
UseHighQualityBloom=False :These three address performance issues.
Source: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2094647
bUseMaxQualityMode=False
Forces maximum possible quality. Don't enable this unless your PC is beastly.
StaticDecals=True
Enables static decals, aka sprites on the map that don't move such as bullet-holes in walls that are placed there by the developers. Change it to False to disable it and improve performance.
DynamicDecals=False
Enables dynamic decals, aka bullet-holes caused by your gun or blood emitting out of an enemy. Change it to False to disable these effects and improve performance.
UnbatchedDecals=True
No idea, I assume these are still sprites and might improve performance was set to False, but I recommend not touching this one.
DecalCullDistanceScale=0.150000
DecalCullDistance is used to set the Level of Detail of a decal when you move far away from it. The lower the value, the amount of detail will be reduced when you go near said decal. Set a smaller number it to improve performance.
DynamicLights=True
Dynamic lighting is a system where the light entities out of any emitters can react to other objects on-the-fly, unlike static lighting which will always look the same no matter what is in-front of it. I would say set it to False to improve performance, but recent UE3 games makes full use of this type of lighting for their maps, and RO2 is no exception. I don't recommend you do this or you'll encounter ugly lighting errors in your maps.
DynamicShadows=True
Dynamic shadowing is a system where shadows react to the world unlike static shadows which always looks the same no matter what. Set it to False to improve performance by a great deal, since shadows take up alot of CPU. I personally set this to True because disabling this might make the game look much worse than it needs to be.
LightEnvironmentShadows=True
CompositeDynamicLights=True
SHSecondaryLighting=True
DirectionalLightmaps=True
I put all of these settings into one quote for a reason. They all change the way how lighting works in RO2 and I'd highly recommend that you don't touch these settings. If you decide to experiment anyways, please at all costs, do NOT touch DirectionalLightMaps. Without it, the shader effects on objects would become null and make your game 10x more ugly without much of a performance boost.
MotionBlur=True
Change this to False to disable Motion Blur. Motion blurring is a effect where the screen "blurs" as you move the camera for a smoother viewing experience and makes the game more cinematic, with the side-effect of making the framerate feel more smoother than it actually is. Disabling it won't necessarily improve performance alot, but I know a few users on these forums would rather have it set to False.
MotionBlurPause=False
I believe this setting is used to determine the pause between frames of motion blur, I'm probably wrong tho. I'd usually set this to False in case.
DepthOfField=False
Depth of Field effects, where the background of the world in your character's line of vision is blurred to improve realism/cinematic quality. Set it to False to improve performance, though on some systems this may actually improve performance when enabled. I don't know why, just experiment.
AmbientOcclusion=False
Enhances shadows around the game world, usually it is a performance killer. I'd recommend this stays set to False.
Bloom=True
Enables light-highlighting and image bloom in the world, making it bright and vivid. I'd recommend this stays at True, but it would probably put off less stress on the CPU if set to False.
UseHighQualityBloom=False
Increases the bloom quality and makes it look alot better. I'd set to to False to increase performance.
bAllowLightShafts=False
Light shafting is a lighting effect where when you are looking at an object obstructing the view of a dynamic light, shadows appear around the object, increasing cinematic quality. Set it to False to improve performance, but I personally have it on.
Distortion=False
Distortion is a shader put in front of the screen or an object to emphasize an effetc used in the game, like taking a hit from a bullet. These can improve game performance when set to False.
FilteredDistortion=False
Filters said shader effect for better quality. Set it to False to improve performance.
DropParticleDistortion=False
Effects where a sprite like a spark would make a distortion effect when animating. Set it to False to improve performance.
bAllowDownsampledTranslucency=False
Downsamples the translucency effect for performance. Set it to True if you wish.
SpeedTreeLeaves=True
SpeedTreeFronds=True
"SpeedTree" is an external company that creates low-poly, good looking trees and/or natural assets for game engines when the developers themselves don't need to. I'm not sure if Tripwire themselves made the trees or another company did, but regardless, the commands work both ways. Set both to False to remove trees and potentially improve performance (I'd highly recommend that you don't).
OnlyStreamInTextures=False
This affects the way textures are streamed into the world as you move throughout the map. I'd say leave it alone.
LensFlares=True
Enables lensflares, a lighting effect where a flare is shown when looking at a light. I don't see how this will improve performance by any means, but disable it if you wish.
FogVolumes=True
Enables/Disables fog in the game, such as distance fog or smoke effects. I'd recommend that you don't touch this since setting it to False can both lower performance and create buggy distance fogging.
FloatingPointRenderTargets=True
Always set this to true. I'm not sure what it does, but usually setting it to False decreases performance.
OneFrameThreadLag=False
Created lag on your CPU thread. Set it to True to improve mouse accuracy (I wont' explain why this happens) or set it to False to generally improve performance.
UseVsync=False
Vertical Sync basically sync the refresh rate of your monitor with your framerate to remove "screen-tearing" when you run the game at framerates higher than your refresh rate. Enabling this usually creates mouse inaccuracy and lower performance, so I'd say set it to False.
UpscaleScreenPercentage=True
This upscales the "ScreenPercentage" command later on in the config to your screen-size, so it fits the entity of your monitor. Unless you like to have black borders around your screen when lowering "ScreenPercentage", keep it set to True. If you have no idea what I just said, just scroll down to the "ScreenPercentage" command and find out what is going on.
Fullscreen=True
Enables Fullscreen. Fullscreen operations usually puts more resources into the game and thus improves performance. Keep it at True to improve performance or set it to False if you want the game to run in Window mode.
AllowD3D10=False
Forces the game to run under the Direct X 10 API. Since Tripwire hasn't officially announced D3D10 suppourt, you'd probably won't gain anything by enabling it to True. NOTE: You NEED a DX10-capable card to enable this in the first place. If you have no idea what that is, don't bother changing it.
AllowRadialBlur=False
Enables a blur effect that surrounds either the screen or certain objects in a radial-fashion, such as when using a scope. Set it to False to enable performance.
SkeletalMeshLODBias=3
Sets the model quality of the characters in-game. This has a value of 0-4. Setting it at a lower number like 0 increases the model quality or setting it to a higher number like 4 makes all the characters look like box men. Set it to 2 or 3 for better performance.
ParticleLODBias=1
Sets the particle detail. This usually defaults to "1" even if you change it, so just leave it alone.
DetailMode=1
Sets the detail mode from 0-4. Setting a lower number like 0 increases game quality whereas setting it to a higher number like 4 decreases game quality. I'd usually set it to 2 to increase performance.
ShadowFilterQualityBias=0
No idea what this does, I assume this effects the range of Shadow filtering in a area, but i say leave it alone.
MaxAnisotropy=16
Sets the maximum amount of AF the game uses. I'd say put it a 4 to be safe, as it will increase texture quality with minimum performance threat.
MaxMultisamples=1
Sets the maximum amount of AA the game uses. I'd say leave it alone.
MinShadowResolution=64
Sets minimum shadow resolution on any given shadow in the game. Raise to to values like 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, etc to increase base shadow quality. That creases performance tho.
MinPreShadowResolution=8
Sets the shadow resolution of a low-quality shadow, usually when you are far away. Leave it at 8.
MaxShadowResolution=800
Sets maximum shadow resolution the game can use. Lower it to said previous values above to either improve performance or raise it to make shadows look better.
MaxWholeSceneDominantShadowResolution=1344
Sets the max shadow resolution of a scene. Leave it alone.
ShadowFadeResolution=60
Sets the resolution of a shadow during "Fading" out. Leave it alone.
PreShadowFadeResolution=16
Same as above, but for pre-fading. Leave it alone.
ShadowFadeExponent=0.200000
This is probably one of the more useful commands. Lower the value to decrease the range of when higher quality shadows are streamed onto the map and thus improve performance without necessarily decreasing shadow quality.
ResX=1600
ResY=900
These two values sets the game resolution that you would be running at. "ResX" changes the "Width" whereas "ResY" sets the "Height".
ScreenPercentage=100.000000
Possibly the most useful commands in this entire config. Tripwire, if you are reading this, ADD IT IN-GAME!
What this command does is that it lowers the in-game resolution of everything 3D without lowering the UI/2D resolution of things like menus, HUD, etc. So you don't need to set a lower resolution for performance and suffer stretched 2D images, just set Screen percentage from a minimum of 50 to a maximum of 100 to increase performance drastically. However, it WILL make the game blurrier and more pixelated, so beware. Also, if you set the previous command "UpScaleScreenPercentage" to False, lowering this value will cause black borders around the game screen. I'd say set it to 90 for best compensation of quality and performance-gain.
SceneCaptureStreamingMultiplier=1.000000
No idea what this does, sorry.
FoliageDrawRadiusMultiplier=0.500000
Lower values will reduce the distance of when "foliage" (aka Grass, leaves, etc) will pop up on the ground. Lower the value to increase performance.
ShadowTexelsPerPixel=4.000000
Higher values increases the tessellation of shadow pixels and thus drastically increase shadow resolution. Lower it for better performance, I recommend setting it to 1.
PreShadowResolutionFactor=0.200000
This affects shadows being streamed into the world as you move around. Leave it alone.
bEnableVSMShadows=False
bEnableBranchingPCFShadows=False
No idea what these two commands do either.
bAllowHardwareShadowFiltering=False
Setting this to True forces your CPU/GPU to filter shadows for increased shadow quality. I'd say leave it at False.
bAllowBetterModulatedShadows=False
Set it to True for better transitioning pre-shadows. I'd say leave it alone.
bEnableForegroundShadowsOnWorld=False
Setting it to True enables shadows on various areas of the map. I'd say set it to False to increase performance.
bEnableForegroundSelfShadowing=False
Setting it to true enables your character's shadows. Leave it as False.
bAllowWholeSceneDominantShadows=True
Setting this to True enables high-quality shadows. Leave it at false.
ShadowFilterRadius=0.250000
ShadowDepthBias=0.012000
CSMSplitPenumbraScale=0.500000
CSMSplitSoftTransitionDistanceScale=4.000000
CSMSplitDepthBiasScale=0.700000
UnbuiltWholeSceneDynamicShadowRadius=20000.000000
UnbuiltNumWholeSceneDynamicShadowCascades=3
WholeSceneShadowUnbuiltInteractionThreshold=50
bAllowFracturedDamage=Truegg
NumFracturedPartsScale=1.000000
FractureDirectSpawnChanceScale=1.000000
FractureRadialSpawnChanceScale=1.000000
FractureCullDistanceScale=1.000000
bForceCPUAccessToGPUSkinVerts=false
bDisableSkeletalInstanceWeights=false
No idea what the rest of these commands do. If anyone knows, I'd appreciate the heads-up.