Performance tips and tricks for Nvidia users.

[Phantomewzick]

Actually, there are only a couple.

1: Go into your nvida control panel, make a game profile for shattered horizons, set Pre Rendered Frames to zero, that smooths out a lot of stuttering.

2: Again in the nvidia control panel, if you are using SLI (2x 8800gts 640's here) set your SLI rendering mode to force alternate frame rendering 2, unless you have the latest 257.15 or higher drivers, in which case its default anyway.

This next tip is not for nvidia cards, its for anyone with a core 2 processor (i dont know if it applies to later intel processors, as i dont have one).

My motherboard has an a couple of options in the BIOS for processor throttling, such as C1E enhanced halt state, and EIST (enhanced intel speedstep). When these options are enabled, it renders the game completely unplayable, with massive stuttering, as soon as i disable it, smooth as butter, so if you are having massive stuttering issues, check your motherboard bios throttling options, turn them off and see if that helps.

EDIT: The reason for changing the C1E and EIST for me is, with them on, if i have cpu-z running while i'm playing sh, it shows my clocks bouncing back and forth from normal to half, it may just be an error on my hardware, but it cant tell if i'm playing or not for some odd reason.

Also, please please do not change any other settings in your bios unless you know what you are doing, as you could make your computer not boot, and then you would have to figure out how to reset the bios, which can be a real pain sometimes.

Let me know how it works, i hope this helps some people with their FPS troubles.

[Silent_Killer]

I'll try your first tip. Bios wise all that stuff is off.

This also gives me the best performance with these settings, I would give these a try if you need more performance. Image settings preview is on Performance.

[AnthonyDa]

If you have a good CPU (ex: quad core), you can also disable physX so it will be calculated by CPU & not GPU.

[LaDeX]

If you have a good CPU (ex: quad core), you can also disable physX so it will be calculated by CPU & not GPU.

Shattered Horizon doesn't use GPU for physics.

[AnthonyDa]

Really ? My bad then ...

[Spanner_]

If you have an nvidia card then by default physx is run on the GPU.

SH uses physx...

So yes, SH does actually run physics through the card...

ATI users cannot run physx on their card cus nvidia bought it... so by default all their physx processing is done on the cpu via a physx software/driver thing.

Even with my core2duo I get an improvemnet if I put physx through the cpu and not my 8800GTX.

[Silent_Killer]

1: Go into your nvida control panel, make a game profile for shattered horizons, set Pre Rendered Frames to zero, that smooths out a lot of stuttering.

This got rid of loads of stuttering for me, and gained me some FPS.

Think I'll be able to give SH a play smoothly first time in ages, maybe a come back.

[hellob]

I have the power saving features enabled on my CPU because this quad draws quite a bit more power than my old dual core.(it runs 1.5x faster at a lower temperature) I leave them on to reduce wear and lower the idle heat on my CPU to 37C. With power saving disabled, it jumps to 46C, so I leave it on for this reason as it just kicks back up to its maximum clocks the second it encounters a load.(anything running will kick it up) I guess it can affect you if you are CPU limited, but this game is 99% GPU limited, and since my CPU usage is only 40% overall with one core near maximum, one core around 60% and the others at 25% load I am not going to really worry about changing this setting. I will try the prerendered frames though as I have noticed some significant stuttering since the last update.

[AnthonyDa]

I have the power saving features enabled on my CPU because this quad draws quite a bit more power than my old dual core.

I don't think that disabling such features inside the BIOS changes anything, it's probably another lie related by poor website who can't try it first.

Now, your CPU might be the bottleneck, all the graphics things are running on a single thread (sort of), and you should see that the 1st core of your CPU has a massive load there it should be quite low on the others core when running the game. This means that if you can see your first core reaching 100%, the your CPU is the bottleneck. I suggest you to try monitoring your cpu & gpu load for few round and see the results :)

[Silent_Killer]

I suggest dont let your GPU run at 100c while gaming