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.

[PvtHudson]

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..

Not for this game though.

I don't know why since I've seen devs state that disabling GPU PhysX should increase FPS for Nvidia cards.

But it's not the case. I use an 8600 GT as a dedicated PhysX card and it works fine.

I enabled "Show PhysX Visual Indicator" in Nvidia Control Panel. I ran Cryostasis benchmark along with FluidMark and both showed PhysX being run on my 8600 GT. I ran it on Shattered Horizon and it said "PhysX: CPU" no matter what I did.

[PvtHudson]

EDIT - Double post, didn't show up at first weird. How do I deleted post?

[Jarnis]

Last I checked, the situation is this;

If you have GPU PhysX enabled, NVIDIA PhysX system software will use GPU for PhysX, even in SH.

If you disable it (or have ATI card), it uses CPU as SH has no "GPU only" physics code - it is all stuff that can run either on CPU or GPU.

There is no difference in visuals or gameplay between these modes.

Now I haven't checked this with the past few driver versions, so it is possible that NVIDIA has flagged SH as "Use CPU" game in their driver as, 99% of the time, it makes sense to run the physics on the CPU. The only theoretical situation where GPU PhysX is beneficial for SH is if your CPU is very marginal and you have either a very powerful single GPU or a 2nd GPU dedicated to PhysX.

In every other scenario, you generally want all of your GPU power to run the visuals.

[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.