Performance Knowledge Base Article

[imported_Rick]

We're putting together a new knowledge base article to help all players who are looking to tweak their settings to improve performance. If you're interested in helping, please reply to this thread with comments on the following article and any suggestions. We've put together the configuration suggestions below so that performance will be good under peak situations (ie. many players with many monsters engaged in combat).

Thank you - Rick

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Settings Options for Performance Open the Options window and select the Video tab. There are two drop down boxes - one is for graphic detail and the other is for texture detail. Settings the Graphic Detail The following is a good guildline to use when configuring the graphic detail. Setting a higher graphic detail requires a combination of more system memory, CPU and video card memory. Your computer needs to meet all of the requirements listed - otherwise use a lower graphic detail setting. Lowest or Low 64MB video memory 512MB system memory 1GHz system processor Medium 128MB video memory 1GB system memory 2GHz system processor High or Highest 256MB video memory > 1GB system memory > 2GHz system processor Highest 512MB video memory > 1GB system memory > 2GHz system processor Setting the Texture Detail The following is a good guideline to use when configuring the texture detail. The more texture memory you have, the higher this option can be set. Remember that players and monsters take the most texture memory - so if you are trying out texture detail settings in a field with no players or monsters, you will likely experience good performance - until you go to a town or enter areas with larger numbers of players. Lowest - Your video card has 64MB video memory Lowest or Low - Your video card has 128MB video memory Low or Medium - Your video card has 256MB video memory High or Highest - Your video card has 512MB video memory Other Options Video Tab > check Full screen mode - Most users experience better performance in full screen Audio Tab > uncheck 3D Sound

[Kulamata]

Wonderful!

Does HDD cache memory size affect performance at all? Or is it all just too small?

[Entilzah]

I think what is suggested there is fine. I would like to add the following suggestion for the knowledge base article. All numbers suggested are based upon my own experiences of configuring the game on different systems and helping others achieve good performance too.

Setting the Maximum View Distance.
The following is a good guideline to use when configuring the maximum view distance. Setting the maximum view distance to ahighervalue requires a combination of more system memory, CPU and video card memory.

Bear in mind that a highermaximum view distance will require more textures to be loaded into memory, and as more items and textures are visible your computer will need to be able to transfer data between the CPU and memory very quickly otherwise you may experience stuttering if your system does not meet the suggested requirements.

If your computer does not meet all of the requirements listed please consider using a lower setting.

1/5th of the slider bar
64MB video memory
256 to 512MB system memory
1GHz system processor
1/4 of the slider bar
128MB video memory
512MB to 1GB system memory
1.5GHz system processor
1/3rd of the slider bar
256MB video memory
1GB system memory
2GHz system processor
1/2 of the slider bar
512MB video memory
> 1GB system memory
> 2GHz system processor

Setting the view distance higher than half way can be used for creating stunning views of the landscape, such as a view of Morning Light from across the water when in the Frozen Wastes. In general, setting a view distance higher than half way should not be necessary for general game play.

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

Few performance tips I've came across not yet mentioned, moving from simplist to most advanced/desperate ...

Having a clean, unfragmented hard drive can be very helpful in improving performance. A nice 7200 RPM drive with 8MB or more cache works well. Serial ATA drives are also nice and offer better throughput, but not a necessity. Run periodic defragmentations especially after deleting logs, moving screenshots, or clearing your world cache. If your not sure how to do this, here are some easy instructions. Open My Computer, right-click the hard disk you have Horizons installed to (Default is "C") and choose properties. From there, click the tools tab, and select defragmentation. Defragmenting a drive can take some time, if you have a particularly fragmented or large disk it might be a good idea to allow your computer to defragment overnight.

If possible install Horizons onto a hard drive that does not include your windows install or swap file. If you run the game on a system with 512MB or less memory, be sure your windows swap file has a high enough maximum setting to prevent the game from running out of virtual memory. You can change this by right-clicking My Computer > Properties > Advanced Tab > Settings Button under Performance > Advanced Tab > Change Button (Be sure to click "SET" after you make any changes). If you can spare the disk space, having at least 1GB of swap should prevent the system from running low virtual memory no matter how much you throw at it or how little system memory you have.

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I'll list a few more advanced methods that I use as well...

Make two hotkeys to control the number of full detail characters you can see. To do so, right click a blank hotkey, click hotkey editor, and choose "text command" from the drop-box. Enter the following command into the entry field:

/setpref maxfullcharacters 0

and click the little "+" symbol. Also click the empty brown square in the lower left of the hotkey window, and give the little guy a nice icon that'll let you remember that this hotkey turns off loading remote characters, which is everything from Players, Monsters, to NPC's.

Now do the same with another blank hotkey, this time entering the following text command:

/setpref maxfullcharacters 3

This hotkey will tell the game to load up to 3 remote characters at once. You can experiment with what works best for you, but I find turning off or reducing full detail characters when just passing through a town then turning them back on when I get outside can be a big help. If you want to go so far as to completely play without remote characters turned on (and don't mind typing), you can use the /select command to select any player or NPC you can't click on. An example being:

/select nadia

That would open up a portal to hell, and spew forth demons that will burn your soul with that really hot sauce you can find at certain sports bars that they use for their chicken wings. Also it'll select the first NPC within range with the first name of "nadia." You can also make hotkeys with several /select entries for use with your favorite NPC's like "/select hebur" (Aughundell Consigner) or "/select gissel." (Sslanis Shaman)

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A huge, huge performance killer in the game is the view distance. Keeping this under control can turn 3 minute ports into 3 second ports. Keeping the view distance slider as low as you can stand is a good start, but I find making 2 hotkeys to manage view distance makes things much quicker. Do the same as mentioned with the previous hotkeys, but enter these commands for the first hotkey (two commands for this one):

/setpref fogstartdist 50
/setpref fogenddist 51

The above is a very aggressive way to cut down on loading things you don't want to see when in towns, etc. The White Fog of Fuzziness will sit a mere 50 meters away, obscuring anything beyond that point with a harsh white barrier of improved performance. I use this one all the time for towns or settlements, since I know the area already and really don't need to see more than what's directly in front of me.

To set your view distance to a more distant range, handy for resource gathering or searching for monsters, do the same as above, but increase the fog distance a good bit. Suggested values follow:

/setpref fogenddist 175
/setpref fogstartdist 150

The above gives you a conservative, but much more distant view for being outside. If you feel your system can handle a little more, or just like to see things far away, play with the values and see what you like. Remember you do not have to make a hotkey for /setpref commands, you can enter them directly into the chat bar.

[Varangaard]

Entilzah, I find your view distance recommendations a little bit too optimistic. My system is 1G memory, 128mb video memory, and 2G CPU (AMD brand). I wouldn't go setting my view distance even 1/4th of the way up, except when feeling masochistic.

On the other hand, players should take into consideration that Nvidia cards appear run HZ a lot better than Ati.

One thing about setting swap file. Take extra care that size changes do not fragment it. I would recommend that, when setting your swap file, you do it onto an empty HDD or a HDD that is completely unfragmented. This ensures that the swap file will be a single continuous block. Also, and this is a critical point, set the min and max sizes to same value. When you prevent swap file size changes, you prevent swap file fragmentation over time.

Please, please use something else than windows defragmenter to defrag your HDD. You'll thank yourself later for that. A program I've found very effective and it has a nice visual presentation of your HDD fragmentation is Diskeeper.

Finally, for some small FPS increases:
* Turn off terrain clutter
* Turn off shadows
* Set UI windows' transparencies either to 0% or 100%. Unfortunately, on chat windows this means seeing the tabs flashing is nearly impossible, so you may want to leave them be.
* Don't have extra windows open (vault, inventory, character, chats, especially map) except when necessary.
* I hear there should be a way to turn off UI border shadow, but don't know how.
edit: I also read that LOD should have a small impact on FPS. There seems to be no consensus though if setting it on or off is better.

edit2: when going into combat that involves lots of friends and foes, setting all effetcs off with /setpref effectson false is your friend. This will disable other stuff too, like bind shrines and doors into caves. To get the effects back, use /setpref effectson true.

[R`aven_Sky`Dash]

turn off the LOD settings
turn on world model setting (seems to help)

[ranion]

Switching my Nvidia settings from Best Quality to Best Performance has helped quite a bit.

[Tzael]

Entilzah, I find your view distance recommendations a little bit too optimistic. My system is 1G memory, 128mb video memory, and 2G CPU (AMD brand). I wouldn't go setting my view distance even 1/4th of the way up, except when feeling masochistic.

Bus speed and hard drive performance are crucial here. For a knowledge base article aimed at 'average user' then I dinnae think we'll get far telling people to ensure their FSB is at least X and their HDD performance is at least Y [:P] Potentially optimistic suggestions, but in fairness they are based upon settings that I supplied which go in conjunction with a number of direct edits to the config files [;)]

On the other hand, players should take into consideration that Nvidia cards appear run HZ a lot better than Ati.

For some reason Ati cards can pump out a higher fps than nvidia cards in open areas, but nVidia cards wipe the floor with Ati when it comes to towns and densely populated areas (monsters or buildings), is a bit of a curious one considering that the renderer is software based and doesn't rely on the graphics hardware for the majority of things.

Please, please use something else than windows defragmenter to defrag your HDD. You'll thank yourself later for that. A program I've found very effective and it has a nice visual presentation of your HDD fragmentation is Diskeeper.

The defragmenter included with Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista is made by Executive Software. It is a specially licensed version of the same engine used by the Diskeeper product, without all the frills of the full product such as scheduling, boot time defragmentation, etc. Basic optimisation of disk layout is the same, only difference is more obscure optimisation choices with the retail version. Joe Blogg average computer user gets no benefit upgrading to Diskeeper over the defragmenter included with these operating systems because they're not gintae mess around with options.

Switching my Nvidia settings from Best Quality to Best Performance has helped quite a bit.

Placebo effect unless your nVidia graphics card has an extremely small amount of memory available to it. For the record full screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering can be enabled on your graphics card with barely an impact on Horizons' performance since the graphics card has very little work to do in terms of rendering (the majority of the work is carried out by your CPU, which is why a hardware renderer would be so desirable).

Right I've got a lot of minor tweaks I make to the game's config files, the thing is that this knowledge base article is aimed at people who won't be tweaking config files. When it comes to in-game options that can be played with, the usual suspects such as terrain clutter (makes very little difference tbh unless you whack the slider to half way), shadows (blob shadows are cool for most, turn them off altogether if on a very low spec system), LoD switch distance for terrain texture are worth playing with, as well as points that Varangaard has mentioned.

Once upon a time, the client used more resources with LoD enabled, thankfully recent builds of the client from the last few months actually demonstrate performance benefits with LoD enabled for terrain, characters, etc.

Ultimately I have no problems getting 30-50fps dependant upon location (ie 30 for towns, 50 for open countryside) on any system I have installed HZ on thus far (including an old laptop so that I could play HZ on holiday - yeah, sad). Unfortunately there is no way I am able to make a single conclusive set of instructions for maximum performance benefits on any computer. In each case I have spent anything up to an hour per system to find the sweet spot with the settings. On my most favourable computers I love having light sources, terrain clutter, decals, shadows, and high texture details, however I am more than willing to sacrifice a bit of beauty on some of the older systems I have installed it on, like a dual Athlon MP 1800 box with 512 meg of memory and a terrible graphics card, or in the case of the laptop I mentioned, all texture settings were set to low.

[ranion]

"Placebo effect unless your nVidia graphics card has an extremely small amount of memory available to it"


Only 32 MB of memory on the video card

[Hasai]

....
Finally, for some small FPS increases:
....* Turn off shadows

Might I suggest blob shadows as a compromise? Oft-times when a mob is spawning, the first thing that manifests is its shadow.

....* Don't have extra windows open (vault, inventory, character, chats, especially map) except when necessary.

Or minimize them, then park the title bar someplace convenient.

edit2: when going into combat that involves lots of friends and foes, setting all effetcs off with /setpref effectson false is your friend. This will disable other stuff too, like bind shrines and doors into caves. To get the effects back, use /setpref effectson true.

Try /setpref combatspelleffects true|false, instead.
[G]

[imported_tjl]

my system is ATI radeon 9200 (128mb), 1 gig of memory, and AMD Opteron 150. the following settings both in game and out of game help my fps the most:[*]Shadows. I always keep them off.[*]View Distance. Usually about 1/4 the way up. I find that 1/4 is still allows for enough distance while eating very few resources.[*]Texture Detail. I usually leave them on high, unless there will be a lot of players around like during events. Then it's set to low.[*]Terrain clutter is always off, unless I want to take nice screenshots.[*]/setpref effectson false if there is a lot of spell combat going on, otherwise I leave the effects on.[*]/setpref useloadingscreen is always set to false. It does not speed up the loading process, but you can see your character and move around while the loading is being done. So in a sense it makes for faster porting.[*]I play the game in fullscreen. Windowed mode does not run well for me.[*]Combat music is off, as well as the ingame music. I wish I could spare the resources for the ambient music (it's awesome) but no.[*]I turn off all non-essential windows unless needed. the compass, map, inventory, player lists, etc are closed.[*]Keep the hard drive that horizons is installed on running well. Defrag it often.[*]Personally, I turn off other running apps like spyware detectors, anti-virus, firewall softwares. Not something I would recommend of course, but the option is there.[*]I turn off all non-essential services and "hidden" processes/apps. A lot of windows installs turn on things the average user will never need or use. A mirror of a great site that goes over the services, (and how to turn them off) can be found here.[/list]That is all for now.

[Nikodemus]

I just recently replaced my old Ati Radeon 9700 Pro with an Ati X800 Pro.

I experienced a performance boost of exactly ZERO Percent in Hz.

Any other game runs at about twice the fps it ran with the old card. And that is with 4x FSAA and 8x Anisotropic filtering turned ON.

I am running on pretty LOW detail settings.

System specs:
Athlon XP 3200+ @ 2.2GHz
1GByte Ram (Dual Channel)
256MB Video Memory (GDDR3)

Graphics detail: Low
Texture detail: Low
average FPS in towns: <10
average FPS elsewhere: <30
average FPS in Lagzoon: <5 at times.
extreme stuttering when loading objects (This should be done in the background and *not* interrupt gameplay as badly as it does)
View distance: 25% max.

[Guaran]

A huge, huge performance killer in the game is the view distance. Keeping this under control can turn 3 minute ports into 3 second ports. Keeping the view distance slider as low as you can stand is a good start, but I find making 2 hotkeys to manage view distance makes things much quicker. Do the same as mentioned with the previous hotkeys, but enter these commands for the first hotkey (two commands for this one):

/setpref fogstartdist 50
/setpref fogenddist 51

The above is a very aggressive way to cut down on loading things you don't want to see when in towns, etc. The White Fog of Fuzziness will sit a mere 50 meters away, obscuring anything beyond that point with a harsh white barrier of improved performance. I use this one all the time for towns or settlements, since I know the area already and really don't need to see more than what's directly in front of me.

To set your view distance to a more distant range, handy for resource gathering or searching for monsters, do the same as above, but increase the fog distance a good bit. Suggested values follow:

/setpref fogenddist 175
/setpref fogstartdist 150

The above gives you a conservative, but much more distant view for being outside. If you feel your system can handle a little more, or just like to see things far away, play with the values and see what you like. Remember you do not have to make a hotkey for /setpref commands, you can enter them directly into the chat bar.

Good advice. Let me expand on it a little bit and suggest a third line for the hotkeys for view distances:

/setpref loaddist 50
/setpref fogstartdist 50
/setpref fogenddist 50

That is my "View In" key. I press it before recalling or teleporting. Makes for fast fast teleports.

My pc has an athlon xp2700+, 2gb ram, nvidia 6800 Ultra OC(256mb), seperate hardrive for games and operating system (even have a third drive with the page file). And Hz can still be demanding if turning settings for display options too high. I would agree that 50% max view distance (loaddist 500) is the realistic max for any system.

On my system I use this for "View Normal"

/setpref loaddist 350
/setpref fogstartdist 325
/setpref fogenddist 350

I have a view max hotkey with loaddist and fogenddist at 1000, fog start at 950. Good for a beautiful view, but use with caution.

I have even done some oceanic exploring, with loaddist 3000 and the game sometimes can't keep up with my flight speed.It was probably downloading new terrain files for the world cache which made it all the more demanding. CTD's very common, and you had best have the loading screen off so you can get airborn before you drown after logging back in out under the ocean.

Turning off LOD Terrain, setting display driver outside the game to "Maximum performance" and disabling 3d sound are all high on the list of first things to do to improve performance. My sound seems to skip along with the video when lag starts to get bad.

[Varangaard]

The defragmenter included with Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista is made by Executive Software. It is a specially licensed version of the same engine used by the Diskeeper product, without all the frills of the full product such as scheduling, boot time defragmentation, etc.

Regardless, my personal experiences with windows' defragger have suggested to me it is not as effective. YMMV, I guess.

Try /setpref combatspelleffects true|false, instead.

Thanks, I've head about this before, but forgotten it exists.

I tested out LOD stuff today, but it didn't show any detectable difference either turned on or off. Might be because I have LOD cutoff set at the exact same distance as my view distance limit (the lo-res graphics LOD substitutes look extremely ugly, especially where they connect back to higher res versions, so I prefer to keep them out of sight).

[Fridlekh]

re: The view distance slider.

I'd like to gripe one more time about the implied nature of the slider vs the reality of it's impact. Given the layout of the options, most people would assume that the far left of the slider would be similar to "lowest" settings, and the far right of the slider would be similar to "highest". This is not the case.

While moving the slider ultimately alters fogenddist, terrainloaddist, terrainunloaddist, loaddist and unloaddist, the option only directly changes one of those values: fogenddist. Looking into the game constants, one sees that the 'lowest' graphics setting puts fogenddist at 100, while 'highest' puts it at 400. Compare this to the slider's range of 50 to 1000 and you might start getting an idea of why I feel this particular option should at the very least come with a warning, or some visual indication of where the preset limits are.

I believe that as it stands, the view distance slider gives users too much ability to cause negative performance impact without enough information to inform the user. this leads to complaints along the lines of "I have a brand new computer, and can't even play at 50% view distance" ... when 50% is still above the 'maximum' quality.

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

I just recently replaced my old Ati Radeon 9700 Pro with an Ati X800 Pro.

I experienced a performance boost of exactly ZERO Percent in Hz.

This is mostly because your video card is not what's limiting the game from running better. I myself have a venerable Radeon 9700 Pro, and I experience no major decrease in performance moving from a game resolution of 1024x768 with lowest settings to 1920x1200 with 2x AA, 4xAF, and texture detail set to full with no LOD. In fact, as long as you leave things like maxfullcharacters and the view distance alone, you can freely crank up most of the visual settings to max if you have at least a first or second generation DirectX 9-class video card.

Horizon's is limited extremely by your CPU and to a lesser extent, your hard disk. Memory can be a problem as well, but once you've over a gig of ram it becomes a non-issue. This really isn't that unusual for a game. Unreal Tournament 2k4 and Half-Life 2 are good examples of games limited by your CPU.

If I were made of money (and not going to college in a month) I'd drop some funds into a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 system with plenty of memory and RAID array.

[dladyman]

This is all fascinating; we'd love to condense it down and include it as a guide on the new GamersInfo.net Horizons data site (for which we're also creating guides). Does anyone have a problem with us doing so? We'll credit each of the contributors in the guide.

Thanks,
David

[Goriax]

I think what is suggested there is fine. I would like to add the following suggestion for the knowledge base article. All numbers suggested are based upon my own experiences of configuring the game on different systems and helping others achieve good performance too.

Setting the Maximum View Distance.
The following is a good guideline to use when configuring the maximum view distance. Setting the maximum view distance to ahighervalue requires a combination of more system memory, CPU and video card memory.

Bear in mind that a highermaximum view distance will require more textures to be loaded into memory, and as more items and textures are visible your computer will need to be able to transfer data between the CPU and memory very quickly otherwise you may experience stuttering if your system does not meet the suggested requirements.

If your computer does not meet all of the requirements listed please consider using a lower setting.

1/5th of the slider bar
64MB video memory
256 to 512MB system memory
1GHz system processor
1/4 of the slider bar
128MB video memory
512MB to 1GB system memory
1.5GHz system processor
1/3rd of the slider bar
256MB video memory
1GB system memory
2GHz system processor
1/2 of the slider bar
512MB video memory
> 1GB system memory
> 2GHz system processor

Setting the view distance higher than half way can be used for creating stunning views of the landscape, such as a view of Morning Light from across the water when in the Frozen Wastes. In general, setting a view distance higher than half way should not be necessary for general game play.

This doesn't agree with my experience. I have 128 MB video memory and1 GB system memory yet I usually get near or better then 20 fps with it set 3/4 of the way out. I'll cut it way down (to about where you say I should always have it) to speed a port time, but unless I'm in Tazoon or Augendell I usually put it right back out again afterwards. My computer hardly ever stutters.

Perhaps the fact that I have a 3GHz processor has something to do with it.

Besides the great view, I find that having the view distance out as far as possible is handy for my dragon when flying long distances. I can often see landmarks if not my actual destination that way. It's much easier then having to consult the map all the time. I do agree that once on the ground it's very rare that a high view distance is needed.

[Royal]

I've a: p 2.8 g laptop with NVIDIA go5300(64mb) and 512 mb of ram
scheduled 1024 mb of swap space on my fragmented hdd.
I think the fragmentation of the Hdd is not that important since
the horizons files are in a row and the 'pagefile' is preallocated space. (and
unmovable if defragmenting). (and my hdd is only 5400rpm)
In horizons its more the issue to not have HDD intensive programs running
while playing and the Correct video-drivers.
for which i use the so-called OmeGa driver.
[link]http://194.71.11.70/pub/games/PC/guru3d/nvidia/nvidia_wxp_omega_16177_[guru3d.com].exe[/url]
Install them in their 'performance settings'.
Dont start tweaking by yourself, just install and use this drivers (tweaked already)
here are my settings
[link]http://www.lsvinvictus.nl/settingsRoyal.zip[/url]
so if you've got a vcard simmilirar to the go5300(64mb)
and use a 1025X768 resolution you might want to give my configuration a try.
And another aggresive way i use is to press ctrl-alt-del and termintate
as much processes as possible. (trail and error if you internet connection keeps alive)
Good luck and i'm open for questions etc.