Read on to find out how just tweaking two configuration settings almost tripled our Crysis frame rate.
Nothing is quite as demanding on your system as a cutting-edge game. To get playable frame rates you’ll generally need lots of fast RAM, a powerful graphics card, a decent CPU and a speedy hard drive. But if your PC isn’t quite up to scratch, don’t give up immediately – there are a few tweaks you can apply that may improve things.
As we’ve already mentioned, detecting and removing resource-hungry processes, freeing up RAM and keeping your hard drive defragmented and optimised will make a real difference.
Updating your video drivers can deliver even more benefits. For example, Nvidia claimed that its 195.62 release would increase performance by 10 to 20 per cent in many 3D games, as well as by 38 per cent in Far Cry 2, and by up to 80 per cent in Lost Planet: Colonies. Impressive? Yes, but unfortunately the driver was soon withdrawn because users were reporting that their cards were overheating, so updating on the day of release probably isn’t the best idea. Stay aware of what’s going on, but let others try out new drivers for a couple of weeks before you jump in.
In the meantime, you can always get an immediate speed boost by overclocking your video card. It’s surprisingly easy.
Overclock your card
Launch the Display Settings applet, click ‘Advanced Settings’, choose your display adaptor’s tab and fire up its control panel. If this is an ATI card then you should see an Overdrive section with sliders for GPU core and memory clockspeeds; Nvidia cards have the same, and add a Shader Clock slider for good measure. (Don’t see that? Make sure you’re using the Nvidia drivers, not those provided with Windows, and install the Nvidia System Tools.
Keep your video drivers up to date to ensure the best possible performance
Tempting though it might be, don’t immediately push all these sliders to the maximum just to see what happens. Your PC will almost certainly crash, unless your video card overheats and dies before that happens.
It’s much better to take a gradual approach, one slider at a time. Push up the Memory Core clock by maybe 10MHz, save the changes and then run something like the Crysis benchmark tool. You’ll also need the demo.
If the demo looks fine then repeat the process, perhaps reducing the increment to 5MHz after a couple of overclocks. If you’ve pushed the card too far then artefacts will begin to appear: strange lines, noise and general video oddities. In this case you should make a note of your last successful clockspeed, return to the default settings and move on to the next slider. When finished, you’ll have the highest successful value for each clock, so try setting all the clocks at the appropriate value. This probably won’t be stable, so wind back the clocks you pushed furthest and try again until you’re artefact-free.
RivaTuner is an excellent video overclocking tool that works with both ATI and Nvidia cards
We tried this on a test PC and managed to increase our GeForce 8800 GTS performance by 14 per cent – nothing spectacular, but not bad for a couple of hours’ work. Be sure to monitor your GPU temperature and increase fan speeds if necessary. RivaTuner has everything you need to safely tweak both ATI and Nvidia video cards.
Find the bottleneck
If everything we’ve discussed so far still doesn’t get you close to the frame rates you need, your system may have a bottleneck that’s holding everything else up.
Is your system RAM up to the task, for instance? When equipped with only 2GB of generic DDR2 DIMMs, our test PC barely reached 20fps on the Crysis demo (1,600 x 1,200, high quality). We replaced these with 4GB of Crucial’s finest Ballistix offerings and frame rates went up by almost 25 per cent – not bad for an £80 to £90 outlay. And that’s just the start – faster and more reliable RAM means you’ll probably be able to overclock your CPU further, too.
A RAM upgrade didn’t offer the same benefits if we tried to run Crysis at the very highest-quality levels, though: the 2GB test returned 11.75fps, the 4GB a near-identical 11.915fps. That’s because the graphics card is now the bottleneck. It simply couldn’t deliver acceptable performance at the settings we’d chosen.
As a last resort, then, you can always change your game settings. There’s usually an intimidating list of quality-related options, but tweaking just one or two of these will often be enough.
In Crysis, for instance, just changing the Shading Quality setting from ‘Very High’ to ‘Medium’ was enough to see our test PC’s 1,600 x 1,200 frame rate leap from 11.915fps to 23.61fps.
Although Crysis will by default use DirectX 10 when installed on Windows Vista and 7, switching to DirectX 9 gave us a further big performance jump to a new frame rate of 35.49fps. There’s no guarantee that other games with a similar option will see such a huge improvement, but it’s worth a try.
We finished by applying some of the techniques we mentioned earlier. Disabling PC resource hogs increased the frame rate by four per cent; turning off pointless services gave us a three per cent increase; using Process Lasso added more than five per cent; and overclocking returned an extra 14 per cent. They’re small gains, but every little really does help, and the incremental effect meant that a previously unplayable game was now purring along at more than 45fps. That’s close to a 400 per cent improvement – a real result.
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