FPS boosting technique!
HAMMER22
Join Date: 2003-06-18 Member: 17476Members
Join Date: 2003-06-18 Member: 17476Members
Hello folks,
If any of you are like me and have a rubbish graphics card with less than 512MB of video memory you may well find yourself having weird graphical glitches, crashes and errors in your console warning IDIRECT3DDEIVICE9::...blah...failed:Out of Video Memory!
Basically this means the game is slowly dying and for me at least will result in a crash, however I have found the solution! It will however require a little bit of 'modding' of the games files. Basically we are going to scale down and erase a number of the new HUD GUI systems which seem to be the main culprit for video RAM running out.
In order to do this you need GIMP and a .dds plugin which can be found here: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/downloads/detail?name=gimp-dds-win32-2.0.9.zip" target="_blank">dds plugin download</a> (to install the plugin simply drop the .exe file into your gimp plugins folder).
Now navigate to your NS2 folder and go to: <i>...\natural selection 2\ns2\ui</i>. It is inside this folder you will find the offending image files. Essentially sort the folder by file size and you will find the following files at the top of the list: <i>unitstatus_marine.dds, unitstatus_alien.dds, health_circle_alien.dds, health_circle_marine.dds, marine_HUD_frame.dds, black_screen_borders.dds.</i>
Now open up all these files in GIMP (when the dds plugin asks if you want to load mipmaps, untick the box!) and then erase the entire image* and scale it down in Image->Scale Image half the original size. This will mean in game you won't get the nice little health circles or health bars for buildings and players but you reduce the load on your GPU massively. I essentially went from <b>unplayable 10FPS up to 30/40FPS, not in combat, and 20FPS, in combat.</b>
Of course this might also help other people suffering from FPS problems because these graphics files are some of largest in the game (5mb each!) and are likely to appear multiple times in any frame (e.g. lots of buildings, players, etc...) so I see no reason why this wouldn't help everyone.
Anyway, hope this helps some people like it has me, doing this has actually made the game playable now.
*Note you will still see the health of buildings and players as percentage so there is no downside really.
NB: I also noticed the infestation texture is pretty massive so in my own game I've reduced that 4x in size but since it was ugly in game anyway I've not really noticed.
If any of you are like me and have a rubbish graphics card with less than 512MB of video memory you may well find yourself having weird graphical glitches, crashes and errors in your console warning IDIRECT3DDEIVICE9::...blah...failed:Out of Video Memory!
Basically this means the game is slowly dying and for me at least will result in a crash, however I have found the solution! It will however require a little bit of 'modding' of the games files. Basically we are going to scale down and erase a number of the new HUD GUI systems which seem to be the main culprit for video RAM running out.
In order to do this you need GIMP and a .dds plugin which can be found here: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/downloads/detail?name=gimp-dds-win32-2.0.9.zip" target="_blank">dds plugin download</a> (to install the plugin simply drop the .exe file into your gimp plugins folder).
Now navigate to your NS2 folder and go to: <i>...\natural selection 2\ns2\ui</i>. It is inside this folder you will find the offending image files. Essentially sort the folder by file size and you will find the following files at the top of the list: <i>unitstatus_marine.dds, unitstatus_alien.dds, health_circle_alien.dds, health_circle_marine.dds, marine_HUD_frame.dds, black_screen_borders.dds.</i>
Now open up all these files in GIMP (when the dds plugin asks if you want to load mipmaps, untick the box!) and then erase the entire image* and scale it down in Image->Scale Image half the original size. This will mean in game you won't get the nice little health circles or health bars for buildings and players but you reduce the load on your GPU massively. I essentially went from <b>unplayable 10FPS up to 30/40FPS, not in combat, and 20FPS, in combat.</b>
Of course this might also help other people suffering from FPS problems because these graphics files are some of largest in the game (5mb each!) and are likely to appear multiple times in any frame (e.g. lots of buildings, players, etc...) so I see no reason why this wouldn't help everyone.
Anyway, hope this helps some people like it has me, doing this has actually made the game playable now.
*Note you will still see the health of buildings and players as percentage so there is no downside really.
NB: I also noticed the infestation texture is pretty massive so in my own game I've reduced that 4x in size but since it was ugly in game anyway I've not really noticed.
Comments
But if it helps, good stuff. The memory footprint has gone down for NS2.exe quite a bit already though in the last few builds (1100Mb --> 800Mb) Even though they didn't actually work on lowering this, perhaps the new materials system is doing something with this, I dunno...