But my quad core, newer, higher speed CPU can’t handle more then 15 mobs/players on the screen at once, without the FPS dropping significantly. So since a single one of my GTX460’s can handle TERA alone, I figured I could get away with using Ambient Occlusion, which is, to my knowledge, a completely GPU powered task. Unfortunately, Nvidia Control panel has no force Ambient occlusion on setting for TERA. However, there is an Ambient Occlusion True/False setting in the S1Engine.ini file. And my other Unreal 3 Engine game has the same command in its .ini file in the SystemSettings section, and its ambient occlusion works just fine. Ok let me start off by saying I spent literally 20+ hours turning .ini settings on and off, and adjusting and testing Nvidia Inspector options.

The texture will go from high detail, to lower detail, as you move closer to it. Then grab your mouse and move it in circles. (If your CPU is the bottleneck.) For some reason, moving the mouse or giving the game client some kind of user input, is a huge killer to your framerate. I have played games in the past such as Ultima Online that had a “Run mouse in a seperate thread” setting.

Your bottleneck will most likely be your CPU. My rig is dual GTX460’s with 4GB of old DDR2 I think, ram. Windows Vista 32 bit, and a q6600 Core 2 Quad processor overclocked from 2.4 ghz to 3.0 ghz. I never got time to test that myself, so I will probably do it in CBT3. But if anyone got Ambient Occlusion to work, please share how you did it.

1. Now, wouldn’t you say TERA has a very weak player/mob max view distance?
2. Do you know what the #1 biggest killer of FPS was for me?
3. Next, zoom your camera in, so your camera moves closer to the texture.
4. You will see the texture of that object at its highest resolution, if you don’t try moving forward or backward until the highest mipmap / LOD level of the texture shows up.
5. Windows Vista 32 bit, and a q6600 Core 2 Quad processor overclocked from 2.4 ghz to 3.0 ghz.
6. There are two files you can edit that will alter your graphics options.

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So put the setting on 0 or 1, and zoom your camera away from your character maybe halfway between max camera distance, and right over your shoulder. Now walk up to a bush, or tree leaves, or a mountain side. You will see the texture of that object at its highest resolution, if you don’t try moving forward or backward until the highest mipmap / LOD level of the texture shows up. Next, zoom your camera in, so your camera moves closer to the texture.

But if you zoom your camera out further, and leave your character stationary, the tree leaves will pop into the highest resolution threshold. Out of all the testing I did, tweaking settings over and over. Do you know what the #1 biggest killer of FPS was for me? “PC View Distance” When this option is set to 1, you cant barely see mobs right infront of you. Their nameplates show up before their models do.

Any way to limit fps?

If anyone has any ideas on why viewing additional mobs would create such massive CPU usage, please enlighten me. Because that one setting is the worst for me. And its the most important setting as well (for pvp atleast). If I leave a line out, its because I don’t know what it does, or changing it made no difference to my client’s game display. S1Option.ini is just a notepad file of your in-game chosen options.

After all this testing, I concluded that no other compatibility setting exceeded the default enough to warrant changing it. So I left it at the default, and gave Nvidia the benefit of the doubt. So, if you want to have any real form of AA and you are an Nvidia user, you have to set AA compatiblity to 0x000100C5 in the Nvidia Inspector. En Masse if you’re reading this, I’d recommend you give the players a real AA option and use this hex code. So some of you might ask, “Why force AA when you can just change “Lighting Enrichment” option to 2 and get it.” Well that is not real AA.

If you checked it, your mouse cursor would go from lagging hardcore, to very nice and smooth. So my assumption is that moving your mouse around, or opening a menu, or any other user input, is very intense on the game client’s thread processes. This is most likely a LOD bias / coding bug, because textures should ALWAYS become higher resolution the closer the camera gets to it. The highest LOD level should never be 20 feet from the object, but the entire 0-20 feet from the object range. And you will be seeing it at the 2nd best resolution level.

Unfortunately, my PC hit its cap on upgradability about a year ago. Because almost every game I’ve played now has my CPU as my bottleneck. Which really bothers me, because if there is one that has stayed relativity constant in MMORPG’s in the last 15 years, its how much game code processing needs to occur. TERA is not the only game I am playing right now that uses the Unreal 3 Engine so learning the ins and outs of the .ini file was worth while.

And if you set it to 6 (max) you can see mobs about 3-4x as far. And going from setting tera vsync 1 to setting 6, gives me a 15 FPS DROP. For some reason, viewing 30 more yards of mobs, kills my FPS. What exactly is changing in that code thats making my CPU slow down my FPS by 30% or so? But there is no reason that viewing additional mobs should kill a game’s FPS that much.

1. Again sorry for my bad spelling hope this will help people and people googling this issue will find this to help them out.
2. AF2 is the optimum setting for almost every game I’ve played.
3. If there is something more that you could add here just let me know and i will edit this post.
4. So, if you want to have any real form of AA and you are an Nvidia user, you have to set AA compatiblity to 0x000100C5 in the Nvidia Inspector.

Go up to a player and look at their nameplate, set Enrichment to 1, then change it to 2. Their nameplate will get blurry and difficult to read unless your right up next to them. There is no FPS loss to my knowledge from turning Enrichment 2 on. But all it is doing is just blurrying your game, minus the interface. So to summarize, normally the way game graphics work is the textures get mipmap / Level-Of-Detail modes.

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Its a very good visual improvement if you’ve got the extra GPU power to sacrifice.

TERA Online .ini Performance Tweaks Guide

And the further away you get from an object, the worse the resolution becomes. But you should ideally not notice a difference, because your sufficiently far from the texture. So I had to fiddle with the compatibility setting to see if Nvidia had truly selected the correct SLi profile. Make sure your using fraps or another program to see your FPS. Let go of your mouse, and give your FPS seconds or so, and take note of what it is. So in summary, a single GTX460 should be able to play this game on max with FPS no problem.