SmokeDarKnight
Author Level
Hello all,
Just a few basic tips for GPU maintenance whether it be Desktop or Laptop
A few of you are having issues with stuttering or frame rate drops etc and here are some tips to maintain and diagnose some of those issues
Drivers
Drivers can be on the odd occasion temperamental and with so many settings at your disposal sometime things can go a little wrong. Sometimes after an update you may receive some dreaded Blue Screen of Death which isn't as bad as it sound, its just your computer telling you there is a problem that may require your attention. If you are receiving BSOD or Stuttering then a good first step is to a clean install of your display drivers
1) Find out if your machine has a Nvidia or an AMD GPU
2) Download the latest drivers from the linkies here >>Nvidia<< or >>AMD<<
3) Goto your control panel and uninstall ALL your Nvidia and AMD Drivers, this may require a few restarts. This should reset all the GPU settings and give you a good starting basis for further testing
4) Avoid beta drivers although these are generally quite stable they are still experimental and can have a few issues.
5) Install the fresh GPU Drivers, probably requires another restart.
6)Test your machine out again
Game Settings
Even though you have just bought a brand new machine it doesn't mean that its going to run all games at its full settings GPU's have their limitations. Before ordering your new machine its good to have a chat with the guys on this here forum, let them know your gaming preferences budget etc and they will be able to give you an indication of what kind of performance you will be looking at. Look at other websites to see how they have reviewed the machine and look at their benchmarks, pay close attention to the resolutions these games are tested at an what settings they are using. Most reviewers will measure performance with Frames Per Second (FPS) and as PC games we like to hit the Magical 60FPS however 30FPS is considered playable.
Setting to watch out for are
1)UBERSAMPLING[/U]:- BEWARE OF THIS ONE, switch this on and you may get whiplash, this setting will redraw your games image multiple times and merge it together giving you super HD and smooth edges, if you use this setting you may well not need settings below such as AA, this is for seriously powerful GPUs. This option is available on games such as The Witcher 2. Absolute Framerate killer
2) Resolution:- Depending on your screen this will vary, the majority of gamers will be gaming on a a resolution of 1920 x 1080. The higher the resolution the more demand this will put on your GPU. Just for those who weren't aware higher the resolution usually results in a sharper richer image.
3) Anti-aliasing:- Usually displayed as AA in your game settings will let you change, this comes in a variety of different flavors including MSAA, CSAA, FXAA, SMAA and Nividia's new MFAA. Each of these come in a variety of variations too including 2x 4x and 8x. However its pretty simple. This setting will do its best to get rid of jagged edges. Switched off strait items in the gaming world may apear to be Z or Stair shapped. Allocating an AA setting will let the GPU attempt to reduce these as much as possible giving you a realistic look. Personally i find this setting a must however this is again going to use up some of your GPU power and reduce your FPS. MSAA i believe is the least FPS hungry version and TXAA having a heave impact. I think that there is very little difference with the ones in the middle but game can still look amazing with this setting off.
4) Filtering:- Broken down into Bi linear, Tri linear and Anisotropic the best way i can describe this setting is that it sharpens textures. Off or Bi will cause textures such as the ground walls etc to look out of focus and blurry, increase the Filter to Tri or Anisotropic and textures will look better and sharper and again the higer the setting the more FPS your going to lose Anisotropic comes in 2x 4x 8x and 16x variaties,
5) Ambient Occlusion:- This setting deals with lighting in the game and can cause some really good effects with lighting and shadows. I tend to find that this setting is less of a burden on GPUs but will have some kind of effect.
6) Shadows:- Shadows can come with Off, low, medium, high and Ultra settings and this setting can give you some really good effects, switching off the setting may make games look a little bright and unrealistic and Ultra giving it a really dark and cinematic feel in areas, at low medium levels this wont have a major impact and some may prefer their games not looking to dark
7) Field of View:- Increase field of view to show more of the world; reduce field of view to increase performance.
8) Terrain High Detail Range:- Sets the level of detail for the terrain around your character and how far away it reduces the detail.
9) Render Non-Collidable Flora, Render Distant Radial Flora, and Render Nearby Radial Flora:- Turning off any of these may increase performance.
10) Object Detail:- Increasing the level of detail on objects decreases performance.
11) Depth of Field:- This setting will add the effect of focusing items close up and blurring items in out of focus areas. Nice effect, some people might like it and i this doesn't have too high an impace on framerates
12) Texture Quality:- Pretty much says what it means, texture can be set to low medium and high, obviously textures with higher setting look better i believe that this will eat up your Vram in particular for for games such as Shadow of Mordor require a GPU with a Vram of 6gb or higher which i wouldn't say is a common Vram at the moment.
13) Bloom:- Again to do with lighting, a stylish effect making bright lighting effect, i mostly see it as light reflecting off of light colored and reflective items in game. Dont think this is too intensive on the GPU
14) Blur Effects:- a style thing game giving the visual illusion of heat. Some like it others don't.
15) Motion Blur:- again a style thing, this will blur your motion when your moving your head around in game some like this effect others don't.
16) Vsync:-Vsync can be your friend with drawbacks. Vsync can limit the framerate to a select number usually 60 or 30. This means that you will get better stability and a more steady frame rate. If your monitor is limited to 60FPS you may want to set this option on, no point in having your GPU produce 120 FPS if your monitor can only handle 60, too high a framerate on a slow monitor can cause screen tearing, this is an effect that when you look around or scroll in a map for example it looks like the bottom image of the monitor isn't keeping up with the top and looks like there is a line on the screen. Switching Vsync on can help with this, however, in games like dota and twitch shooters like COD this can on occasion cause a small imput lag. If you are a competitive gamer you may avoid this setting. Another hand function of Vsync is if you are unable to maintain 60 FPS and seeing drops down to low 40s or 30, you can limit the framerate to 30 FPS. Though this setting is lower that the holy grail of 60fps i found it useful for Assassin's creed unity to give me a more balanced framerate. The best way i can describe the difference between 60 and 30 FPS in my own opinion is that a drop from 60 to thirty makes it feel like the game has slowed down a fraction and can make me feel a bit sick.
From a trouble shooting perspective i have found that when trying to diagnose low framerates, graphical anomalies, stuttering etc is to set every setting to the lowest setting and work your way up. Every system is different in software and hardware and sometimes things go wrong. If a problem persists and the lowest possible settings i would suggest that there may be a hardware issue. If it runs fine even though it looks bad start playing with the settings, one at a time fire them up to high or medium and slowly try to fine the setting that is causing the problem. This is also a good way of finding the sweet spot of for your game and your system helping you get your computer to the gaming experience that YOU prefefer whether it is a high framerate, an amazing looking image or a balance in between.
Just a few basic tips for GPU maintenance whether it be Desktop or Laptop
A few of you are having issues with stuttering or frame rate drops etc and here are some tips to maintain and diagnose some of those issues
Drivers
Drivers can be on the odd occasion temperamental and with so many settings at your disposal sometime things can go a little wrong. Sometimes after an update you may receive some dreaded Blue Screen of Death which isn't as bad as it sound, its just your computer telling you there is a problem that may require your attention. If you are receiving BSOD or Stuttering then a good first step is to a clean install of your display drivers
1) Find out if your machine has a Nvidia or an AMD GPU
2) Download the latest drivers from the linkies here >>Nvidia<< or >>AMD<<
3) Goto your control panel and uninstall ALL your Nvidia and AMD Drivers, this may require a few restarts. This should reset all the GPU settings and give you a good starting basis for further testing
4) Avoid beta drivers although these are generally quite stable they are still experimental and can have a few issues.
5) Install the fresh GPU Drivers, probably requires another restart.
6)Test your machine out again
Game Settings
Even though you have just bought a brand new machine it doesn't mean that its going to run all games at its full settings GPU's have their limitations. Before ordering your new machine its good to have a chat with the guys on this here forum, let them know your gaming preferences budget etc and they will be able to give you an indication of what kind of performance you will be looking at. Look at other websites to see how they have reviewed the machine and look at their benchmarks, pay close attention to the resolutions these games are tested at an what settings they are using. Most reviewers will measure performance with Frames Per Second (FPS) and as PC games we like to hit the Magical 60FPS however 30FPS is considered playable.
Setting to watch out for are
1)UBERSAMPLING[/U]:- BEWARE OF THIS ONE, switch this on and you may get whiplash, this setting will redraw your games image multiple times and merge it together giving you super HD and smooth edges, if you use this setting you may well not need settings below such as AA, this is for seriously powerful GPUs. This option is available on games such as The Witcher 2. Absolute Framerate killer
2) Resolution:- Depending on your screen this will vary, the majority of gamers will be gaming on a a resolution of 1920 x 1080. The higher the resolution the more demand this will put on your GPU. Just for those who weren't aware higher the resolution usually results in a sharper richer image.
3) Anti-aliasing:- Usually displayed as AA in your game settings will let you change, this comes in a variety of different flavors including MSAA, CSAA, FXAA, SMAA and Nividia's new MFAA. Each of these come in a variety of variations too including 2x 4x and 8x. However its pretty simple. This setting will do its best to get rid of jagged edges. Switched off strait items in the gaming world may apear to be Z or Stair shapped. Allocating an AA setting will let the GPU attempt to reduce these as much as possible giving you a realistic look. Personally i find this setting a must however this is again going to use up some of your GPU power and reduce your FPS. MSAA i believe is the least FPS hungry version and TXAA having a heave impact. I think that there is very little difference with the ones in the middle but game can still look amazing with this setting off.
4) Filtering:- Broken down into Bi linear, Tri linear and Anisotropic the best way i can describe this setting is that it sharpens textures. Off or Bi will cause textures such as the ground walls etc to look out of focus and blurry, increase the Filter to Tri or Anisotropic and textures will look better and sharper and again the higer the setting the more FPS your going to lose Anisotropic comes in 2x 4x 8x and 16x variaties,
5) Ambient Occlusion:- This setting deals with lighting in the game and can cause some really good effects with lighting and shadows. I tend to find that this setting is less of a burden on GPUs but will have some kind of effect.
6) Shadows:- Shadows can come with Off, low, medium, high and Ultra settings and this setting can give you some really good effects, switching off the setting may make games look a little bright and unrealistic and Ultra giving it a really dark and cinematic feel in areas, at low medium levels this wont have a major impact and some may prefer their games not looking to dark
7) Field of View:- Increase field of view to show more of the world; reduce field of view to increase performance.
8) Terrain High Detail Range:- Sets the level of detail for the terrain around your character and how far away it reduces the detail.
9) Render Non-Collidable Flora, Render Distant Radial Flora, and Render Nearby Radial Flora:- Turning off any of these may increase performance.
10) Object Detail:- Increasing the level of detail on objects decreases performance.
11) Depth of Field:- This setting will add the effect of focusing items close up and blurring items in out of focus areas. Nice effect, some people might like it and i this doesn't have too high an impace on framerates
12) Texture Quality:- Pretty much says what it means, texture can be set to low medium and high, obviously textures with higher setting look better i believe that this will eat up your Vram in particular for for games such as Shadow of Mordor require a GPU with a Vram of 6gb or higher which i wouldn't say is a common Vram at the moment.
13) Bloom:- Again to do with lighting, a stylish effect making bright lighting effect, i mostly see it as light reflecting off of light colored and reflective items in game. Dont think this is too intensive on the GPU
14) Blur Effects:- a style thing game giving the visual illusion of heat. Some like it others don't.
15) Motion Blur:- again a style thing, this will blur your motion when your moving your head around in game some like this effect others don't.
16) Vsync:-Vsync can be your friend with drawbacks. Vsync can limit the framerate to a select number usually 60 or 30. This means that you will get better stability and a more steady frame rate. If your monitor is limited to 60FPS you may want to set this option on, no point in having your GPU produce 120 FPS if your monitor can only handle 60, too high a framerate on a slow monitor can cause screen tearing, this is an effect that when you look around or scroll in a map for example it looks like the bottom image of the monitor isn't keeping up with the top and looks like there is a line on the screen. Switching Vsync on can help with this, however, in games like dota and twitch shooters like COD this can on occasion cause a small imput lag. If you are a competitive gamer you may avoid this setting. Another hand function of Vsync is if you are unable to maintain 60 FPS and seeing drops down to low 40s or 30, you can limit the framerate to 30 FPS. Though this setting is lower that the holy grail of 60fps i found it useful for Assassin's creed unity to give me a more balanced framerate. The best way i can describe the difference between 60 and 30 FPS in my own opinion is that a drop from 60 to thirty makes it feel like the game has slowed down a fraction and can make me feel a bit sick.
From a trouble shooting perspective i have found that when trying to diagnose low framerates, graphical anomalies, stuttering etc is to set every setting to the lowest setting and work your way up. Every system is different in software and hardware and sometimes things go wrong. If a problem persists and the lowest possible settings i would suggest that there may be a hardware issue. If it runs fine even though it looks bad start playing with the settings, one at a time fire them up to high or medium and slowly try to fine the setting that is causing the problem. This is also a good way of finding the sweet spot of for your game and your system helping you get your computer to the gaming experience that YOU prefefer whether it is a high framerate, an amazing looking image or a balance in between.
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