currently with my killer machine my fps can vary from highs of about 50 to lows of approx 5 fps on certain maps (aveage of 20)
i was wondering if anyone has any tweaks out there to bump this average up a little?
now i realise the best thing would be to get a new graphics card, but i already did. unfortunatly my comp only pci slots so im kinda screwed.
any tips appreciated! 
there are some basic rules of thumb. stuff i suggest here wonât necessarily be what iâd WANT to use, but you are looking for the best FPS possible, so here goesâŚ
resolution is probably the single greatest factor. run at the lowest you can stand. r_mode 3 is 640x480 - it will give you the best fps at the cost of long distance clarity.
if you feel competant, overclock your CPU. ET is CPU hungry. i have a 2.53 ghz P4 and i still saw improvements by nudging it up to 2.8
turn off all uneccesary tris (triangles). objects on your screen are made up of triangles, the fewer your card needs to draw, the better your FPS will be. some examples are bulletholes, ejected shell casings, rain/snow, shadows, tracers, muzzleflash, flares, etc. i will give a list later.
run at cg_fov 90. most people like a wider fov, but lower is better for FPS (less stuff on screen at once)
kill other eye candy that may not use tris, but uses CPU cycles (coronas, breath, etc). free up that CPU power for the stuff that matters.
make a file called autoexec.cfg and put it in /etmain with the following lines in it:
set r_mode 3 // 640x480 resolution
set cg_marktime 0 // bulletholes
set cg_brasstime 0 // shell casings
set cg_atmosphericeffects 0 // rain and snow
set cg_shadows 0 // shadows under players
set b_tracers 0 // bullet tracers (etpro servers only)
set b_muzzleflash 0 // your muzzleflash (etpro only)
set r_flares 0 // erm, flares
set cg_coronas 0 // halo effect around lightbulbs
set cg_enablebreath 0 // probably not much help, but meh
set cg_showblood 0 // blood when hitting others
set cg_bloodtime 0 // blood splattered on walls and ground
set cg_blooddamageblend 0 // blood in your eyes
set cg_bloodflash 0 // ditto
set cg_drawgun 0 // hide your gun. might be too disorienting - 1 turns it back on
set r_subdivisions 128 // low detail for curved surfaces
set r_picmip 3 // blurry textures. you might hate it - lower it to 0 or 1 if so
set r_lodbias 2 // crappy low detail models. set to 0 if you hate it
set cg_fov 90 // in case you've changed it from default
set r_dlightbacks 0 // backlighting of surfaces
set r_dynamiclight 0 // flashing light on nearby walls when firing
set cg_bobpitch 0 // bobbing vision crap. probably not much help for fps, but meh
set cg_bobroll 0 // ditto
set cg_bobup 0 // ditto
set cg_bobyaw 0 // ditto
set cg_runpitch 0 // ditto
set cg_runroll 0 // ditto
set r_texturebits 16 // lower texture detail
set r_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST // ditto
set r_detailtextures 0 // ditto (also forced by many servers anyway)
set r_colorbits 32 // you can try this at 16 but it might be unbearably sucky
set r_depthbits 24 // dont mess with this. 16 makes the game suck ass
set s_mixahead 0.1 // helps on a crappy PC. bump it up to 0.15 if sound gets garbled
set r_overbrightbits 0 // 1 may possibly decrease FPS depending on your system. try 0/1 and see
set r_swapinterval 0 // mentioned just in case, same reason as above
set b_althud 1 // or 2. etpro servers only. gets rid of the animated face, which is made of tris
set r_fastsky 1 // crappy single color sky. good fps boost
set r_drawsun 0 // the sun. meh, bit of cpu help if you left pretty sky on
set com_maxfps 43 // one of them magic numbers, just in case you reach it
set cg_drawfps 1 // see if all this crap is working
ill add more if i think of any. those are from memory and i just woke up, anyone feel free to correct errors. be aware that your game is going to look like crap. should get better fps tho
One more hint thatâs missing in ouroboroâs list - by all means disable r_primitives (big ugly framekiller on my machine, it can throw me from 30fps to 5) and make sure u have OpenGL extensions enabled (helps a lot on new cards, I think itâs a compatibility setting for very old cards that donât support them or have buggy implementations).
thanks for the time u put into doing that ourobouro! i really appreciate it
a question though:
i was looking around myself for some other tweaks in the meantime and some of them were in the format like this -eg.
seta âcg_shadowsâ â0â
seta âcg_showbloodâ â0â
seta âcg_wolfparticlesâ â0â
so it had seta instead of set
and " were used around the values eg âcg_shadowsâ â0â
can your way and this way be used?
thanks again
Quotes around the value works fine, but I donât think you should have them around the cvar names (it may work, but itâs ugly 
).
Thereâs no difference between set and seta afaik.
IIRC seta and set are the same in ET. They were different in RtCW/Q3.
BTW, another way to help your FPS is to defrag your hard drive, and do it often.
seta should mark the cvar as âarchiveâ and thus have it saved in your etconfig.cfg. However it is best to set everything expicitly in your personal cfg, since ET is buggy and puts etconfig files all over the place.
ouroboro is right. ET is CPU/FSB/Cache/memory speed hungry more than GPU hungry. Of course, what is actually limiting you depends on your system. If you post your system specs we might be able to give specific suggestions.
Also, servers with a lot of players will give you quite a bit worse FPS than smaller ones.
edit:
set r_overbrightbits 0 // mentioned in case youâve changed it to 1, which hoses FPS
Huh ? That is a brightness setting not a performance one. I seriously doubt it changes FPS.
heya guys, the help is appreciated up till now
i tried the tweaks and there is probably about +5fps improvement (if even) , but every little counts. iactually took some of the tweaks off as any enhanced preformance was offset by the game look crap and therefore more difficult to play.
but anyway, u asked for my specs so here there are (u may wanna compose urself and take a breathfor this beast)âŚ
p3 730MHz
256ram
radeon 9200 se 128mb (pci) graphics card (this is a new card, unfortunatly i only have pci slots in the machine and this was the best of a very bad lot)
actually, im kinda embarrased.
id say looking at that that iâts a lost cause 
:eek:
Think that might be the problem!! I would imagine the graphics card is feeling rather high powered in that machineâŚ
At least you can get the game to run, but ideally you need to upgrade!
If you think it might be very expensive to upgrade, I managed to get from Maplin Electronics an Athlon Barton Xp3000+ with case and Motherboard for ĂÂŁ180 a while back. I then bought an 80gb HD, a Radeon 9600 (256mb) and 512Mb ram from overclockers and threw it all together⌠All for under ĂÂŁ400⌠Am sure you could get a decent deal if you lok around⌠GL!
www.novatech.co.uk - buy one of their barbones PCâs ( $150-200) and use your exisiting Hard drive - add say a geforce 5500 for ĂÂŁ60 and bobâs your uncle!
set r_overbrightbits 0 // mentioned in case youâve changed it to 1, which hoses FPS
Huh ? That is a brightness setting not a performance one. I seriously doubt it changes FPS.
perhaps itâs just my system, but thatâs 15 fps i can keep and still attain that brightness without using that cvar.
to get those screenshots, i started with a freshly generated etconfig.cfg, applied the âhighâ system settings from the menu, set com_maxfps to 0 and cg_drawfps to 1 - then simply set r_overbrightbits to 0 and 1 respectively. i then opened them in imageready and adjusted the gamma to 1.3 to equal the in-game gamma (this is necessary since ET uses r_ignorehwgamma 0 by default). this also assumes your gamma ramp is at 1.0 in your operating system (most are). no other changes were made. i made those shots specifically for this post, but iâve been doing tests for a long time and have always come to the same conclusion about that cvar.
i could get even more anal and turn off rain, and record a demo and take the screenshots at the same exact time in the demo (in case the number of raindrops and position of the radars and/or clouds is effecting the results ;)), but i trust you will agree thereâs something to my claim just by those 2 shots.
also, in ET, r_ignorehwgamma is 0 by default. in RTCW it was 1 (and is forced to 1 by most servers). that makes a big difference in how effective r_overbrightbits is. it has a greater effect (both positive and negative) in ET, from my experience. i suspect most people run it at 1 in ET simply because they ran it at 999 in RTCW 
- another example of why itâs better to actually do oneâs own testing and experimenting, rather than simply plopping someone elseâs config in their /etmain, or copying over their old RTCW config into ET (iâm not saying you do that, just a generalization)
again, it could very well be that i have an unusual system, since iâve never done any testing on anyone elseâs box.
iâd suggest running your own tests, using timedemos and changing only that cvar in your config. i suspect you will be surprised with the results - but i could be wrong.
Lost cause pretty much says it. No amount of tweaking is going to give you good gameplay with that setup. The good news is that you should be able to get a system that plays a lot better pretty cheap. If you are on a really tight budget, you might be able to get a 1ghz p3, and another 256 megs of ram second hand very cheap. Assuming your motherboard can take it, that ought to put your system over the line from âbarely playableâ to âmodestly craptasticâ :moo:
Otherwise, you would need a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM. That need not cost a fortune, as even the âbudgetâ stuff is miles better than what you have got.
ouroboro:
Odd. My testing didnât show any difference, but Iâll take another look. Are you sure there werenât other settings waiting for a vid_restart ?
nah, and like i said, iâve always noticed a drop when that cvar was set to one, not just when i took those shots, but over a year or more of screwing around with cvars
hrm. well apparently itâs just me or maybe just some people then. so the thread starter can do his own tests and see which gives him better FPS - r_overbrightbits 1 or 0. i wonât make a blanket statement about that cvar anymore⌠v583
edit- oh but i should ask you sauron if you run r_ignorehwgamma at 1 or 0, because my tests show that r_overbrightbits does NOT decrease FPS if r_ignorehwgamma is at 1
???
i kinda think it wouldnt be able to handleany enhancements as itâs just piece of dell crap. also being just another destitute student means there is NO chance of me being able to afford anything in the near future. So i guess it means iâll have to soldier on with my behemoth machine firing out an astounding 15 fps!
thanks 4 the help/advice guys
hopefully someone else can use it to! 
Hmm, I did some timedemos and r_overbrightbits 1 does seem to cost me about 2 fps over a fairly long demo. This seemed reproducable over 5 runs.
I have r_ignorehwgamma 0 and am using a GF3, recent nividia drivers, Athlon XP@1.44ghz
Another thing I noticed is that r_overbrightbits 1 seems to have much different effects between fullscreen and windowed mode. The fps drop was observed in fullscreen mode.
Note that in general, timedemos will likely be more sensitive to video card related tweaks than real online play, since demo playback shouldnât require as much CPU.
Anyone have a good technical explaination of how
r_overbrightbits
r_mapoverbrightbits
r_intensity
r_gamma
work and interact ?
yeh, from what i have observed, the drop is less on an already heavily tweaked config, while itâs a lot worse on a more or less default config (as in my screenshots). basically i figure itâs up to the player if they want a TOTALLY washed out, whitewall effect and are willing to lose a few fps for it. personally, i dislike the effect of overbrightbits on a highly tweaked config anyway. i find it causes a loss of clarity for many objects, especially their borders.
as for the original post, i suggested he leave it at 0 because heâs looking for every frame he can get. my personal config has a few things in it that cost me a few frames but i consider it a fair trade for the benefit the cvar in question may give me.
itâs up to the player in the end.
