Performance tips

[Phred]

Can't find an appropriate thread to put this in as it's not an angst filled quit message or a pvp beef so here goes. The game uses a very cpu intensive method to display grass so turning the grass slider off can make the game way more responsive on planets like alderan and the other foliage heavy worlds. I told a friend about it and he was able to go up to the native rez on his laptop where it was unplayable before that.


edit. changed title to make it a general tips thread.

[ajax34i]

I believe the grass and tree sliders affect non-grass planets like Tatooine, too.  Specifically, the rocks that make up the canyon walls.

EDIT:  The biggest performance improvers are probably known by everyone by now:  turn V-sync on, turn Shadows off.

For computers that have audio built into the motherboard (Realtek, f.ex.), I think quite a bit of the sound processing is done in software (and thus on the CPU), so turning off the software graphics equalizer and/or the sound modification effects (room effect, concert hall, etc) helps drive the CPU load down.  Also, I can't live without the in-game sounds, but I think turning the in-game music slider down to 0 turns it off, which also seems to save a few cycles.  Game ran marginally better on my crappy-CPU computer with the music off.