Use this guide at your own risk!
Although nothing here will harm your computer, if you do something wrong, it might make CrimeCraft or other games not work or work oddly, and I cannot be held responsible if that happens.
This guide is for the people with ATI video cards and mid range computers that want to squeeze all the performance and eye candy out of CrimeCraft at the same time, while trying to maintain the best of both worlds. I thank Avarice for the Low Spec System guide, as the command line arguments are invaluable! This guide, however, is not purely performance. Sorry if it is lengthy, as I will try to be as descriptive as possible on each step to avoid confusion. Please do not be shy if something here confuses you, please let me know and ill try to better explain it, for you and others in the future.
We all know how CrimeCraft likes to drop frames even on the fastest of computers, so usually turning everything on is not a good thing no matter what rig you are sporting, but there are methods to lessen these frame dips without making the game look likes it came from the 90's :)
First you want to check out THIS thread where i explained how to reduce the input lag on your mouse. This is HIGHLY recommended if you have a ATI card. Of course, every ms counts, and could save your life one day ;)
After you do that, you will have ATI tray tools installed, this is the powerhouse of a tool that we will use.
First, we are going to create a profile for ATI Tray Tools to use so the settings will always apply before playing the game.
Right Click the ATT tray icon and at the top expand 'Game Profiles' then click 'Manage Profiles'
On the right side of Executable, click the Folder icon.
Steam Users:
Navigate to 'C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\crimecraft\Binaries' ('Program Files (x86)' If you are using 64-bit windows. If you see a C:\Program Files (x86) folder, you are using 64-bit windows) and double click 'CrimeCraft.exe'(might be displayed as simple 'CrimeCraft' with the CC double gun shield icon, if you have still have hidden file extensions)
Non-Steam Users:
Navigate to 'C:\Program Files\Vogster Entertainment\CrimeCraft\Binaries'('Program Files (x86)' if on 64-bit) and double click 'CrimeCraft.exe'(might be displayed as simple 'CrimeCraft' with the CC double gun shield icon, if you have still have hidden file extensions)
For European Servers:
The next line down, Parameters, Right Click and Copy everything INSIDE the quotes but do not copy the quotes: '-OVERRIDEYAKAADDRESS -YAKAADDRESS=188.138.118.123 -YAKAPORT=1111 -LANG=INT'
At the Very End of the line, INT can be replaced with the abbreviation of the language you want to use, like RUS(russian), BRA(Brazil, e.g., Portuguese), ESP(might be SPA, for Español), TUR(Turkish, the new language? I do not remember this one in the past) INT is English
For US Servers:
The next line down, Parameters, Right Click and Copy everything INSIDE the quotes but do not copy the quotes: '-OVERRIDEYAKAADDRESS -YAKAADDRESS=68.71.252.14 -YAKAPORT=1111 -LANG=INT'
At the Very End of the line, INT can be replaced with The abbreviation of the language you want to use, like RUS(russian) BRA(Brazil, e.g., Portuguese) ESP(might be SPA, for espaniol) TUR(Turkish, the new language? I do not remember this one in the past) INT is English
Everyone:
On the Top Line name the Profile, i just typed 'Crimecraft Optimized'. call it whatever you want.
On top of the windows, Click the 'Direct3D Tweaks' tab
Check the box that says 'Force to use triple buffers'. This will lessen the frequency and severity of frame dips in all games, including CrimeCraft, although it will not cure it completely unfortunately.
Click back to the first tab '3D General' and Check the box next to '3D to'
Select Custom Settings from the dropdown box. Then click Edit.
In the middle of the windows, Under 'Anisotropic Filtering', Select '2x' from the Drop Down box, and select the 'Performance' Option Box. Not only does this add a little detail to the game, it increases fps sometimes vs outdated texture filtering methods used in some games, including CrimeCraft. Adding this superior texture filter option added 3-5 fps for me.
If you see the Option Tessellation(your card must support it), Select 'Manual' and '1' on the selections. For some reason manually setting this to 'Manual' and '1' adds two fps on every game i have that does not have native tessalation support. This one confuses me as well.
In the Performance category, Leaving these at High Quality will be fine for most. The best bang for your buck is to reduce Mip Map detail level to Quality(second from the top) and frame dips might be smoothed out when complicated scenes come into view(like many people or objects) at almost no loss in image quality.
Click the Second Tab At top '3D Additional'. Put a checkmark in all boxes in the 'Tweaks' Category except 'Alternate Pixel Centers', Leave that one unchecked.
'Temporal AntiAliasing' depends on you. If set too heavy, can cause it's own frame dips, but it is great if setup correctly. '2x' recommended to prevent noticeable frame dipping.
I like keeping my frame rate as close to 62 as possible(it cannot go higher in CrimeCraft, CrimeCraft will never run at a frame rate higher than 62) and anything lower than 50 i can really feel, So i Set Temporal AA to 2x, on the next drop down box select Manual, then in the text box type in 50. This means this feature will only be used if you are maintaining 50 or more fps. Also Temporal AA + low frame rate causes bugs, so remember to put in a High frame rate if you do what to use it.
In the Additional Category, Select 'Performance' on the 'Catalyst AI' setting, this will automatically use tricks to increase performance without noticeably decreasing quality(with emphasis on performance) automatically.
Check the Box 'Enable Surface format Optimizations'. yet another performance tweak without a significant image quality hit.
On texture LOD, move the slider to '0.1'. This will instantly add 2-4 fps on larger maps without any noticeable image quality drop at all. I presume setting it to '0.1' allows a virtual loss less compression, I am not sure, just another AMD Driver oddity.
You should already have flip queue size set, I use '1' now, although i used '2' in the past with the understanding it would help prevent frame dips, i have found this is not the case for me. The setting '1' Never gives me input lag, regardless of the severity of a frame drop(an odd side affect is, if you frame dip, you might not see yourself move right away, but when the frame dips end, your aim might have moved much farther than you expected, as the input itself did not lag at all. Using '1' allows for a much more predictable mouse movemnt in lag even if it doesnt feel 'right' at first.).
Press Ok then Save(The purple floppy disc on the bottom right), then press the Button 'Create Desktop Shortcut'
Your Set! You can run the game from that shortcut now.
ATTENTION! Remember to run the original launcher before using this shortcut to check if CrimeCraft has been updated. Since we are bypassing the launcher, it will still need to be ran periodically to keep the game updated, although the shortcut we crated should never need updating, unless the server IP address changes again.
Unless you understand what we are doing, and can reverse any thing you do wrong, I suggest you ignore the rest of this post. Go test out crmecraft :D
__________________________________________________________________________________
Experimental Tweaks:
These tweaks may or may not work, and might mess stuff up or even degrade performance. Ignore this unless you are confident you can reverse anything you do.
Right Click the ATT tray icon, Expand 'Tweaks', then click 'Advanced Tweaks'
In the Drop Down Box at the Top, Select Advanced D3D Tweaks.
Check the box 'Forced Compressed Stencil Buffer' And hit Apply.
In the Drop Down Box at the Top, Select Multithread Support.
This one requires knowledge of the hardware you are using. If you do not know how many threads your processor uses(Intel typically has two threads per CORE, AMD has one thread per CORE) then just skip this, you will probably only decrease performance.
Check the box, Enables MT Support.
In the Box Maximum Working Threads, Set it initially to 'number of CORES you have, minus one, times threads per core', so if you have a four core AMD, use 3, if you have a four core Intel, enter 6(not 7, as seven will still cause work to perform on the 4th core). For Intel's use this math: (('number of cores' - 1) x 2).
In the Box Minimum Working Threads, Put '0' in the box.
If this Setting Causes a performance drop, lower the number of threads used until you find the sweet spot. Setting this too high can hurt the performance of games as games also need the processor for things other than frame rate. It's smart to leave one full core At least for CrimeCraft.
For People who really want Experimental Higher performance AntiAliasing:
Right Click the ATT tray icon, Expand 'Tweaks', then click 'Advanced Tweaks'
On the Top Drop Down Box, select New AA and AF methods.
Click the checkbox 'Disable Support for Adaptive AA' and 'Disable Support for High Quality AF' until both boxes are 'null'. What i mean is neither checked nor unchecked, usually a solid block is filling the checkbox.
Put a check Next to: 'EATM', 'SAAOM', 'ATMAlphaFix', 'ATMAlphaSharpenMode', Then hit Apply and close the window.
Right Click the ATT tray icon and Go to 'Game Profiles'->'Manage Profiles'. On the Bottom Drop Down list, select the profile you created for CrimeCraft, I used 'CrimeCraft Optimized' Click 'Edit' next to the '3D To' line.
Next to AntiAliasing, select 2x. On Filter, select Edge Detect. On Anti-Alias Mode select 'Adaptive Multi-sample AA'(If this doesn't work for you try setting it to Multisample AA). For some This particular AA method is less impressive as others, although some experience 8x looksing AA at the performance a little better than 4x box. If this doesn't work, you can experiment until you find one that impresses you.
If the last method did not work for you, or you simply did not like it, there is also Morphological Filtering(my absolute favorite filtering any card offers). Not all ATI cards have this feature, in fact very few do. If you have a 6000 series card chances are you are in luck, if you have a 5000 series card, this might not work for you, but some 5000 series cards work, like the popular 5770. I do not think any 4000 series cards have Morphological Filtering Support.
Antialiasing: 2x
Filter: Box
Anti Aliasing Mode: Adaptive Multi-sample AA(i do not think it matters)
Morphological Filtering: Check the checkbox.
Press Ok and Save.
Wow that was much longer than I expected. I hope this guide can help some of you get the most out of your video card without suffering a noticeable loss in quality. If you have a midrange computer, you deserve to have a decent looking game run at acceptable frame rate.
I was not able to fit everything in here, and i left a lot of details out just to prevent too much clutter. If i missed anything critical, please let me know.
Hope this helps everyone :D
Edit:
If you recieve a hackshield cheat report after installing Ati Tray Tools, you will need to disable the Overlay. I have always used the overlay and have never been kicked, but some people are not so fortunate.
To Disable the overlay, Right click on the tray icon->Tools and Options->Click On Screen Display. Uncheck the very first Option 'Enable OnScreen Display' and press OK. Thanks GladJolt for reminding me.
Last Edited on: Jan 02 2012 02:52 AM UTC (143 Days ago)
Submitting...
"Thief"
Use this guide at your own risk!
Although nothing here will harm your computer, if you do something wrong, it might make CrimeCraft or other games not work or work oddly, and I cannot be held responsible if that happens.
This guide is for the people with ATI video cards and mid range computers that want to squeeze all the performance and eye candy out of CrimeCraft at the same time, while trying to maintain the best of both worlds. I thank Avarice for the Low Spec System guide, as the command line arguments are invaluable! This guide, however, is not purely performance. Sorry if it is lengthy, as I will try to be as descriptive as possible on each step to avoid confusion. Please do not be shy if something here confuses you, please let me know and ill try to better explain it, for you and others in the future.
We all know how CrimeCraft likes to drop frames even on the fastest of computers, so usually turning everything on is not a good thing no matter what rig you are sporting, but there are methods to lessen these frame dips without making the game look likes it came from the 90's :)
First you want to check out THIS thread where i explained how to reduce the input lag on your mouse. This is HIGHLY recommended if you have a ATI card. Of course, every ms counts, and could save your life one day ;)
After you do that, you will have ATI tray tools installed, this is the powerhouse of a tool that we will use.
First, we are going to create a profile for ATI Tray Tools to use so the settings will always apply before playing the game.
Right Click the ATT tray icon and at the top expand 'Game Profiles' then click 'Manage Profiles'
On the right side of Executable, click the Folder icon.
Steam Users:
Navigate to 'C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\crimecraft\Binaries' ('Program Files (x86)' If you are using 64-bit windows. If you see a C:\Program Files (x86) folder, you are using 64-bit windows) and double click 'CrimeCraft.exe'(might be displayed as simple 'CrimeCraft' with the CC double gun shield icon, if you have still have hidden file extensions)
Non-Steam Users:
Navigate to 'C:\Program Files\Vogster Entertainment\CrimeCraft\Binaries'('Program Files (x86)' if on 64-bit) and double click 'CrimeCraft.exe'(might be displayed as simple 'CrimeCraft' with the CC double gun shield icon, if you have still have hidden file extensions)
For European Servers:
The next line down, Parameters, Right Click and Copy everything INSIDE the quotes but do not copy the quotes: '-OVERRIDEYAKAADDRESS -YAKAADDRESS=188.138.118.123 -YAKAPORT=1111 -LANG=INT'
At the Very End of the line, INT can be replaced with the abbreviation of the language you want to use, like RUS(russian), BRA(Brazil, e.g., Portuguese), ESP(might be SPA, for Español), TUR(Turkish, the new language? I do not remember this one in the past) INT is English
For US Servers:
The next line down, Parameters, Right Click and Copy everything INSIDE the quotes but do not copy the quotes: '-OVERRIDEYAKAADDRESS -YAKAADDRESS=68.71.252.14 -YAKAPORT=1111 -LANG=INT'
At the Very End of the line, INT can be replaced with The abbreviation of the language you want to use, like RUS(russian) BRA(Brazil, e.g., Portuguese) ESP(might be SPA, for espaniol) TUR(Turkish, the new language? I do not remember this one in the past) INT is English
Everyone:
On the Top Line name the Profile, i just typed 'Crimecraft Optimized'. call it whatever you want.
On top of the windows, Click the 'Direct3D Tweaks' tab
Check the box that says 'Force to use triple buffers'. This will lessen the frequency and severity of frame dips in all games, including CrimeCraft, although it will not cure it completely unfortunately.
Click back to the first tab '3D General' and Check the box next to '3D to'
Select Custom Settings from the dropdown box. Then click Edit.
In the middle of the windows, Under 'Anisotropic Filtering', Select '2x' from the Drop Down box, and select the 'Performance' Option Box. Not only does this add a little detail to the game, it increases fps sometimes vs outdated texture filtering methods used in some games, including CrimeCraft. Adding this superior texture filter option added 3-5 fps for me.
If you see the Option Tessellation(your card must support it), Select 'Manual' and '1' on the selections. For some reason manually setting this to 'Manual' and '1' adds two fps on every game i have that does not have native tessalation support. This one confuses me as well.
In the Performance category, Leaving these at High Quality will be fine for most. The best bang for your buck is to reduce Mip Map detail level to Quality(second from the top) and frame dips might be smoothed out when complicated scenes come into view(like many people or objects) at almost no loss in image quality.
Click the Second Tab At top '3D Additional'. Put a checkmark in all boxes in the 'Tweaks' Category except 'Alternate Pixel Centers', Leave that one unchecked.
'Temporal AntiAliasing' depends on you. If set too heavy, can cause it's own frame dips, but it is great if setup correctly. '2x' recommended to prevent noticeable frame dipping.
I like keeping my frame rate as close to 62 as possible(it cannot go higher in CrimeCraft, CrimeCraft will never run at a frame rate higher than 62) and anything lower than 50 i can really feel, So i Set Temporal AA to 2x, on the next drop down box select Manual, then in the text box type in 50. This means this feature will only be used if you are maintaining 50 or more fps. Also Temporal AA + low frame rate causes bugs, so remember to put in a High frame rate if you do what to use it.
In the Additional Category, Select 'Performance' on the 'Catalyst AI' setting, this will automatically use tricks to increase performance without noticeably decreasing quality(with emphasis on performance) automatically.
Check the Box 'Enable Surface format Optimizations'. yet another performance tweak without a significant image quality hit.
On texture LOD, move the slider to '0.1'. This will instantly add 2-4 fps on larger maps without any noticeable image quality drop at all. I presume setting it to '0.1' allows a virtual loss less compression, I am not sure, just another AMD Driver oddity.
You should already have flip queue size set, I use '1' now, although i used '2' in the past with the understanding it would help prevent frame dips, i have found this is not the case for me. The setting '1' Never gives me input lag, regardless of the severity of a frame drop(an odd side affect is, if you frame dip, you might not see yourself move right away, but when the frame dips end, your aim might have moved much farther than you expected, as the input itself did not lag at all. Using '1' allows for a much more predictable mouse movemnt in lag even if it doesnt feel 'right' at first.).
Press Ok then Save(The purple floppy disc on the bottom right), then press the Button 'Create Desktop Shortcut'
Your Set! You can run the game from that shortcut now.
ATTENTION! Remember to run the original launcher before using this shortcut to check if CrimeCraft has been updated. Since we are bypassing the launcher, it will still need to be ran periodically to keep the game updated, although the shortcut we crated should never need updating, unless the server IP address changes again.
Unless you understand what we are doing, and can reverse any thing you do wrong, I suggest you ignore the rest of this post. Go test out crmecraft :D
__________________________________________________________________________________
Experimental Tweaks:
These tweaks may or may not work, and might mess stuff up or even degrade performance. Ignore this unless you are confident you can reverse anything you do.
Right Click the ATT tray icon, Expand 'Tweaks', then click 'Advanced Tweaks'
In the Drop Down Box at the Top, Select Advanced D3D Tweaks.
Check the box 'Forced Compressed Stencil Buffer' And hit Apply.
In the Drop Down Box at the Top, Select Multithread Support.
This one requires knowledge of the hardware you are using. If you do not know how many threads your processor uses(Intel typically has two threads per CORE, AMD has one thread per CORE) then just skip this, you will probably only decrease performance.
Check the box, Enables MT Support.
In the Box Maximum Working Threads, Set it initially to 'number of CORES you have, minus one, times threads per core', so if you have a four core AMD, use 3, if you have a four core Intel, enter 6(not 7, as seven will still cause work to perform on the 4th core). For Intel's use this math: (('number of cores' - 1) x 2).
In the Box Minimum Working Threads, Put '0' in the box.
If this Setting Causes a performance drop, lower the number of threads used until you find the sweet spot. Setting this too high can hurt the performance of games as games also need the processor for things other than frame rate. It's smart to leave one full core At least for CrimeCraft.
For People who really want Experimental Higher performance AntiAliasing:
Right Click the ATT tray icon, Expand 'Tweaks', then click 'Advanced Tweaks'
On the Top Drop Down Box, select New AA and AF methods.
Click the checkbox 'Disable Support for Adaptive AA' and 'Disable Support for High Quality AF' until both boxes are 'null'. What i mean is neither checked nor unchecked, usually a solid block is filling the checkbox.
Put a check Next to: 'EATM', 'SAAOM', 'ATMAlphaFix', 'ATMAlphaSharpenMode', Then hit Apply and close the window.
Right Click the ATT tray icon and Go to 'Game Profiles'->'Manage Profiles'. On the Bottom Drop Down list, select the profile you created for CrimeCraft, I used 'CrimeCraft Optimized' Click 'Edit' next to the '3D To' line.
Next to AntiAliasing, select 2x. On Filter, select Edge Detect. On Anti-Alias Mode select 'Adaptive Multi-sample AA'(If this doesn't work for you try setting it to Multisample AA). For some This particular AA method is less impressive as others, although some experience 8x looksing AA at the performance a little better than 4x box. If this doesn't work, you can experiment until you find one that impresses you.
If the last method did not work for you, or you simply did not like it, there is also Morphological Filtering(my absolute favorite filtering any card offers). Not all ATI cards have this feature, in fact very few do. If you have a 6000 series card chances are you are in luck, if you have a 5000 series card, this might not work for you, but some 5000 series cards work, like the popular 5770. I do not think any 4000 series cards have Morphological Filtering Support.
Antialiasing: 2x
Filter: Box
Anti Aliasing Mode: Adaptive Multi-sample AA(i do not think it matters)
Morphological Filtering: Check the checkbox.
Press Ok and Save.
Wow that was much longer than I expected. I hope this guide can help some of you get the most out of your video card without suffering a noticeable loss in quality. If you have a midrange computer, you deserve to have a decent looking game run at acceptable frame rate.
I was not able to fit everything in here, and i left a lot of details out just to prevent too much clutter. If i missed anything critical, please let me know.
Hope this helps everyone :D
Edit:
If you recieve a hackshield cheat report after installing Ati Tray Tools, you will need to disable the Overlay. I have always used the overlay and have never been kicked, but some people are not so fortunate.
To Disable the overlay, Right click on the tray icon->Tools and Options->Click On Screen Display. Uncheck the very first Option 'Enable OnScreen Display' and press OK. Thanks GladJolt for reminding me.
Last Edited on: Jan 02 2012 02:52 AM UTC (143 Days ago)