And the FPS Drops to about 30 Specs: I5 4690k @4.4ghz GTX960 @1.42ghz On garfield heights, and other maps the CPU has all four cores pushed to about 90% if you face some ways, if you face otherways the FPS goes back to 60 and the CPU usage drops to about 80%. Settings: All normal, Dynamic reflections on (Normal preset) and AA off I cant really overclock my CPU anyfurther, to get to 4.8ghz i need 1.43 volts (which is pushing it on air)
Anytime, man. Did you try none or partial shadowing? You might be able to get away with partial. And try to turn on anti aliasing with SMAA (this is important as FXAA is alot more demanding), it shouldn't lower your FPS too much and will make it much more graphically pleasing. Worst comes to worst, turn off AA. Also, try lighting quality around normal. Lastly, if you so miss dynamic reflections you can try to enable it and turn down the faces per update setting (this has the most FPS change) Edit: I just remembered. disable SSAO. Big increase.
For me disable partial shadows or none is almost same, hardly any difference, so on some maps I run without shadows because my CPU is not enough for them, I doubt there is CPU that is enough on some maps. Another trick is to enter into level editor (F11), wait until loaded, then on right there is search box, type info and hit enter, you should see levelinfo with blue icon, select that. You should see list of properties, select visual distance and type smaller numbers, 2200 meters is what I quite often use, but you need to play with it as sadly it also changes distance land is visible, hence my improvement suggestion that land/terrain should have it's own setting. Don't save changes, just hit F11 again or click play icon from toolbar. Garfield Heights has lot of objects, but also it has visual distance set to quite low by mod author, so lowering that might get things to look bit weird as you can see edge of the world being drawn when visual distance is set too low, for performance improving purposes I set it to 800, but you really need to experiment with it, it is probably too low. You can also remove one 0 from fog and change fog offset to 400 or so, I'm quite sure I lost some of the guys already, so just set numbers like in pic Fog settings are like this: fogDensity, that is how dense fog is, usually 0.000X by default, for shorter visual distance values take one zero away or more. fogDensityOffset, what is distance from the camera where fog density is 0, 400 is that withing 400 meters there is no fog. fogAtmosphereHeight, from ground (or is it from 0 height?) how high fog will go, sometimes you need to make fog higher. Reason to play with a fog is that you can have shorter visual distance if you are willing to accept driving in a foggy conditions, fog will mask out that border of drawn world that would otherwise be eye sore. Reason why this helps with performance is that every object, even tiniest piece of bridge casts shadows and that shadow is taking CPU time as long as it is within visual distance and your camera is facing direction of that object. So if you have structure that is made from 5 objects vs same structure that is made from 1 object, that 5 object structure calculates 5 times all edges etc. Or so I believe. Things start get problematic when there is more of those objects then, all shadows are calculated in single thread and your cpu will run out of power. Then other things related to shaders have their own effect, dynamic reflections are one big hit too, so all cores get their share of the workload eventually, but with visual distance you can get better performance with not too much of effect to visual quality. For example East Coast USA has visual distance of 4000 meters if I don't remember wrong, but you are driving mostly inside a forest, you can lower quite a bit of that without even seeing anything else but improvement to fps, surely there can be 1 or 2 places where you see lower visual distance, but you can make compromise how you like it with this information.
Looking off the edges of the world, because it is flat (according to Betsy Devos Queen Idiot anyways!), into the abyss, WILL CAUSE FPS TO PLUMMET. I am talking up to 50~80% FPS HIT. 300fps to 60fps! This has only happened since the newer version of the game that came out in december (or possibly the november update). All 3 of my maps do it. Many other map mods do it. I don't know why, it's like the game is trying to render infinite space and it's giving it troubles. It didn't used to be this way.
The world editor is ridiculously more laggy after the update, and it takes about 30 seconds just to get into it. One of the reasons I haven't been working on any of my maps lately actually.
I find world editor working much better when there are lot of free CPU cycles available, lowering and diabling mesh detail, dynamic reflections and shadows can help to keep editor running faster. Sadly task manager is not very good tool to find out if you have enough free CPU cycles as you can see here, so you need something faster to really find out what is going on with the CPU:
