Originally posted by: jjones
From the Publisher:
NOTE: There is a known issue with sound card drivers that is not documented in the readme. The side effect is reduced frame rate which manifests as a "stuttering" when you enter different EAX domains and other sound effects start cycling. But, there is a simple work around:
Update your sound card drivers. Ninety percent of the time this is the issue. We use a very advanced sound system for the 10,000 lines of dialogue, and often your sound card drivers are not up to date (or worse yet are the default windows drivers).
We also employ the use of an advanced autodetect system to calibrate the game for your video settings. On some configurations the system breaks down and assigns funny settings based upon bad information it gathers from drivers. We are working on improving this system for the full version of the game but until then consider going through the settings and manually adjusting them.
Here are the biggest performance-effecting settings:
1) Resolution (Consider reducing it)
2) Material Quality (This is what shader model you're using; a lesser one would decrease visual quality but increase performance.)
3) Reflections (Consider turning it off to improve framerate)
4) Anti Aliasing (Consider reducing it or switching it off)
Updated to latest drivers from Creative. That helped somewhat, at least now I can play the game reasonably if I set things to Good instead of Best.
As for the performance tips;
1. Droping lower than my native 1280x1024? don't think so.
2. Dropped this from Best to Good. So far I can not see any difference in the demo. There is no percievable difference in effect and graphical quality during game play (you probably have to pause the game and start looking really close at each and every effect in order to find the difference).
3. I wont even comment this one. You do not buy a 7800GT just to turn of the eye candy.
4. Turned this off. In some games this makes a great deal of visual quality, not so much in this timeshift demo, but it helped improve framerate.
As for the rest of my setup. Windows XP Pro, with all latest drivers installed, all crucial windows updates, and latest Direct X installed. No programs running in the background, and I even killed unnecessary services in order to try to gain more FPS. The greatest impact was to finally increase the priority of the game thread from Normal to High.