I'm starting a tweaking thread because I'm fed up with having to scour the internet to make a game look and run properly for practically every game I buy, or worse, scour the internet for hours and discover there is no fix. I'd like to use this thread as a place to post fixes and improvements for PC games that may be a resource for other people with the same games. If you find a way to fix a problem, such as getting a decent form of AA to work or getting a game to display in the correct resolution, post the title of the game in bold and add it. I'll start with re-posting some improvements for The Walking Dead with some added info. The Walking Dead (AA and SLI) I've discovered a way to get a real form of antialiasing working with The Walking Dead, at least if you have an Nvidia card. I've tested it; this method works. You'll need Nvidia Inspector. Head to the profile for The Walking Dead. You'll need to input 0x200002C1 for AA compatibility. Then turn on 4x MSAA and 4x sparse grid super sampling AA. Change LOD bias to -1.000 and make sure it is set to Allow rather than Clamp. This seemed to clean up the image considerably without blurring up the screen. It's not a demanding or technically advanced game, so with a decent card you'll have plenty of power to use a potent form of AA. Turn off any post processing AA; it is not needed if you are using supersampling and will only lower image quality. Also, there's a way to get SLI working. I just ran across this last night. It seems to work. The compatibility bit for Mass Effect and the Borderlands games, which is 0x02406405, seems to also work for The Walking Dead. It's ridiculous that this is something that needs to be found through testing by the consumer. This should be available standard at release or at minimum via an update.
How to fix the stuttering problem in the PC version of Deus Ex Human Revolution: I've tried this and it works like a charm. It's not the easiest thing to find either. You'll have to comb through hundreds of forum posts of people bitching about the problem and coming up with fake solutions that don't work before they found the actual solution. The stuttering problem is annoying as fuck and makes the game borderline unplayable. It appears to be a problem with the way the game handles multiple CPU threads. The result being that if you don't have an i7 monster CPU, the game will stutter and run like poop. Although even some people with i5s and i7s were complaining about it. With this tweak, the game runs silky smooth all the way through even on a Core 2 Duo, so clearly the game is horribly optimized for the PC.
SMAA Injector (tested w/ Borderlands 2) For games that are too demanding to play at max for your GPU, this SMAA injector is pretty useful. http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html SMAA is similar to other post processing AA techniques, but SMAA doesn't blur up the image. It also is not very demanding. I think it looks significantly better than FXAA or MLAA as a result. I used it for Borderlands 2 until I found a way to get more advanced AA working. Download the injector files and copy and paste in the appropriate SMAA files depending on whether it's DX9 or whatever. The different files are separated by DirectX folders. In Borderlands 2, pressing Pause/Break turned it on and off in-game. One negative side effect was that it didn't seem to be compatible with the Afterburner overlay I use to check my GPU usage, fan speed, VRAM, ect. while this injector was installed. Otherwise, it's low computational cost AA that looks pretty good.
Crysis 2 (vsync) I just thought of a really ridiculous problem Crytek has been too lazy to fix. I have had major problems with that game when using vsync. I use adaptive vsync for almost every game, and Crysis 2 tends to limit the frames per second to 24 rather than 60. The bizarre trick to fix this and get vsync to work perfectly again is to set the game to windowed, exit to Windows, and then hit Ctrl+Enter just as you are booting up again. After that, adaptive vsync works and I get my 60 frames per second and full screen. Anyone have a fix for the cursor always being slightly off center in menus in every Crysis game? How do they manage to put together these cutting edge technologies but still can't fix bugs from 2007?
Mass Effect 3 I'd recommend using the Inspector antialiasing compatibility bit 0x000000C1 and MSAA + sparse grid super sampling AA instead of the standard 0x080100C5 bit for Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. The ME games aren't that demanding anyway, so you should be able to pull it off without a top end card. I think. Also, I noticed that there is a new option in the Nvidia 313.95 Beta driver, Vertical Sync Smooth AFR Behavior for SLI setups. I tried it with ME3, and it seemed to work just fine. Looked good with no problems. I have some more experimenting to do with it. There's also a weird "Vertical sync: On (Smooth)" setting in Control Panel in 313.95 that I haven't figured out yet. I'm assuming it's the same as the new AFR setting in Inspector. Also, if you are in the Crysis 3 Beta, this driver unfucks your SLI performance. 65% improvement.
Anyone tried Assassins Creed 3 for the PC? What a mess. Frequent FPS drops everywhere and the game hasn’t been patched since its release to correct the performance issues. This is for anyone experiencing fps issues on Nvidia cards. After fiddling around for awhile with the settings, I'm finally playing this game almost butter smooth now. Almost consistent 60fps. There's still some random stuttering here and there, which is annoying, but minor compared to before. Make sure you have the latest drivers (313.95) and Nvidia Inspector. Navigate to C:/Documents/Assassin's Creed III/Assassin3.ini Make sure you have vync turned off (So vysnc = 0) Set the Refresh rate to 60. Open up Nvidia Inspector and load the Assassin's Creed III profile: 1. Enable triple-buffering. 2. Enable Vsync (Force On) 3. Vertical Sync Tear Control I had as Standard, but Adaptive works well. 4. Limit the framerate 58fps (helps with input lag on 60hz) 5. Set power management mode to "Prefer maximum performance". When in-game turn down all the settings to Normal, although I did leave Textures on High as it had no discernible impact on the framerate. Both high and (especially) very high settings for Environmental quality reduce the game to a slideshow. For reference my specs are: core i5 2500k 12gb DDR3 GTX 570 SLI I had SLI disabled, because the game scales poorly with it enabled. Anyway, this made the game playable for me. My opinion of the game is that it pretty much stinks. Far too many cutscenes, zzzzzzzzz. I haven’t seen such a poorly optimized game either since GTA4. Hopefully these settings help someone.
I guess I'll just post this here since I'm not sure where else to put it. How to fix annoying overscan/underscan issues through HDMI on an AMD video card: -Make sure the HDMI input is set to "just scan" in the TV menu, not 16:9 -Make sure the HDMI input is labeled "PC" in the TV menu -In Catalyst, set overscan to 0% -Lower the resolution to a low, non-native resolution like 1024x768 -Lowering the resolution will ungrey the GPU scaling box in Catalyst (this is an annoying glitch AMD still hasn't fixed that can only be resolved by lowering the resolution) -Enable GPU scaling and set it to force/maintain 16:9 -Turn the resolution back up to 1920x1080 -This should give you perfect 1080p AMD needs to get its shit together. Connecting a PC to an HDTV through HDMI shouldn't be this much of a hassle in 2013. In fact, I would hope it would be pretty much plug and play. No wonder they're getting their asses handed to them by Intel and nVidia.