Originally posted by Yalexy

Yeah, you're right, the GTX460 has 336 CUDA-cores and 192-bit, but they're comparable to the 384 cores and 128bit of the GTX660M.

Anyways, technical nitpicking aside, the GTX660M is comparable in performance to the GTX460 and this performance allows to run TSW with all settings on low.

No, they're not comparable.  One Fermi shader is not comparable to one Kepler shader.  GTX 460 shaders had a stock clock speed of anywhere from 1.3 GHz to 1.556 GHz.  GeForce GTX 660M shaders have a stock clock speed of 835 MHz.  But again, it depends on which GTX 460 you're talking about, as Nvidia recycled the name a lot.

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-460/specifications

Kepler cards have much better memory controllers than the broken Fermi memory controllers, which would allow Nvidia to clock memory much higher and get the same memory bandwidth with two channels in Kepler cards that they'd have needed three for in Fermi cards.  In desktop cards, they do roughly that, but the GeForce GTX 660M doesn't, in order to save on power consumption, as GDDR5 is quite the power hog.

Originally posted by grimgryphon

I have this laptop and play TSW on it.

Do the following:

1. Run in DX11
2. Go to Settings -> Video Options and set the graphics preset to "Ultra"
3. Set AA to 'FXAAHQ'
4. Set Tesselation to 'none'
5. Set SSAO to 'none'
6. Go to advanced tab and set Advanced GFX Effects to '0' (it seems this setting only applies to Tesselation and SSAO, which are off)

I get 40-50 fps in most areas with that and it's beautiful. :-)

Moving the lighting slider in advanced can also can increase the fps. Play around with that too.

Hope this helps.

SSAO should definitely be off, as that's ugly fake shadows with an enormous performance hit.  That's not specific to TSW; that's fundamentally what SSAO is.  FXAA is certainly a good idea if the game supports it properly (i.e., applies it to 3D models but not 2D text and icons), as it's a much smaller performance hit than MSAA, let alone SSAA.

Depending on how the game models are set up, you may or may not have to turn tessellation off entirely.  If they start with high-triangle models and then use tessellation to break them up into even more triangles, then they've missed the point of tessellation, so you might as well turn it off.  But if they start with low-triangle models, then a moderate amount of tessellation will make the game look quite a bit better with only a modest performance hit.

I'll add that you should probably mess with shadows and see how that affects performance.  Doing shadows properly would bring such an enormous performance hit that the hardware necessary to make a game playable doesn't exist.  And no, quad CrossFireX Radeon HD 7970s or quad SLI GeForce GTX 680s wouldn't get the job done.  Games tend to use ugly approximations that reduce the performance hit considerably, with a choice on a continuum ranging from somewhat ugly with a huge performance hit to extremely hideous with a mild performance hit.  I don't know where TSW shadows land on that scale, but it's worth tinkering with--and make sure you compare it to turning shadows off entirely.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by grimgryphon

I have this laptop and play TSW on it.

Do the following:

1. Run in DX11
2. Go to Settings -> Video Options and set the graphics preset to "Ultra"
3. Set AA to 'FXAAHQ'
4. Set Tesselation to 'none'
5. Set SSAO to 'none'
6. Go to advanced tab and set Advanced GFX Effects to '0' (it seems this setting only applies to Tesselation and SSAO, which are off)

I get 40-50 fps in most areas with that and it's beautiful. :-)

Moving the lighting slider in advanced can also can increase the fps. Play around with that too.

Hope this helps.

SSAO should definitely be off, as that's ugly fake shadows with an enormous performance hit.  That's not specific to TSW; that's fundamentally what SSAO is.  FXAA is certainly a good idea if the game supports it properly (i.e., applies it to 3D models but not 2D text and icons), as it's a much smaller performance hit than MSAA, let alone SSAA.

Depending on how the game models are set up, you may or may not have to turn tessellation off entirely.  If they start with high-triangle models and then use tessellation to break them up into even more triangles, then they've missed the point of tessellation, so you might as well turn it off.  But if they start with low-triangle models, then a moderate amount of tessellation will make the game look quite a bit better with only a modest performance hit.

Tesselation really doesn't make the game look that much better to me. It certainly won't break my immersion while playing because I don't have bumpy gravel ;-)

Even the highest preset (Ultra) doesn't turn it on by default, which indicates to me that the developers didn't invest in it much more than to create additional eye-candy.

Disclaimer: I still play UO regularly so chances are graphics are not my highest priority. :-)

Originally posted by grimgryphon

Tesselation really doesn't make the game look that much better to me. It certainly won't break my immersion while playing because I don't have bumpy gravel ;-)

If bumpy gravel is the most notable effect of tessellation, then it sounds like they've missed the point.  Think of it as the graphical equivalent of a crafting system that lets you grind crafting levels by crafting a zillion of some stupid item, but never lets you craft anything that you actually want, no matter how high your level gets.  That's more a marketing checkbox than a game feature.

At least it beats what Crysis 2 did with tessellation:  massive amounts of tessellation of objects that are completely flat so that tessellation makes no visual difference whatsoever.  Also, massive amounts of tessellation of water that is completely invisible because it's underneath the game world.

Ahhh well playing the trial now. Game seems like a lot of fun. But my laptop clips a lot. Game slows down and such.

Shame shame. Going to keep messing with the graphics till I find the sweet spot. 

Hell what resolution should I put it on? It looks so weird right now. Kind of grainy.

Well I keep playing but the FPS shoots down hardcore too frequently for me to play. I keep changingthe graphics but itll play perfect for a few minutes then will go back to the way it was. It is very odd.

Not too sure how to fix it. Maybe my computer can just not play it : (

Originally posted by Duilyon

Hell what resolution should I put it on? It looks so weird right now. Kind of grainy.

 

 

Well I keep playing but the FPS shoots down hardcore too frequently for me to play. I keep changingthe graphics but itll play perfect for a few minutes then will go back to the way it was. It is very odd.

 

Not too sure how to fix it. Maybe my computer can just not play it : (

Not sure what to tell you. We have the same computer and mine runs just fine. What else do you have running that might interfere with bandwidth or processing? Maybe shut down some Windows services?

Make sure you have the laptop plugged into the wall whenever trying to play games.  You don't want power-saving settings to kick in and switch you to integrated graphics.

Also make sure that it's well-ventilated, and you're not blocking any air vents.  Overheating will cause clock speeds to thottle back severely.

You can check directly on the bottleneck monitoring your hardware.  You can look at processor activity in Task Manager.  AMD Catalyst Control Center lets you check on the GPU activity of an AMD card, so I'd expect that Nvidia Control Panel would do the same for an Nvidia card, but I haven't had an Nvidia card recently.