Hands up those of you who have had their Hellgate London bog down in seemingly open areas with very little activity? How many times have your fps (frames per second) gone from high 30’s to 0.3 (ie 1 frame every 3 seconds)?
Yeah I’ve had it happening to me too, and I had been scratching my head wondering why. If I could handle 30fps most of the time, even in heavy firefight with lots of explosions I can accept a slowdown to about 15 fps (ie half). To have my framerates drop so drastically from 30 odd to 0.3, that’s too much.
So I began to fiddle around a little, and concentrated on the graphics section. In the end, after much fiddling, I remembered reading about this small tweak from another game – if you have shadows on LOW, set it back to at least medium or HIGH. If you have Pixel Shaders on LOW, do the same, bring it back up.
Rationale – on LOW, these settings aren’t accelerated by the hardware, and thus handed over to the software part to render. Thus, your framerates will drop like crazy if you do not have an optimum-spec system to play the game, and think that lowering these settings will help.
So I set shaders and shadows back to medium, and viola! The framerates don’t drop that much anymore. Yes, during intense battles they still drop but not 1 frame every 3 seconds this time… this time, I could actually MOVE and aim and shoot…
