Tweaks

[Nil]

I'm not sure why I haven't posted this before, but in the interest of putting things in one place, here are Mort's Vanguard tweaks. I don't take any credit for this. Mort is the man.

Important to note that while this WILL work for many of you, it won’t work for ALL of you (I’m rolling back my drivers and then defragging after this, but if that doesn’t work, it certainly didn’t work for me yet)

Also, I don’t think that ANY of these tweaks are “supported” so before you do ANYTHING, make a copy of the file you are about to change and save it somewhere in the event that you need to revert back to basics.

I’ll try to make this as clear and easy to follow as I can.

#1 GENERAL Tweaks
A) FIRST, be sure to defragment after install. Seriously, this has a HUGE impact on the game’s performance.
B) Turn off your AV program and/or Firewall. I know you hate the idea of it but try it, if it doesn’t help then you know you can leave it on.
C) Google the program RivaTuner 2.0 and set the card to force shading at 2.0. if anyone else figures this out please let me know. personally I think this program stinks. THIS IS AN ADVANCED TWEAK don’t mess with anything else unless you know what you’re doing!!!
D) In the in-game settings, change sound settings to “Hardware”
E) In the in-game settings, set the resolution to 1024×768
F) In the in-game settings, turn off HDR
G) NVidia 6xxx series users, Tru using the older “71″ series drivers. Linky goodness
H) ATI users (I’m one myself) by far, ATI users with AMD proc’s tend to be having the most problems aside from the Nvidia 6xxx users. I’ve been told to try the catylist 6.8 drivers (which can be found Here) I am currently using these drivers and still have the older 6.7 driver install program, I can’t find it on the web, but I haven’t really searched for too long. the original filename is : 6-7_xp-2k_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_34826 so for those who want to try a driver rollback, there you go.
I) Also for ATI peeps, Rumor has it that the Omega drivers (www.omegadrivers.net) give some folks SIGNIFICANT increases in quality and speed. UPDATE!!! My personal test shows only a ~1 FPS gain and what’s worse is that the Omega drivers don’t support OC’ing for the 1300+ series of cards. DOUBLE worse is that reverting back to the Catalyst 6.8 drivers no longer allow ATI tool to OC my ATI 1300pro and deleted my openGL drivers which the ATI installer didn’t like re-installing (I know, weak card. Give it a rest already)
I) Someone previously suggested starting the client and then Alt+Tabbing to desktop, bringing up the Task Manager, Going to processes, selecting the VGClient.exe file and setting the priority to high. might work for some.
J) TURN OFF Hardware Occulsion while in the field and TURN IT BACK ON in town. The FPS gain in the field (for me) is close to 10!!!

#2 VGCLIENT.INI Tweaks
go to:
[install drive]:\ProgramFiles\Sony\Vanguard\bin\vgclient.ini

Open it using notepad and make the following changes:
AnisotropicFiltering=off (which supposedly works for NVidia folks VERY well) Side Note: ALSO go into your card’s propertied and change this there as well
UseJoystick=False (I don’t know why but this did give me an extra 3-5 FPS)
UsePrecaching=True (For NVidia folks and some ATI folks, this is the holy grail)
UseTrilinear=False (For some folks this was an incredible boost)
UseCubemaps=False (I only noticed an ugly load screen, the game still looks fine to me)
ReduceMouseLag=False (this has worked for a few folks as well)
UseTripleBuffering=True (Only do this if you also set the vsync)
UseVSync=True (it gave me a few extra FPS)
UseSound=False (You lose the sound but can pick up nearly 5-10 FPS!!!)
Side note: instead of turning sound off you CAN set LowQualitySound=True instead!
GlobalHardwareSkinning=True (gave me a noticable bump 2-5FPS-ish)
TextureDetailWorld=5 (this controls the texture details, raising this to 5-7ish can save you a significant amount of memory and reduce stuttering. This can range from 0-7, 0 being the most detailed textures to 7 being lowest texture detail)
RenderQuality=5 (Setting this to 5 sets the game into “very high” mode but coupled with a higher TextureDetailWorld setting, it will give you the special effects of very high with the memory requirements/stuttering of a low or medium settings)

(NOTE: Changing the in-game drop-down graphics settings to Medium or High (or whatever you change it to) changes BOTH RenderQuality and TextureDetailWorld to their default settings. The trick is to adjust all the in-game settings FIRST, THEN mess with the .ini settings for these two and don’t flip between low/med at all in-game since that would reset this change)

If you know of another good tweak, post it here.