What do you do when your FPS is low?

[VladG]

Interesting, I personally never touch the resolution. If I can't play a game at my screen's native resolution... then I'm not playing it all. I find that lowering the resolution on an LCD display results in horribly blurry images, much more noticeable than the old CRT tubes.

Also forgot about AA, that's the first to go here as well.

 

[VladG]

My computer lags like mad when playing flash games. Dead serious. Is there anything I can do to make it not do that?

Might be a processor issue, flash content is pretty cpu intensive. A single core might not cut it anymore, there's also a bug in windows XP I've encountered on an old laptop, a normally low-resource windows process would go haywire and hog all my cpu power and it would be flash content that triggered it for some reason.

Check your task manager when you're having issues and see if something is using more cpu than it should

 

[Yopaz]

It usually goes back up, but if it's persistant I usually top playing. The one thing I like about console gaming is that framerates are usually constant, but I still prefer PC.

Consoles don't really have constant framerate and when it drops there's nothing you can do. I have experienced it several times on my Xbox.

OT: When I get low fps I will start by turning off non essential background programs. Depending on my computer I might even have to shut down explorer.exe. Then my step is to turn of AA, shadows then water. I am always willing to go very low on most settings since I care more about my fps than the graphics.

 

[lacktheknack]

I'm sorry, I don't know what that means.

<img width=300>http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lub72dmoje1qeyksp.jpg

Oh, fine. Back when I had a really crap computer, my first step was to drop the resolution, then the AA about half way, then the AF, then the other effects, then I'd kill off the rest of the AF, drop the resolution to minimum, and finally kill the AA.

And Tomb Raider: Legend's "Japanese Corporate Work Party" sequence would STILL fall to one frame per second.

I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore.

 

[Mr Pantomime]

I usually have my AA at 16, so I halve that, then motion blur and shadows. Ive never had to go much further than that.

 

[somonels]

I go to my Clean OS. That'll give me a dozen FPSs more. The only graphics setting I am interested in are resolution and draw distance.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

I like to actually set everything to its lowest setting and slowly turn up the graphics until my machine starts stuttering. Then I'll have found the sweet spot.

 

[Craorach]

Motion Blur, Shadows, AA Filtering, Water Effects.

I lived with a bad graphics card/processor combo for years... playing EQ2 I literally had to turn everything to the lowest possible settings.

 

[gideonkain]

Just discovered Game Booster 3 the other day, increased by performance by 42%.

 

[Yopaz]

It is usually a performance issue either by the game or the drivers whenever such a problem arises for me. If new drivers do not exist then I fiddle with what I can within in-game settings seeing if I can increase performance that way. If I cannot then I start diving into config files to look for settings that may not be changeable in game and see if I can get effects for that. If that fails I wait till the issue is ironed out before playing.

Consoles don't really have constant framerate and when it drops there's nothing you can do. I have experienced it several times on my Xbox.

They are suppose to however. If we look at older consoles they pretty much always preformed perfectly to the games designed for it. This has changed today which I think is a terrible thing for console gamers. Sadly I see this trend only continuing.

Yeah, it's a shame that consoles which have the one advantage that they're simple and that games are just supposed to work can't accomplish that anymore. Hopefully this is just because the consoles are too old to keep up and that we'll see some improvements with the next generation consoles.

 

[Death Carr]

Wonder how it could get any lower than it already is?

Then turn game booster on, fuck around with the settings etc.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I hate motion blur, so I turn that off immediately whether it's impacting my framerate or not. Next comes disabling v-sync and lowering anti-aliasing, then shadows. If the framerate still isn't good enough I back out of the game and disable any and all other processes I have running that don't have to do with the game, and finally if that doesn't work I lower the texture quality.

 

[JochemHippie]

Close every background program and lower the ingame res a little.
Usually does the trick.

And indeed, motion blur can go fuck itself.

 

[Zantos]

If I have any potions, that's the time to use them.

I start off by shutting off anything running in the background. If I don't get much more from that, I turn off all the extra graphics stuff. Then turn it down to "Look like arse" quality. If that hasn't worked, I go away and have a little cry.

 

[loc978]

Draw distance first, then shadows, water effects, anti-aliasing, and finally texture quality... Never had it go farther than that... and I don't think I've ever played a game with the option of "motion blur". If I have, I've never noticed it.

 

[bojackx]

Anti-Aliasing should be your first place to start, especially if it's 8x or higher, as 4x still looks absolutely fine. Then I move the texture settings down from very high to high, and then to medium, and if all that doesn't work, turn down the resolution.