PC Performance Guide for Gamers February 16, 2008
Posted by r4v3n27 in Computers and Stuff.add a comment
If you’ve ever wondered how to improve the performance of your PC for gaming, this guide is for you. Please note that I did not write it myself; I am simply reposting it here with the permission of the original author, BillZBubba from the City of Heroes Forum. Also, this guide does not deal with video card optimizations; I will try to get permission to repost BillZBubba’s ATI guide as well.
Bill Z Bubba’s System Performance Guide (Rev 3)
Hello again, everyone. Since I consolidated my ATI Settings Guide, I decided to make sure everything was still as correct as I could get it for this guide. I removed from this guide a section on video optimizations, as the above guide should have most of the info. Instead, section four of this guide will have some general information that you may or may not find useful.
This guide is broken up into four sections:
Section One will cover MY computing philosophy when it comes to gaming, and will lay out the groundwork for WHY you should follow the other sections within this guide.
Section Two will cover Basic system cleanup and security. This section should improve performance and take minimal effort on your part.
Section Three will cover Advanced system cleanup. This section is not for little wussies that are a-scareded of learning too much.
Section Four consists of some tidbits and other items that have come up from time to time.
Let’s begin!
SECTION ONE (Casual computing equates to a sub-par gaming experience)
A little history to get the ball rolling seems to be in order. I am a gamer. I am also addicted to the eye candy that has been rolling off the shelves in the past few years. The advances made in the 3D graphics community have been nothing short of phenomenal over the last decade. The technological dance between the hardware vendors and the software writers has taken us from Pong to the gloriousness of City of Heroes/Villains, F.E.A.R., and Far Cry.
Even early on, I found that my knowledge was inadequate to the task of keeping up with the accelerating evolution of the gaming industry. What could I possibly do to alleviate this problem? I became a tech. Not only has this kept me mostly up to date with the goings on of PC architecture, but it allowed me to fund my addiction.
The two now play hand in hand with my most favorite of hobbies, but there has been a price. I now REFUSE to game unless I’ve properly optimized every facet of the device which allows me to game. In order to have the performance, the eye candy and the lack of issues I have, sacrifices were made. Knowledge was gathered. And Bill’s PC tweak guide is the product. Well, the real product is my game system. The guide is only to help others enjoy their gaming more.
My system:
The motherboard: ASUS P4C800-E
The video card: Xtacy Radeon X800XT AGP 256MB
The ram: 2GB of DDR400 PC3200 4X512MB
The sound: Creative Audigy 2 with 5.1 speaker setup
The monitor: 24″ widescreen LCD running at 1920X1200
The hard drive: 7200 RPM 60GB running on SATA
The case: CasEdge Diabolic Minotaur
I game on this system. I also use it to store my mp3s, with which I play my bass guitar whilst listening to them with WinAmp. NOTHING else occurs on my game system.
No anti-virus solutions, no software firewalls, no MS Office, nada, zip, nothing. If you wish to have one system that you do everything on, that’s your choice, or your financial situation, but doing so is against my philosophy. I have a separate desktop for all my other computing needs. I advise, if at all possible, that you do the same.
The philosophy: If I’m going to game, I deserve the best that I can get out of the hardware that I can afford. We all deserve this, but ONLY YOU can make it happen.
Microsoft sure as hell won’t help you, the vid card manufacturers want you to drop $500 every 4 months, 3rd party software vendors don’t give a damn about your performance, so it’s YOUR job to make things right.
If you are not prepared to learn a few things, and work hard for your gaming experience, quit reading now, go away and cease asking for help. You don’t deserve it. I said, GOOD DAY, SIR!
Still here? Good, let’s get busy.
SECTION TWO (Items every gamer should know:)
So your gaming PC drags, locks up, or isn’t performing as it once did?
Well it’s YOUR fault! At least partially.
Some notes about Windows XP. It sucks! But it’s also the best Operating System (OS) Microsoft has come out with since DOS 6.2, so let’s do what we can to make it a streamlined, properly functioning OS.
Basic Maintenance: (The following information is based on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. If you are not running this, or Vista, by now, you should really put some thought into upgrading.)
Update your freaking OS already. Windows Update exists for a reason. That reason being that Microsoft opens holes as often as they close them. However, do NOT enable Windows Update to run automatically as this is a performance drain. Every Friday night, before the happy weekend of gaming, bring up Windows Update from your programs list and download ALL Critical Updates. View the Optional and Driver Updates but only install the Optionals if you know they are relevant to you, and only install the Driver Updates if they have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with your video or sound cards.
Spyware and viruses are NOT your friends. Get rid of them. Matter of fact, stop doing stupid things to get them. Quit hitting the porn sites, quit clicking yes when a webpage asks you to install something, quit being so trusting. There are evil folks running amok on this planet, and a great many of them have computers and company logos.
Download and install the following programs:
These programs do NOT stop incoming garbage from getting on your system unless you purchase the full versions. I do NOT advise this, as allowing anything to run in the background degrades your system’s performance. Run them both weekly at the minimum. A great time is Friday night right after you’ve installed all of MS’s Critical Updates.
Keeping your system free of adware, spyware and bloatware will aid you greatly in the fight against viruses and security holes.
If you can’t promise yourself to manually run a free virus check monthly, such as Trend Micro’s Housecall or Panda Software’s Scan, then install an anti-virus solution. AGAIN, I personally do NOT advise this, as the majority of AV solutions out there are bloated crapware that degrade performance as much as they keep you safe. If you DO install one, disable it while gaming.
A little interjection here:
Norton and McAfee’s Internet Security bundles are the most intrusive, system clogging, problem causing sacks of excrement on the face of the earth. Do NOT use these products. If you are TRULY worried about your internet security, you should buy a router with an internal firewall to place in between your cable/dsl modem and your systems. Windows Firewall is somewhat useless and problem causing as well, but if you refuse to get a router, enable it. If you have a router and have enabled its firewall, make sure that Windows Firewall is Off by going to Start/Control Panel/Windows Firewall. Please see note at end of guide about connection issues.
Yes, there’s too much junk running in the background of your OS and you need to get rid of it.
Back to the Start button, right click it and choose Open, then Programs, then Startup. If anything is in here, it’s garbage. Delete it and close the window. Right click Start again and choose Open All Users, then Programs, then Startup. If anything is in here, it’s garbage. Delete it and close the window. (These are just shortcuts to various executable files. Deleting them WILL not delete the programs that they are associated with.)
“But Bill! I use those programs!” Tough noogies. Start them manually WHEN YOU NEED THEM. Allowing them to start up with Windows does nothing but waste valuable system resources.
Reboot your system. Now run Disk Defragmenter. It can be found under Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter. This may take 15 minutes. This may take 3 hours. Run it, let it finish. How often you run this is a personal choice. I run it every time I add or remove a game. Beyond that, I attempt to run it once a month.
XP is bloatware on a huge level. Lots of useless bells and whistles that anyone trying to tweak out a little more performance should nuke. So here we go:
Right click the My Computer icon and choose properties. Go to the Advanced tab and click on the Settings button under Performance. Set this for Adjust for Best Performance. Hit Apply and then Ok twice.
Right click your desktop where it is touching no icons, choose Properties, go to the Appearance tab and click on Effects. Uncheck everything. Hit Ok, Apply and then Ok.
Things look somewhat different? Good. Move on.
“SOOO much work, Bill! Why do I have to do all of this?” Because Microsoft builds their OSs for people that don’t want to do any work. You’re a gamer that wants the best for yourself, right? Then get busy! If your hands aren’t bleeding yet, you aren’t working hard enough!
Update your Video Card and Sound Drivers!
Step one is to download Driver Cleaner from here.
“But why do I need that, Bill?” Probably because you keep installing drivers on top of drivers and haven’t properly cleaned up anything ever.
Step two is to get the latest version of your video driver.
Head back into Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and Uninstall every listing you find of your video driver. (ATI now makes this simple by adding the ATI Software Uninstaller. This yanks everything and prompts a reboot.) Reboot your system. As it comes back up, it may tell you that it is reinstalling your display adapter. Cancel out of this, twice if need be.
Now run Driver Cleaner and clean every instance of your video components that you see listed. If you are uncomfortable choosing, read the help files within the application to get comfortable. Important! If you do run a persistent antivirus solution, DISABLE IT NOW. Install the latest version of your video driver.
OEM vendors don’t want you laptop users to have a good gaming experience, so they force the video card manufacturers into not letting you get updated video drivers. Then the OEM vendors stop updating their drivers about 2 months after the release of your systems. To get around this: If you are unable to use video drivers from ATI or Nvidia, go to omegadrivers.net and use his drivers, as they have been tweaked to install properly on ATI Mobility and Nvidia Go cards.
Check the manufacturer’s website for your sound card and see if they have anything new. If they do, grab them and get them installed the same way, unless all you are downloading is a patch to your existing driver. (Driver Cleaner can also be used to strip out Creative drivers.)
At this point, you should already notice improvements in the quality and performance of your system. Enjoy.
Optional: Because my system has 2GB of RAM, I have no need of a swap file. In my testing with CoH when I only had 1GB of RAM, I saw no errors without a swap file, but the general attitude is that killing off Virtual Memory should ONLY be done if you have MORE than 1GB RAM. To disable Virtual Memory/Swap File, go to Control Panel/System/the Advanced tab/the Settings button under Performance/the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory, click Change. For all drives, select No Paging File, and click the Set button. You will have to restart when finished. Further testing has shown that the best performance seems to come from leaving a swap file enabled, but on a DIFFERENT partition, preferably a different physical driver, than your operating system. Even with this information, my swap file remains disabled on all drives. Please note, some programs will fail to even start if virtual memory is disabled. CoH/V is not one of them.
An item that I neglected in prior versions of this guide, but an important one: Clean out the dust bunnies! Dust is evil. It gets into our slots, it builds up on our copper connectors, it clogs our fans, breaking them, leading to overheating, bad connections, systems locking up, randomly rebooting, artifacting while gaming, you name it, dust can cause it. Once a month, you should open up your case, remove all the components that are slotted, blow out all the slots, fans, cards, reseat everything properly, and reconnect all power cables. Another reason for reseating cards is due to the physics of metal that is heated and let to cool down. It expands and contracts which can cause a card to actually wiggle itself out of its slot.
If you REALLY want to see your system happy, let’s move on to advanced tweaking.
SECTION THREE (You want me to do WHAT?!?!?)
In this section, I will be sharing with you some great resources to study with, research issues with, and to simply bone up your knowledge with. I will also be taking you through a few items in the system registry to nuke, as well as a few services that can be done away with without issue.
The Windows XP Registry: This is not a place to be if you don’t know what you’re looking for, and it most CERTAINLY isn’t a place to be mucking about if you don’t know what to do with the items you have found.
That said, Let’s Go Delete Some Garbage!
Click on Start, then Run. In the run box, type in regedit and hit Ok. Welcome to the registry editor. Do not fear, young readers! As long as you tough NOTHING but what I’m telling you to touch, all will be well. If you feel fear at this time, close the editor and download Highjack This instead. Using this program, one can see and then remove items from the registry that shouldn’t be there. Also, the output from this program can be posted in the game forums to allow other people a glance at what may be causing you issues.
If you ARE comfortable with following these directions and ONLY doing what is stated:
Let’s get to the two sections you want to look at.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
Within these two paths, there are three items we are seeking. Run, RunOnce and RunOnceEx. When you click on the Run folder, items should pop up on the right side.
The only item that MUST remain on the right side is “(Default) REG_SZ (value not set).”
Everything else on the right side is something YOU will have to determine whether should be kept or deleted. In a nutshell, if you find that it is related to your anti-virus solution, your sound card or your video card, leave it alone. If it’s NOT related to those items, you can right click the NAME of the key, and choose delete.
DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE IN THE REGISTRY BESIDES THE CONTENTS OF THESE 5 KEYS!
Do NOT delete ANYTHING from the left window.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnceEx
The CONTENTS will appear in the RIGHT window when you have Run, RunOnce or RunOnceEx HIGHLIGHTED on the right.
WINDOWS SERVICES: Below is all I plan to tell you about disabling unnecessary windows services. The Services MMC can be found in Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services.
Services that I would completely disable:
Automatic Updates
Error Reporting Service
Indexing Service
Messenger
Themes
YOUR SYSTEM’S BIOS:
I thought about a lot of ways to cover the BIOS, but I’m going to take the easy way out:
Tom’s Hardware Guide has a great article on BIOS tweaking.
A quick mention on overclocking. Don’t do it. Ever.
Unless of course you need to because your performance is too low, AND you know for a fact that the bottlenecks occurring to CAUSE your low performance are DIRECTLY related to the speeds at which your processor, RAM and GPU are running.
If that is the case, OVERCLOCK THIS PUPPY!!! The apps are out there, there are ways to monitor your temperatures, ways to tell when you’ve gone to far without frying your system, ways to make a once slow system a screaming banshee again. But I’m not here to teach you that. If you want it badly enough, you’ll figure it out.
SECTION FOUR (Other stuff)
Gaming on an LCD: If your LCD has a DVI port, use it. Don’t use adapters, get a straight DVI-DVI cable to connect the dvi port on your video card to the DVI port on your LCD. Odd point here about the cables. A single link DVI is able to transfer 1920 x 1080 resolution vs dual link’s 2048 x 1536. For those of us that bought the Dell 2405FPW, which runs at 1920X1200, we’re kind of scratching our heads as to why Dell shipped us a Single Link DVI cable. Just a “what the?” that I thought I’d share. I did purchase a Dual Link cable, and have noticed a increase in overall rendering smoothness, so it’s something to consider if you run high res LCDs. I can only assume Dell did it to save a few bucks. If you do run high resolutions, you might occasionally notice tearing as you move quickly through a scene or when turning around. At item that can help this is to enable the “Wait for Vertical Refresh” or “Sync Vertical Refresh” or “V-Sync” option within your video driver. For OpenGL games, when enabling Vert Refresh, also enable Triple Buffering, as this helps out overall smoothness and performance.
Gaming on a CRT: Windows XP sucks, as mentioned earlier. One of the BIGGEST suckatudes that MS added was a lockdown on refresh rate while gaming in full screen mode. I have never understood why they did this, never found any statement from them as to why they did it, and quite frankly, don’t care why they did it. It was stupid. Anyway, get around it by making sure Refresh Rate Overide is enabled within your video driver. I usually set it for Same As Desktop, then set my refresh rate at 75Hz. Why 75? Because anything below that always bugged my eyeballs. If you don’t enable the RRO setting, you will always be capped out at 60FPS in games. I advise attempting to game at the same resolution and refresh rate as you run your desktop. This is so that if you do run full screen 3D, when you alt tab out of it, you aren’t causing your CRT to bounce itself between different settings.
What’s the difference between LCDs and CRTs? Lots of things, but the big one is that LCDs do not use refresh rate. On a CRT, the entire image is shot back onto the screen X # of times based on the refresh rate, which you CAN adjust. An LCD only redraws each pixel as needed, and to my knowledge, there is no way to change the redraw rate. My LCD has a 12ms redraw, which seems fast enough that I never get ghosting. Due to this, you never have to be concerned with refresh rate override on an LCD, because Windows will lock it down to 60FPS within the display properties.
For both Nvidia and ATI users, I advise having your video driver manage FSAA and AF. As noticed in my ATI guide at the top of the page, we now have proof that the FSAA management within the game is different, and seemingly not as good, as that when managed by the driver. Be sure to turn OFF FSAA and AF in game when you force them to your desired settings within the driver.
On connection issues:
Networking can be a pain in the tush. Frequent disconnects can be caused by:
Your network card and/or drivers
Your router
Your cable/dsl modem
Your ISP
The server you’re connecting to
Backbone issues between you and the server
Sunspot activity
Coronal mass ejections
It’s Tuesday
Basically, ANYTHING between your chair and the server can cause disconnects. It’s one of the reasons I avoid posting in tech threads on this issue. There’s simply too many variables for me to test over a forum.
If you are having these problems consistently, the first step is to make sure that your software firewalls aren’t causing you problems. See note above about the nastiness of Norton and McAfee internet security bundles. Next is to update all drivers and firmware for your NIC, router, cable/dsl modem. Make sure that all of your cabling is in good working order. Still having problems? Get with your ISP’s tech support and with NCSoft’s tech support and open dual tickets.
CONCLUSION:
Game happy, or quit gaming. Also, one can consider a computer much like one should consider a child or a pet: Neglect any of these, and it will turn out badly in the end.
Me Inside 