WOFF pushing my 'borderline' rig to the limits

[Shiloh 12]

WOFF is an incredible WWI sim and I've enjoyed it immensely over the last 6 days. My hats off to the developers for all their hard work. My rig however is not as up-to-date as it should be so here is my story. I have had a series of flying and testing triumphs and frustrations over the last few days. The triumphs have been the moments where I've figured something out that gave increased performance and the frustrations are the times where I was in a fight at 7 FPS.

 

But now, I've finally reached a workable medium and would like to share my specs/settings so that others with borderline systems may have some more information to work with in getting their rigs running WOFF somewhat smoothly. Additionally, I was hoping some of you may help me out in squeezing even more performance out of my rig/settings.

 

First off, here are my specs.

 

- Motherboard: MSI K9A2CF-F AMD 790X
- AMD Athlon II X4 640 Quad-Core 3.0 GHz (OC'd to 3.46 GHz)
- 4GB RAM
- Seagate Barracuda 250GB Sata HD (7200 rpm)
- Samsung Spinpoint TB HD (7200 RPM)
- DVDRW/CDRW drive
- Corsair 650TX 650W ATX12V
- GB Radeon 6850 HD video card (OC'd from 1050 MHz to 1150 MHz)
- Windows 7 (32-bit)
- Acer 23" monitor (max res 1920 x 1080)

- TrackIR 5 Pro

 

I knew I would have to OC at some point and clearly now was the time. I figure that even if I get a bit of a shorter life out of these components they are on the verge of becoming inadequate for most modern gaming and I'll be in a better position to upgrade a year from now so fingers crossed. The AMD Athlon is known as a stable CPU and I know many have had success OC'ing beyond what I've done here. I believe my system is stable after 3 days for testing and my temps seem okay.

 

With that said I am currently getting 35-45 FPS in normal flight conditions and 25-35 FPS when in combat (anywhere from 4-10+ craft). It's not smooth as glass but I don't feel like smashing my rig with a sledgehammer either.

 

Here are my AMD card settings.

 

3D Application Settings

AA: 8X with morphological filtering checked (fliter: standard 8X)

AF: 16X (per pixel samples)

Tessellation: 64X (with nothing checked)

Catalyst AI: Quality (medium setting)

Wait for vertical refresh: Off, unless application specifies

AA Mode: Adaptive Multi-sample AA

OpenGL Settings: Triple buffering not checked

 

AMD OverDrive

High-performance GPU clock settings: 850 MHz

High-performance memory clock settings: 1150 MHz

Enable manual fan control: 100%

 

And my workshop settings (the settings I feel affect performance).

 

UI Aspect: 16:9 wide

In Cloud Fog: off

Aircraft Skin Res: Hi (No Bullet Decals)

Terrain Detail Textures: Detail Textures Normal

Woods/Forests Density: Low

Resolution: 1920x1080, 32 bit depth, 8 samples AA

Sliders set to 4,2,2,2,4

G Effects: off

 

Even with those slider settings everything looks pretty decent. This may/may not help others with borderline rigs. Also, this is what I've figured out on my own and in perusing the forums so it's very possible there is some information here that can be improved upon. I would love to squeeze out an extra 10-15 FPS so if anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

Thanks for taking the time to post this Shiloh, I am sure it will prove most useful to folks who are in a situation similar to yours.

 

.

[DukeIronHand 8]

Yes indeed...I am expecting WOFF in the mail today and I suspect my system will be borderline.

 

Apparently I was a little hasty when I bought my new vid card specially for WOFF...bout 3 years a ago!

[Shiloh 12]

Thanks Lou. I've been testing like crazy and I finally have my rig stable. The 10 vs. 10 fights in QC have gone smoothly with only occasional hitches here and there - typically when all 20 craft or so initially join together on the screen. It has taken a week but finally I can start a serious campaign pilot (RFC 74 flying SE5a's) and enjoy the thrilling and often terrifying skies Over Flanders Fields.

[DukeIronHand 8]

Out of curiosity how come you run high rez skins?

Trading bullet holes for a skin improvement that is minimal (at least on my system in OFF) didn't seem like a good deal.

 

Big difference in WOFF?

[cptroyce 0]

Well..I am / was ready to go out and totally upgrade my system for WOOF use. Particularly after I read the specs suggestions from the Devs pre-ordering.

 

However after tinkering around on my, I guess middle level PC, I am getting very good game play..and may be reconsidering the upgrade.

 

I have Win XP

32 bit

E8400 CPU(?) 2.7Gbs

Nvidia 660Ti GPU

Sliders on 54335

Normal on the graphics

Hi Skins

No sun glare

 

I haven't tried the 10v10 dogfights in QC, but the campaigning has been fine after some testing and tweaking

 

I also "stumbled" into tweaking the settings on my PC settings tabs to performance and increasing the (i don't know) spare ram on the hard drive from 2046 to 4000. After I did those PC changes, WOOF seemed to perform better in general on my PC setup. 

 

How do I Overclock the CPU? I have Nvidia Inspector and control panel. I see where to OC but I am not sure what to change the settings to?

 

Hope this helps any others who may have mid to lower end systems and was thinking that WOOF would be unplayable. Seems there is a fair amount of flexibility in the sim.

 

Regards,

Royce

Edited December 28, 2013 by cptroyce

[Shiloh 12]

Out of curiosity how come you run high rez skins?

Trading bullet holes for a skin improvement that is minimal (at least on my system in OFF) didn't seem like a good deal.

 

Big difference in WOFF?

 

I'm not sure Duke. First I started slowly lowering different settings and the graphics quality was getting pretty bad so I tried raising some stuff up to see what that would do and I came to this. My rationale was that the bullet holes may take more rendering power and tax the processor a bit more rather than a smooth skin although I'm not sure I'm correct in my thinking.

 

Well..I am / was ready to go out and totally upgrade my system for WOOF use. Particularly after I read the specs suggestions from the Devs pre-ordering.

 

However after tinkering around on my, I guess middle level PC, I am getting very good game play..and may be reconsidering the upgrade.

 

I have Win XP

32 bit

E8400 CPU(?) 2.7Gbs

Nvidia 660Ti GPU

Sliders on 54335

Normal on the graphics

Hi Skins

No sun glare

 

I haven't tried the 10v10 dogfights in QC, but the campaigning has been fine after some testing and tweaking

 

I also "stumbled" into tweaking the settings on my PC settings tabs to performance and increasing the (i don't know) spare ram on the hard drive from 2046 to 4000. After I did those PC changes, WOOF seemed to perform better in general on my PC setup. 

 

How do I Overclock the CPU? I have Nvidia Inspector and control panel. I see where to OC but I am not sure what to change the settings to?

 

Hope this helps any others who may have mid to lower end systems and was thinking that WOOF would be unplayable. Seems there is a fair amount of flexibility in the sim.

 

Regards,

Royce

 

Thanks for sharing your settings and your experiences on optimizing a less than optimal system. I have never OC'd before now Royce so I don't know too much about it. I Google-searched, read some articles and watched some videos than rolled up my sleeves and had at it. From what I learned it is best to OC through the BIOS settings. On bootup, when I see the Motherboard load screen I hit the 'delete' key and that gets me into BIOS. Mine is an older BIOS setup so from the main menu I go to Cell Menu>Adjust CPU FSB Frequency>then change that number from the default of 200 up to 230. Next ESC out to main BIOS screen and save settings. This OC'd my processor from 3.0 GHz to 3.5 GHz. I tried numbers larger than 230 first but when my computer was acting up, wouldn't reboot and/or became unstable I kept lowering that number until my system stabilized. The idea is maximum performance while still operating a stable system. One must keep an eye out for the CPU temps to make sure that the OC doesn't overheat your CPU.

 

There are some videos I found on youtube that show how to update the BIOS settings on a newer BIOS. Please do some of your own research before attempting this as there are risks to your system and I don't want to be responsible for pointing you in the wrong direction or providing bad information as I really am inexperienced with this. I have however been able to find a happy medium between CPU performance and stable system that has accepted this OC and I believe this is a significant key to allowing me to play WOFF at a smoother level.

[cptroyce 0]

Shiloh

Thanks for that post..did do some google research and have a handle on what I need to do. Would have done that sooner, except I thought you could just over clock by going to to system setting tab or something like that..these are ares I just never wandered into ;>)

 

Anyway as soon as I find the key that opens the BIOS on load up I am going to tweak it and see what the difference is..Delete doesn't seem to do it; not F12 either..anyway

 

Thanks again,

Royce

[Shiloh 12]

Good stuff Royce. When you see that Mobo screen quickly appear on boot up it will often say which key to use for BIOS.