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How to increase FPS


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HOW TO GET MORE FPS IN EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2(and other games)

 

Hi everyone! In this guide, i'm going to show you how to increase your FPS in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and other games. You're gonna learn some basic tips. If you ready, let's start... ^_^

Before we start, i'm gonna tell you something. CAUTION! Some solutions may not works with your PC/Laptop! If we're clear, let's roll! :truestory:

  • 1. Update your graphic drivers
  • 2. Give your GPU a slight overclock(if you had bad cooling system, do not try this!)
  • 3. Boost your PC with an optimization tool
  • 4. Switch out that old HDD and get yourself an SSD
  • 5. Turn off Superfetch and Prefetch
  • 6. Defrag & TRIM your hard disk for faster access
  • 7. Tweak your Intel, AMD or NVIDIA Control Panels
  • 8. Optimise game settings

 

1. Update your graphic drivers

 

For Nvidia GeForce owners: Go to http://www.geforce.com/drivers. Next, select your graphics card and your Windows version from the list and hit the “Start Search” button. My tip: Always go for the driver marked as “BETA”. This isn’t quite a finished driver, but they all run as stable and good as the final release these days and will likely give you even more performance!

 

For ATI/AMD Radeon owners: ATI/AMD fans go to http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/downloads.aspx and select the appropriate device. This will give you access to the latest official driver which you can download and install. To get the beta driver with more performance improvements or features, head over to http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx.

 

For For Intel HD Graphics owners: Mostly found on ultrabooks or tablets, the Intel graphics chipsets are the weakest of the bunch. I wouldn’t recommend doing any sort of gaming on the older integrated Intel HD chipsets (such as the HD 3000 or earlier) – unless you’re heavily into slideshows instead of smooth gameplay – but their latest graphics chipsets are powerful enough to play even recent titles, albeit not at the highest possible resolution or with all the bells and whistles turned on. To get updated drivers go to the Graphics driver page of the Intel Download Center.

 

Wait, how do I even know what graphics card I own?

Not a problem: To find out the maker and exact serial number, all you need to do is follow these steps. First, go to “Control Panel” and head to “Hardware and Sound”. From here, click on “Device Manager”:

Screen%20Shot%202017-12-06%20at%2011.04.

This will bring up a list of all the built-in devices of your system. Head over to where it says “Display adapters”:
In these cases, you’ll see an Alienware X51 gaming rig with two graphic chips (the nVidia is usually always the faster one) and a laptop with a GeForce GT 650M. At any rate, make sure you’re using the latest drivers!

 

2. Overclock your GPU(if you had bad cooling system, do not try this!)

 

Your gaming performance is mostly dependent on the power of your graphics chip – even more so than on how much memory your have or how fast your processor is! The bottleneck and the reason for stuttering gameplay is in almost all cases the graphics chip. To improve performance, you may want to look at running the graphics card beyond the factory speed setting – or in other words: overclocking! Now, 5-10 years ago, I wouldn’t have recommended overclocking as it posed a significant threat to your hardware, but nowadays most systems turn themselves off automatically before they take any damage. Besides, I only recommend a slight overclock by about 10-15%.

 

To overclock the GPU, I recommend two tools:

  • MSI Afterburner –a classic overclocking tool from ASUS.
  • EVGA Precision X – allows overclocking of both the GPU and memory clocks.

Using 3DMark 11 I measured that overclocking my system as described above yielded a 10% performance boost:

boost-gaming-rig-3dmark-11-before-after-

 

3. Boost your PC with an optimization tool

 

It's so simple! Boost your PC with an optimization tool. You can try these tools:

  • Razer Cortex(known as Razer Game Booster)
  • AVG PC TuneUp

Also uninstall all old programs you don't need.

 

4. Switch out that old HDD and get yourself an SSD

 

SSDs are much faster than mechanical hard disks and while this most certainly doesn’t boost your game’s frame rate, it will definitely reduce load time in game.

My recommendation is to go at least with an SSD with more than 250 GB as most games these days take up between 8-20 Gigabytes.

 

5. Turn off Superfetch and Prefetch

 

Both SuperFetch and Prefetch are Windows features that are supposed to boost Windows and applications startup times. For games, however, I noticed that loading times and background activity actually increases when these features are enabled. That’s why I recommend turning them both off if you’re an avid gamer. Here’s how:

  • To do this, go to “Control Panel”, “System and Security”, “Administrative Tools”, and “Services”.
  • Scroll down until you see the “SuperFetch” entry, double-click on it, and choose “Disabled”from the list.

boost-gaming-rig-services-local-window-s

  • Hit “OK” and close all windows.
  • Next, open up the registry; click on the Start orb and type in “regedit”. Hit Enter, and go to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory ManagementPrefetchParameters”.
  • Double-click on “EnablePrefetcher” and enter “0” (default value is “3”) to disable the Prefetcher.

Note: Please follow the above instructions precisely as deleting or changing the wrong values in the registry may cause problems with your PC.

 

6. Defrag & TRIM your hard disk for faster access

 

As data is written or deleted from your hard disk, files become fragmented and will physically spread out all over the disk drive. This will lead to a significant performance hit, especially with games, as the hard disk will first need to collect all of these portions in order to be able to fully process the entire file. As both your games and their files usually take up several GBs, it is vital that all of these files can be read in a continuous manner.

  • To defrag the disk, fire up the Start menu, and go to “All Programs”, “Accessories”, “System Tools” and “Disk Defragmenter”.
  • Select your Windows disk, and hit “Defragment disk”. Note, if you have an SSD, you should not defrag. Instead, use the TRIM command to optimize them.
  • In Windows 8, Microsoft integrated the TRIM command into the Disk Defragmenter—so, simply hit “Optimize”. Windows 7 doesn’t offer this, so be sure the TRIM command gets executed regularly. To see if TRIM is enabled, open up a command prompt by clicking on the Start orb and typing “cmd” into the search bar. Right-click on the first result (“cmd”), and click “Run as administrator”. Next, type in the command “Fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify”, and hit Enter. If this returns the result “= 0″, you’re good to go! Otherwise, TRIM isn’t supported and needs to be enabled. Try entering the command “fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0″. If that doesn’t help, a firmware upgrade might be necessary to enable TRIM.

 

7. Tweak your Intel, AMD or NVIDIA Control Panels

 

For NVIDIA: All NVIDIA drivers come with their own control panels that let you tweak the most essential 3D settings. While you can set many of the following options in-game, some are not available or directly controlled by the driver. This is why it’s always a good idea to go through the list of all options and tweak them to best balance performance and visual quality.

boost-gaming-rig-nvidia-control-panel-wi

To get to the NVIDIA Control Panel, right-click on your desktop, select “NVIDIA Control Panel” and head over to the “Manage 3D Settings” category on the left. These are the some of the lesser known but still important settings to tweak:

  • Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames: This controls the number of frames that the processor prepares before transferring them to the graphics card. Increasing this value results in smoother game play, but you may notice a lag when using the mouse and keyboard. To eliminate the lag, try the “1″ setting.
  • Threaded Optimization: This option should always be “On”, as it allows the support of multi-threaded optimization for modern multi-core processors.
  • VSync: It synchronizes the frames that your graphics card renders with the refresh rate of your monitor. If you disable it, you might find that games run more smoothly; however, you will notice that some parts of the screen might not be rendered correctly and appear to lag. Disable it only if your monitor has a higher frame rate than your gameplay.

 

For ATI/AMD: The AMD/ATI Control Center is another fantastic way to squeeze out more performance and increase the visual quality of your games. To fire it up, right-click on your desktop, select “Radeon Settings” and head over to the “Gaming Settings”.

Screen%20Shot%202017-12-06%20at%2011.15.

From here you can set individual graphic settings for games you have installed. But i recommend going with the Global Settings as our recommendations usually apply to all games...

These are the most important settings:

  • Anisotropic Filtering Mode: The higher this setting is set, the sharper distant textures will appear. However, this will also increase the processing load on your graphics card. If your GPU is powerful enough, enable it and see if there is a noticeable visual difference. Use this only if your game doesn’t support it.
  • Anti-aliasing mode and method: Anti-aliasing reduces the “jaggies” around edges, which has a severe impact on performance. If you’re seeing shimmering or jaggies, try the “Override” method and select an anti-aliasing level from 2 to 8.

Screen%20Shot%202017-12-06%20at%2011.16.

  • Morphological Filtering (MLAA): AMD introduced its own form of “anti aliasing” to help remove jaggies around the edges in games, which *might* work better and faster than the methods mentioned above or the games built-in methods. It’s a case by case thing: We recommend turning off the in-game AA and the settings above and try it out! If it works, keep it.
  • Texture Filtering Quality: According to AMD this changes the quality of textures. However, even when looking up real close we couldn’t notice a difference between High and Performance, yet many of the tested games ran 1-5 fps faster in the latter. We recommend going with Performance here - you will likely not notice a difference.
  • Surface Format Optimization: Used by older games to decrease graphical fidelity in order to gain a few FPS. Todays games aren’t affected and even on older games. Turn it off.

Wait for Vertical Refresh: Vertical Sync (or Vsync) synchronizes the frames that your graphic card renders with the refresh rate of your monitor. If you disable Vsync, you might find that games run more smoothly, however, in most cases, you will notice that some parts of the screen might not be rendered correctly and appear to lag. Disable Vsync only if your monitor has a higher framerate (for example 60hz) than your gameplay (for example 40 FPS).

 

For Intel HD Graphics:

Screen%20Shot%202017-12-06%20at%2011.18.

Make sure that you’ll select Maximum Performance and disable all the power saving and battery extending options.

Screen%20Shot%202017-12-06%20at%2011.19.

Last but not least, i'm turning our attention to you AMD Radeon users: Open up your Radeon settings (right-click on your desktop), go to Global Settings and switch off Power Efficiency. 

 

8. Optimise game settings

 

Updating drivers will get you only so far. The biggest gains in frames per second come from tweaking and compromising on graphics settings.
Ideally, you want to run your game at your monitor's native resolution. For most PCs that's 1920x1080; on a laptop it's likely to be 1366x768. To find out your monitor's resolution, right-click on the desktop in Windows 7, 8 or 10 and click on 'Screen resolution'. In earlier versions, click 'Properties' instead.
The highest selectable resolution should tell you the native resolution, and should say 'recommended'. You can also search Google for your monitor's make and model if you're still unsure.
Lowering the resolution should give you more frames per second, but don't adjust the resolution here. Instead, load your chosen game and look for the graphics settings. Here you can change the resolution and many other settings.
Anti-aliasing is one setting to watch out for. AA smoothes out jagged lines, but incurs a performance penalty. Typically you'll see a slider, but it might be just a number, such as 2x, 4x 8x etc.

 

  • First, try disabling AA altogether and see how your game plays. If it's fast enough, you can enable AA again at the lowest setting and progressively increase it until you find the best balance between quality and performance.

Improve-FPS--optimize-settings_thumb.jpg

The same sentiment goes for most other graphics settings, including draw distance and shadows. Lighting effects, including shadows, tend to be real performance drains, so if you can live with basic effects, you can make the difference between a game being unplayable and playable.
Essentially, it's a process of trial and error. Unless, that is, your graphics card drivers can optimise each game's settings to work well using the hardware available. For example, the Nvidia card in our test PC has drivers which can do precisely that.

Improve-FPS--optimize-Nvidia-small_thumb

 

That's it from me. I hope it works for you guys. Good luck! ^_^

You can download download AVG PC TuneUp from here.

Also you can download Razer Cortex(Razer Game Booster) from here.

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  • Penguin changed the title to How to increase FPS

Just some things to addition: GPU drivers don't increase performance, they just make GPU compatible with system and software, Game Ready drivers don't really help me too (Nvidia GPU); usually boost softwares are useless and don't make a big difference, they help shut down useless processes, but they usually have low CPU, VRAM and memory usage. And good luck playing MP on medium with Intel GPU :)

Edited by MushroomLTU
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Helped ya? Why not giving me a reputation point? Thanks!

Earth is hexagon.

GTA SA > GTA V

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I just want to emphasise again, that people with less skill shouldn't try to overclock their CPUs. You need to supervise the conduct of your cooling system first to avoid your pc burnint down (No tbh your pc should be young enough to avoid that by himself but high temperature is not good and lowers the power of cpu and gpu. So people if you don't have the knowledgebase, dont dare to try it. It can crash your pc :(

 

DoritosPowers

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Few pointers regarding ETS2 specifically, just to add on:

In MP, due to the optimisation etc and how it's modelled from the base game, you will find yourself lagging in highly populated areas, even with a beast of a PC. I myself lag on the C-D road for example.

In a general aspect, the in-game settings can be tweaked, common ones like texture quality can be lowered a bit, reflections and a few more. Grass and Vegetation can be on low or even off, as it's not too nice to look at in the base game itself. These chew up the frames unnecessarily and just don't need to be on.

 

Overall a very nice guide, these are the common stepping stones, from there it's just a lot of tweaking of in-game settings and you're good to go!

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  • 4 months later...

Just saying if people actually want better FPS, installing the newest NVIDIA driver is not always the best option. If you want maximum performance, always look into benchmarks.

 

There's articles for every new driver update in http://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia

and with every update there are some nice people who are cool enough to do benchmarks with every driver update. So, if the new driver doesn't perform up-to-par or just isn't stable, previous driver is usually recommended. At the moment, recommended driver is 391.35 and it has the best FPS in most of the games and it's pretty fresh. So please don't go blindly in with your GeForce Experience and always check if the driver is working well for everybody else.

 

+ Remember to use DDU to remove your old drivers in Windows safe mode (!EVERY TIME!)

 

I wouldn't suggest overclocking your GPU much, just increasing the power limit is enough to be honest. For a newbie they may think its easy and just rising the MHz will help but in some cases it lowers performance. Yeah GPU's are weird like that.

I would start with overclocking your CPU, it's going to take some time to make it stable but it will help. Just don't go over the top with your voltages.

 

And remember! DO NOT defrag your SSD, you can prematurely break it. TRIM is automatically executed on SSD's so don't bother touching them. Defragging will help with HDDs though like pointed out in the topic.

Edited by Muzolf
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