graphics settings for sh3

[She-Wolf]

hello folks, seeing someone was enquiring about ATI settings for best effect in SH3 reminded me that Ihave a small area of dissatisfaction re graphics as well.

I have two Geforce 7600 GT cards with SLI enabled on my system. SH3 is listed in NVidias list of games, but there isn't a preset configuration - I have to do it myself.
I don't think I know enough about graphics to do that.

The global settings are :

anisotropic filtering - 4x
antialising gamma correction - off
antialising setting - 2x
antialising transparency - off
conformant texture clamp - use hardware
extension limit - off
force mipmaps - none
multi-display/mixed gpu acceleration - single display performance mode
sli performance mode - single GPU
texture filtering - anisotropic mip filter optimisation - on
texture filtering - anisotropic sample optimisation - on
texture filtering- negative LOD bias - clamp
texture filtering - quality - quality
texture filtering - trlinear optimisation - off
triple buffering - off
vertical sync - use 3d application settings

if any of you understand that lot and think I need to tweak one or two, would appreciate your guidance.

I have three areas of gentle discontent;

sometimes the rigging 'breaks up'. Nothing like as bad as it was in the unmodded SH3. Then it was like birds in the rigging, but bridges and rigging are not as smooth as I think they ought to be, at a certain distance.

When I look under the water, I can't see anything except poorly defined sea bed, and horizontal lines where the depth of the water is. I can look up and see the underside of the waves, but not 'through' the water. straight ahead. Maybe that is because the North sea is just plain murky!
Similarly, the sky seems poorly painted. The clouds are fine, the stars are fine but the backdrop sky seems like it has been daubed on with a paint brush, not smooth.
It doesn't affect the game play but if I could have it better, I would :)

[PapaG39]

I have a very good computer & the X1900xt graphics card.
My main game was Il2 & the game play & graphics are just stunning.

SH3 is fine graphics wise & game play is very smooth. In GWX the game play is smooth, but the graphics in certain areas are very poor. Brown sky/water & boat at early evening. however this changes as the evening progresses & gets a more normal. I think when they changed from the standard sh3 cd setup they made some things better & some things worse. I think the graphics in the oiginal were fine, but some people just have to see if they can change things for the better. God bless em for trying...

Anyway, as far as the graphics..If your other games are fine then just leave it alone & live with it. or you can put everything to max & then back down a small setting at a time until it gets as good as it is going to get.

With all of that water to render this game is very hard on the cpu.. taxed to the max I guess you could say...

[She-Wolf]

Well thank you Papa, I will assume it is the game and not me then. I guess the underwater shots I have seen of other people's SH3 games might have been in taken in clearer water. I have never seen my boot under water as it is too 'black' to find it, though I can see underneath just fine in the game Dangerous Waters.

The sky in the day time is fine too, if the weather is good - fluffy white clouds and blue sky, but at night - not so good. but I can live with it!:yep:

[andylegate]

If I remember right, you can adjust the water clarity in SH3 Commander.......

I'm using a Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 (256 MB DDR built on to it) and the latest driver from Nvidia (Forceware v 163.71).
My card is VERY old compared to many. But at the same time, I rarely notice any problems with the graphics and I can see underwater just fine, to a point: you can't see very far underwater and at night, which would be normal anyways.

[She-Wolf]

Andy, I have GWX but not SH3 commander. If having it means I would have to uninstall.reinstall, I won't bother, but otherwise... where do I get it from and is it expensive?

[andylegate]

oh wow, surprised nobody has responded to you yet about it.

No, you don't have to uninstall GWX before install ing SH3 commander!

And it's FREEEEEEE.

You can get it from here:

http://www.users.on.net/~jscones/software/products.html (http://www.users.on.net/%7Ejscones/software/products.html)

[KrvKpt. Falke]

Turn off these two things:

texture filtering - anisotropic mip filter optimisation
texture filtering - anisotropic sample optimisation

These optimisations are increasing performance but decreasing quality.
I am playing on gf 6600 gt (worse than yours) with these two disabled.

I am not sure about this one:

sli performance mode - single GPU

cause i dont have sli, but if you have two graphic cards in sli mode shouldnt this setting be changed to "multi GPU" or something?

Are you using 163.xx series drivers? Cause i was using them and image quality in sh3 was very bad even with antialiasing and anizotropic filtering enabled (and i had random crashes to desktop) so i decided to go back to old 91.47 (from september or october 2006) and - they are much much better.

[She-Wolf]

ahh, right Andy - thank you :D

KrvKpt. Falke I will change the settings as you suggest, check the GPU setting, though I would have thought Nvidia settings would have taken care of that automatically when I enabled SLI- but I will give it a go. I am almost certainly using the latest nvidia driver as I recently had to reformat, so I will see if I can get the older series and put that on. Thank you for your help. I shall have a go at it tomorrow. :up:

[andylegate]

Are you using 163.xx series drivers? Cause i was using them and image quality in sh3 was very bad even with antialiasing and anizotropic filtering enabled (and i had random crashes to desktop) so i decided to go back to old 91.47 (from september or october 2006) and - they are much much better.

REally? hmmmm.. I haven't had any problems yet......

Oh great! Now ya done it and got me all paranoid! :rotfl:

[KrvKpt. Falke]

Calm down :) There arent drivers suitable for every single graphic card; one driver may be perfect with your gfx, but can suck with mine. Newest nVidia gfx drivers are made with gf 8 series and vista in mind; i ve found them not good for my old gf6600gt, but they can be fine with yours...
What im 100% sure about them is that they acted wierd (ctds) when aa and af were enabled in control panel and that sh3 was looking very ugly and very aliased.

[She-Wolf]

well, some improvement KKF, thank you. I haven't yet put the older drivers on ( mine are 162 series), though I have them on the desktop, but I did put SHCommander on, and found the setting for water clarity was already at 18, so left that be for now, but I did the other graphics tweaks and think it has improved things. I can see a bit better underwater, and see the sub clearly if I look up toward the surface. Odd though, if I look in the Museum and go below water there, it is all crystal clear... anyway, it has improved, so thanks again :)