Can anyone walk me through some of the advance graphics settings, what they mean, and how demanding they are? Specifically:

Texture Downscaling

Texture memory Size(MB)

LOD distance

Depth of Field

Vignette

SSAO


Thanks, I'd like to try and optimize this wonderful game, but have no idea what these particular settings do, or mean, or how demanding they are, other than the obvious high is more demanding than low, or enabled is more demanding than disabled.

Texture Downscaling : Downgrade in a major way the textures to improve performances (ex : instead of 2048x2048 you'll go for 512x512, uglier but faster)

Texture memory Size(MB) : Change it according to your CG memory.

LOD distance : Distance from where the textures and details will be ugly-ed.

Depth of Field : Nice blur effect when you look at something, like if you're looking at a house, the background will be blurred like Macro photography, to mimic the eye feature.

Vignette : don't know a damn about it...

SSAO : Shadow system, help making the whole game more realistic but kills your CG ^^ (shadows in corners or on surfaces with bumps).

My take... anyone have a better one ?

-Texture downscaling: higher values result in lower texture quality.
-Texture memory size: sets the amount of graphics card memory allocated to textures. Larger values will decrease the amount of streaming that occurs in game and will make the game run more smoothly, but they can also cause the graphics card to run out of memory and even result in game crashes. Choose a reasonable value based on the amount of memory available on your graphics card.
- Shadow quality: affects graphics performance. Consumes GPU power without affecting CPU performance.
- Number of shadowed lights: set the maximum number of lights that cast shadows. Affects graphics performance. Consumes GPU power without affecting CPU performance.
- LOD distance: distance scale for level of detail on meshes. Lower values improve game performance but result in reduced detail on models.
- Bloom: effect greatly improves quality of game graphics without placing excess demands on GPU.
- Light shafts: visual effect recommended for medium-high/high-end machines. Should be disabled on older systems.
- Anti-aliasing: demanding effect that can significantly reduce performance, so it should be disabled on medium and low-end machines.
- Blur effects: special blur and radial blur visual effects that are quite demanding on hardware but used rarely in the game.
- Depth of field – gameplay: subtle visual effect. Option determines appearance of effect only during gameplay sequences and does not affect DoF in cutscenes.
- Vignette: aesthetic option that produces a photographic vignette around the game screen. Does not affect performance.
- Rain, Wet surfaces rain effect: modest impact on performance.
- SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion): lighting effect that is important to the game but unfortunately places significant demands on the GPU.
- Motion blur: blur effect on camera movement, demanding on the GPU.
- Cinematic depth of field: provides movie-like depth of field in cutscenes and dialogue sequences. Extremely detailed but demands significant power. Should only be enabled on machines equipped with top-end graphics cards.
- Depth of field – cutscenes: option only affects cutscenes and dialogue sequences, does not affect gameplay performance.
- Dangling objects limit: limiter for physical animation of character components like Geralt's hair. Disabling this option places greater demands on the CPU.
- Ubersampling: high quality rendering mode under which whole scenes are rendered multiple times to provide the best possible textures, object details and anti-aliasing (superior to anti-alias and anisotropy even on the highest settings). Use with caution, only on top-end computers (best possible in terms of both GPU and CPU).
- Vertical sync: helps eliminate "screen tearing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing) during camera movements and blinking on very quick animations (e.g., bright explosions), but can cause somewhat slower rendering and short input lags.
- Decals: enabling decals like dust or blood on characters can affect CPU performance.


This is all from the game's readme, btw ;)

Yup... can't beat that :D

This post may be of interest to you.

Edit: nevermind, an earlier poster has already provided the info I was going to link to.

Cheers.

all of them has been explained in the readme.txt.

-Texture memory size: [...] Choose a reasonable value based on the amount of memory available on your graphics card.

Yes... can't help thinking we're missing some essential information here. What is a reasonable value, for what amount of memory? What would be good to know here is what amount of graphics card memory you need for each of the available options. Does "Large" need more than 1Gb, for example? Should we be considering "Total available graphics memory" (4863MB for me), or "Dedicated graphics memory" (1024MB for me).

Without some numbers, the advice to "choose a reasonable value" is not very helpful, and just means resorting to trial and error to find the best value, the same as if there was no advice at all.

Nope, it's quite simple...

memory < 512 = low (change it)
memory > 512 and < 1024 = medium (just enough)
memory > 1024 = high (hell yeah :D)

Nowadays, most cards have 1024 or 768, out of the box. Some may have a greater amount, heavy duty cards ^^

Just my opinion... but seems logical...

The choices are:

Very Small
Small
Medium
Large
Very large

Do you know how much memory each of those corresponds to?

It would certainly be useful to know.
...well, except for me. Rather glad I went for the 2GB 6970 now :-P

That said, I still can't get close to maxing out at 2560x1440... Ubersampling is obviously overkill, but even with that off, I've had to drop to a measly 1920x1080, hehe.


Actually, what would be darned useful to know is which of these settings have the biggest impact on high-end rigs... well, second biggest, Ubersample is obvious.

Also, I'm still running an aging Core 2 Quad... so my GPU rather outstrips my CPU. Any of these settings cause significant CPU-bottlenecking?

I'm gonna try my own diagnostics when I get back from work tonight, but interested whether anyone else has already dug through and tested things.

Guide to Nvidia Forceware 3D options: http://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_1.html
[updated April 2011]

Guide to ATI Catalyst 3D options: http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_1.html
[updated June 2009]

Just put everything on max and it ran very smoothly but that was just for the opening prison scenes. I quit out because I still haven't finished TW1 and I felt I was on the verge of getting some spoilers. Phenom II 3.2 BE and Radeon HD 5850 1GB with 4GB Corsair DDR3 RAM. I don't expect a great framerate in more open, populated areas with these settings, but 30-40 will probably be good enough for me.

As for vignetting, if you've ever seen Top Gear, they always seem to use that for their showcase stuff, like the car X vs car Y or the scenes of expensive cars tearing around mountain roads. It probably works in TW2 by bleeding the shadows and/or darker colours into their neighbouring colours.

Logically I would guess:

Very Small = 512MB or less
Small = 750MB
Medium = 1GB
Large = 1.5GB
Very Large = 2GB or more

...but I have no idea.

SSAO makes the picture look more realistic, depth and shadows pop out..usually only to a more discerning eye. I notice it on stairs and such, causes subtle shading from reflections.