[Graymalkin]

I picked up Jedi Knight 2 yesterday and got right down to playing. On the Kejim(sp?) base level I got a pretty decent framerate, very playable. As soon as I got to the third level with the gigantic outdoor spaces my framerate dropped and hovered around 20fps. I realize the outdoor level has far more onscreen polys than the indoor levels and has to worry about the textured sky and whatnot. I wasn't expecting such a precipitious drop however. I'm looking for some suggestions to adjust my settings to make JK2 playable in outdoor levels. I expect a large number of outdoor levels like the first JK had so I want to make sure the entire game is playable, not just indoor levels.

Specs:

12" Powerbook G4
867MHz G4
640MB RAM
GeForce4 MX 420 w/ 32MB

Running 1024x768x32
Medium texture detail
Shadows on
Dynamic lights on
Fast sky off

Looking at my cfg file I'm going to make some changes but any suggestions are still appriciated. Maybe everyone can post their specs and settings so we can all improve our performance.

[a2daj]

Have you tried just turning off all the options to see how well it performs? Try turning things off in the options before tweaking the .cfg files.

The first thing I usually turn off in any game to help boost performance is shadows. However, now that I think about it, by default I don't think shadows work in JK2. You have to manually enable something in the .cfg file. At least you do for the Volumetric Shadows. Those are very CPU intensive and aren't really recommended. Not sure how much of an impact the blob shadows are but try turning those off anyway.

[KeyLimePi]

Didn't I hear somewhere that audio uses a surprising amount of resources? Try cutting out the music, it's worth a shot.

[SciFrog]

Take everything down for this level, then put it back later...

[MilkmanDan]

Ok, heres the Sarcastic post (before anyone else does it).

Buy a PC.

I'm kidding. Really. I just had to say it to be silly.

[a2daj]

No you didn't.

[Graymalkin]

Originally posted by SciFrog:
Take everything down for this level, then put it back later...

I want to know what I need to unset for this level to make it playable. Today I was able to sit down with it, once I got to an indoor area the framerate shot back up to where it was on the first to levels. It did drop when I entered the room full of Storm Troopers with the catwalk overhead. Not quite as badly as the first part of the level but enough to be annoying. Rooms with doors leading outside can be a problem too, if a door opens to an outside area the framerate drops to the outdoor level, once the door closes the framerate shoots back up. This is without even having the open door in the viewport, it shouldn't even be rendering the outdoor area.

I tried setting the texture detail to low and turned fast sky on. Turning off dynamic lights was ugly and didn't affect my framerate any so I turned dynamic lights back on. In the cfg file, what are valid settings for cg_shadows? It is currently set to "1", will setting it to 0 force blob shadows instead of the detailed shadows it is using or turn them off entirely? Also what does the r_facePlaneCull setting control? Will setting it to "0" (it is now "1") force the engine to cull unseen planes better?

[Liquidity X]

make sure FSAA is set to no higher than 2, i tuned mine all the way off. Also runn the game at higher res. i found with my gefroce 4 TI, the game runs better pumped up. and that level just sux. Tough it out threw it, and it'll getbetter after that.

[Graymalkin]

That's something to look forward to!

I keep FSAA off at all times because the GF4MX simply does not have enough umph to keep framerates up with it enabled. I'd rather have the 50% more frames than a prettier picture. I'll enable FSAA when I want to take screen shots of stuff.

[a2daj]

I'd recommend turning shadows off completely. You won't really notice them while getting shot at