LOTF some (experimental) guidance for crashes/slow gameplay

[Mausinator08]

Ok, I don't know about everyone else, but I do seem to see in the Patch 1.6 Notes thread that there is a support email to contact for these excessive crashes some (not all) people are experiencing. On 1.5 I experienced crashes when there was more than one enemy locked on to me and/or with nVidia Turbulance enabled. Also, if you have nVidia, right click on your desktop>left click nVidia Control Panel. From there, in the side pane off to the left, Select Surround and PhysX. In the main pane to the right side where there is a combo box (drop-down menu) with the options Auto-Select/GPU/CPU, select CPU and click Apply button at the bottom right. Not only will that at least surpress the frequent crashes (if not all), it will disable the nVidia Turbulance option for good (can't even select it in Options) and the game will be somewhat smoother even with almost highest to highest graphics @ 1080p.

For me, I have the following setup and can run the game pretty smoothly at highest settings without VSYNC and no AA (keep in mind I built this machine in 2010...):
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-880GM-UD2H AM3 Slot
CPU: AMD AM3 Phenom II X6 1055T 2.8 GHz (3.2 Turbo Boost)
RAM: 2x DDR3 1333 MHz Crucial + 2x DDR3 1600 MHz Crucial (I know, two different speeds, but I wasn't paying attention and I'm fixing to upgrade completely in a year or two anyway.)
Video Card: nVidia Geforce 750 TI GTX with 2 GB GDDR5 (the small one with no power source connector, this is what is bottlenecking the most for me performance wise, more than the AMD CPU... go figure)
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Recon 3D Fatal1ty Profesional 5.1

As you can see, my video card aint the best... but I haven't had crashes since 1.4 and 1.5. I'm fixing to run 1.6 and see if it's even better or if crashes occur again. Afterwards, if needed, I'll just contact CI at [e-mail]

Also, don't remember how or where I saw this (Google for it if you want), but someone on some forum stated that the Anisotrophic Filtering being set to 8 or above causes uneccessarry lag for some reason, and that something like the following fixes this? (I have yet to get this to work):
- Turn Texture Size all the way down.
- Exit and Restart the game.
- Turn Anisotrophic Filtering all the way down.
- Exit and Restart the game.
- Turn Apex Turbulance off. (Should be off for now anyway for most due to the crashes.)
- Exit and Restart the game.
- Turn Texture Size to desired level (or all the way up if you can)
- Exit and Restart the game.
- Play until your heart is content and hopefully (supposedly) a crash free and smooth gameplay experience will occur.

Those of you hammering the Devs about "not fixing crashes" may or may not be correct, but at least Google common troubleshooting steps before asking for money back...please? It really is not that hard to search for "LOTF crashing" or "lords of the fallen slow" or "lords of the fallen lags physx". (Feel free to copy and paste those phrases into Google.) We have a right to complain... it's only natural. But lets have supporting evidence through the proper channels ([e-mail]) that are provided before filling a forum/chat room with the same complaint over and over and then insults towards the devs and others. It's just common sense. I'm not trying to be rude to those of you who feel shafted. But please, understand that PC games are a different beast entirely that does require work to get your "Ultimate Rig" cranking those bits and bytes for the best experience. If that's too much to handle, that's what consoles are there for. Cheap, reliable, and cost effective. Now before I get slammed for being narrow minded, don't take any of these words litterally. (It's going to happen anyway, I already know) This is just my openion from what I have experienced, and I am sharing, not forcing, this information. I don't like flame wars. Just take it or leave it.

Thank you

[deezman2014]

Love what you said in the end. I am not a fan of nerd rage, it clutters up forums all too often on Steam, as well as the multitude of other game related sites I belong to or own myself. Most games that come out for pc have issues for a while after launch. Take WoW for instance, it's one of the biggest games out there, Blizzard does an expansion they always, without fail, have to take servers down to fix a multitude of bugs. People, devs CAN'T, and WILL NEVER be able to predict how their products are going to react to every system out there. There's countless different ways to build PC's, therefore there's no way for the devs to see everything that's going to be an issue out the gate. So, nerd ragers out there, as our more level headed author of this thread stated, CHILL!! It's a damn game!! They will patch it, or tell you how to mend issues as quickly as they can explore the options that will fix the issues for MOST of the systems out there, but that takes time. If you want to say nasty things to them or about them, then educate yourself and find your own salution to why your system doesn't like that certain piece of software. If you're too lazy or stupid to be able or willing to step up, and take it to that level, keep your damn comments to yourself and leave our discussion forums room for people to have conversations without all your crying and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, we really don't care how bad your day is going because you couldn't play with your new game. Hide in a corner and hug yourself, we have way better things to do with our time, then holding your hand while you cry. Have a nice day. Blessed Be.

[Mausinator08]

Wow! Nicely said. Straight forward and to the point. And I'm not perfect either. I'll admit, there are times when I want to rage quit. (Sometimes I do to keep from having a heart attack at 25 years old, lol!) But yeah, to put what deezman2014 said in short, people only want to hear about the good, not the ugly. Plus you will be doing yourself a favor not just in your lifestyle and attitude, but to your physical body as well. There is this little word I've learned about called dendrites. Laughing produces more of these, which, in my openion, are even better than endorphans because it triggers a healing mechanism rather than just deadening pain. You will feel better if you and others all keep calm and find something productive to do about the situation or at least just walk away for a little bit. That's not running away from a problem so long as one comes back to solve it later. I used to go on rampages when I was in Jr. High and High School. Not worth it! ANd like deezman2014 said... It's a frazilin' game! Unless you are getting a decent sallary to sit there and play, (or rage about how much it sucks), it's not like you will eventually die for not yelling at a game. It's ok.

On a lighter note, the Devs listened (silently) about LOTF. I played with patch 1.6 and turned everything on and up (including VSYNC and what not!) and the game played like butter! No crashes/freezes. No lag other than the fact I need to slightly upgrade my tower. And I have all the bells and whistles turned on includig APEX Turbulance and I didn't have to modify the game or my system/OS. I even got to keep my PhysX on the GPU instead of CPU this time. So yeah, they listened. We didn't get a response because they know not to get themselves in trouble with flame wars. So maybe we can follow up with email like they suggested next time with constructive feedback on what is going on in the game and maybe they can crank out less patches more quickly with less goofups.

I used to work as a QA Tester at EA Games where I live and was only a contractor getting paid $9.50/hr FT (originally got paid $7.50/hr FT) and yet somehow most of us were extremely dedicated to finding these issues, following up with tracking them, etc. for such little pay. Why? Because we ENJOY games, not critique them. Filing supporting, factual information in an email is easy compared to submitting a bug in a database filled with 10s of 1000s of bugs per title. Customers/Consumers have it easy. Let's not abuse our privilages of enjoying games. Sure, we are alowed by law to complain all we want. But every action has a consequence, good or bad. I'd like to keep this privilage if you all don't mind.

Just because we can doesn't neccessarily mean we should. (Yes, I made a quote! :) )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrite
- a clearer explanation than mine about what Dendrites actually do. It deals with the immune system.

[Doomvora]

Originally posted by Store Page Reqirements:

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7 (SP1) or Windows 8 (only 64 bit OSs
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 @ 2.66Ghz or AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3.0Ghz
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 460 or better
DirectX: Version 11
Hard Drive: 25 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Sound Card with Latest Drivers

I actually barely meet these requirements and do NOT meet the requirement for graphics

My specs
Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66ghz
8 GB DDR2 RAM
Geforce 630 GT <-- this is where i fail on the reqs.

I can still manage to run the game, however its at a constant 20-25 fps, any ideas on maybe mods thats dumb down the graphics alittle to allow at least 30 fps for my setup? I have literally everything at the lowest possible settings so im rather at a loss as to what to try.

I even resorted to 1024x768 resolution for the game to try and get the game to run smoother.

[Mausinator08]

Asuming you have tried my suggestion(s) dealing with PhysX and the Apex options already, their is also an ini file in Users\<Your User Name>\Documents\Lords of the Fallen\settings.ini

Try messing with those settings (especially where it says 'physx_fixed_timestep_size = 0.016'...
some say changing the 0.016 slightly or setting it to 0.0 has at least smoothed out the PhysX frames for them. It's basically a timing interval where the phisics are not updated in sync with the actuall framerate or something like that. I saw no effect on that but that was on patch 1.5.

Also, after you set your settings the way you like in that ini file, right click it>select properties>general tab>put a check on the read only box. I found that the game sometimes at certain points "resets" the graphics settings to default which next time you run the game from steam it will revert back to those. (Happens everytime when you bring up the advanced graphics options... anoying!)

By the way, how many GBs of dedicated VRAM does your Geforce 630 GT have? I only have 2 GB GDDR5 and even that only runs 40 to 50 consistantly and sometimes for short spurts I'll get the full 60 FPS. This is at full graphics though. The game also states when setting everything to Very High (Maximum) that I need a video card with >6 GB of VRAM??? What?????? I doubt that somehow, but I won't disregard it completely after what I"ve seen. Still could use some more patches, but as I've been ranting about, I can be patient...

Try upgrading your system RAM to like 12 or 16 GB if possible. And I find setting your page file for all HDDs to 1.5 x system memory helps tremendously! (I have 16 GBs of DDR3 RAM and was origianlly running about 2048 MB of Virtual Memory... quickly set that to about 24 GB and now I have had less problems with games/system stability. Then agian, all my HDDs are either 1 TB or 2 TB so I had room to spare.)

Something simple you could try is to use nVidia Control Panel and put settings specifically for LOTF for program specific settings. For some of these, rather than allowing the application to decide, force anisotrphic to 2x, 4x or off for example. The game keeps trying to use 8x (so I've heard, anyway) and it isn't very optimized for that particular setting from what I understand. Maybe a dev could chime in on that question?

At any rate, the only other suggestion is to upgrade your video card if possible to a GDDR5 GTX with at least 2 GB of dedicated video memory. I got my Geforce GTX 750 ti with 2 GB GDDR5 Video Memory for under $200 at Best Buy in 2014. No external power for mine, but it gets the job done.

Hope all that helps....