Lowering the draw distance?

[Barricade]

Hey guys. I was just curious if lowering the draw distance was possible? Playing on the industrial map, I ended up on a hill overlooking a lot of the land, buildings, oceans and trees which caused the fps to drastically drop. If I could reduce the distance even by 1/4 I think that'd help out a lot. Has anyone done it or is there an option that I'm over looking?

I know. I need to upgrade my toaster. I'll be doing it soon, once I fix up my BMW. Thanks in advance.

While I touched on the subject, could anyone recommend which intel processor and mobo to go with that'd make games like this, Arma III, and GTA V run as smooth as a babys ear lobe on max? Does the i5 still cut it not overclocked? Or am I looking at the i7 now. Thanks for the help.

[aljowen]

Yes you can lower the draw distance, but it will be slightly more in depth than just tweaking some settings. But if you follow what i say below it shouldnt be too hard and is only a 7 step process.

DRAW DISTANCE STUFF
You will need to make sure that your game is no longer in full screen (alt+enter) then you will need to open the level editor by pressing f11. Since you will be modifying the level file you will have to do this seperatley for each map you want to lower the distance for.
Once in the map editor at the right hand side of your screen you should see the Scene Tree. Click on the arrow next to "Mission group" to expand that folder.
You will then need to click on something that will usually be called "theLevelInfo" You can always see which one it is because it has a blue circle logo with an "i" in it next to it.
The inspector below the scene tree will now be filled with all sorts of perameters that you can change. You want to look at the category called "Visibility" it will have an option called "visibleDistance" that is the draw distance. I belive that number is measured in meters, so if you make it smaller the draw distance will be smaller and vice versa.
Edit that number then play the game for a bit inside the editor and repeat until you are happy with the frame rate (you can find the exact frame rate by pressing Ctrl+F)
Now to exit the level editor just press f11, you can then go back to full screen if you want to by pressing alt+enter and play the game. If you want to save the changes that you have made so that the draw distance will be the same next time you load the level make sure that when you press escape to leave the level you click a "do you want to save" prompt that will appear.

NEW COMPONENTS STUFF
As for your second question your CPU will not usually be the issue in most games. It is the GPU that will make things appear smooth. Since you havent specified your budget or form factor all i can suggest is that getting the latest top of the range I5 K edition, which will be fine for running any game. But you will need a GPU that is more powerful than a GTX750ti or AMD R9 270 to get smoothness at 1080p in most games at either max or medium for more demanding games. If you want to ensure smoothness in all games a GTX770 would be ideal but isnt entirely nessasary.

Hope any of this wall of text helps :)

[Barricade]

Haha awesome man. I'll try decoding your text later tonight and report back how it went. I'm currently running a GTX660 3GB, not the best card- but I picked it up fairly cheap. Really I just plan on swapping out the mobo and cpu- and maybe add a processor water cooled system. I'm running 8 gigs of ram, and the 660- so I shouldn't be too far behind the gaming benchmark. If so I can always add those things later on. Thanks again for your text!!!

[aljowen]

Your 660 should be fine for a while still. In most games your CPU wont really effect performance that much as long as your CPU isnt awful. An I5 will do everything, these days with things such as cuda and open cl your GPU will do a lot of the things that your cpu used to do if you are planning on doing any video editing or 3d rendering. In games a pentium G3258 will do pretty much everything that you need, but its always nice to have an I5 because it future proofs you and ensures that you can have your PC hosting multiplayer servers while playing the game on the same PC etc.