Performance & Visibility (Foliage)

[Forrest Gimp]

First thing I wanna say is I absolutely fell in love with this game, it's very good. Grabbed Deluxe Edition as soon as I could, RS1 still feels a bit better, but this one is very close. Well, best shooter on the market for me anyway.

So, to get this out of the way, my rig is quite old (Core i5 3.40 GHz, 16 GB RAM, GTX 960 4 GB VRAM, Win10) and I don't really look for high end visuals. In multiplayer shooter, stable, smooth ~60 FPS and best possible visibility is all I'm looking for. I ran testing with various graphic settings and it appears that on most maps and in most situations, I get 60 FPS on High/Med settings, but the problem is, in specific areas and during very heavy firefights (arty and all) it dips down to ~40, as well as it does so in particlar areas of the map for reasons unknown.

I solved this easily with just setting most on Medium, few on Low and turning off some non-critical stuff like DoF and etc, so my game runs pretty solid on 60 with barely any dips and still looks almost great. Why almost? Foliage Detail...

It appeared pretty big performance hog. I read up on it and played through all 3 settings on several maps. I also read up that people arguing on it giving advantage for folks having it on Low. I don't have deep undestanding of this game and haven't seen all maps yet, but from what I seen so far: regardless of settings, most (tactical) vegetation like bushes, trees, and even some grass is rendered all across the field. Foliage detail adds more thick patches of vegetation that only creates extra layer of concealment, but I doubt that anyone really uses this foliage as a concealment right now. Though it does look pretty, especially on High+ textures, I give it that.

To be clear, even on High, it doesn't render whole field with this extra foliage, at least from what I've seen, and shootouts can occur on pretty long distances on regular basis, so it won't provide any concealment at all. Even on Medium, draw distance is criminally close. My big issue is that on Low it literally grows under my feet, so in that very case, it really doesn't do much in case of creating concealment for the enemy. So, it just looks ridiculous and only drains extra performance, minor, but still it does. Why?

Point is, if developer wants it to be fair, they need to lock this setting on High for everyone. Even if I get big hit on FPS because of that, I do understand that prefernace of majority and fairness for all comes first before the needs of few, and I won't have any problems with it. But the way it is implemented right now, they might as well give us an option to turn it off entirely just not to be annoying, in perf and visual senses both, no?

Questions: is there a safe and legit way to turn it off in file settings maybe? If not, are there any official statements on this from TWI? Because I'm sure this thing is pretty controversal and found quite a lot of heated debate threads on it so far. I can't believe it will stay the way it is...

P.S. Any more tips on performance or visibility tweaks from players would be very welcome in a mean time.

[@theweedfather]

Regardless of your settings there's culling that happens after a certain distance, you could have your settings on high but 200m away you'd still see someone laying in a bush that isn't there.

Vietnamese and Southern forces contrast with the green foliage due to their skin color, look for light spots among the greenery.

[Forrest Gimp]

Huh, yeah, I noticed that too a few times, hope it gets adressed in future. But what about weed? I mean foliage of course. Man, that popping up greenery makes me so uneasy... No fix whatsoever?

Btw, seen that guide referenced a few times: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1465356159
It says you don't risk bans or anything with tweaks in ROEnine.ini f.e., but in few threads I searched, people say you do risk ban for meddling with in-game setting files. Who to trust? Are there safe and unsafe tweaks I can make?

P.S. Dear TWI, please, please I'm begging you, fix pop up, do something about it, it hurts, it hurts so much...

[Yawb]

Disco, ini tweaks are fine, atleast the ones listed on Spacemarines guide.

The tweaks that could get you banned are ones that are exploits. No such things exist on spacemarines guide, and if they were im pretty sure tripwire would of removed the guide already if it had something obtaining as bannable.

I personally use "Problem Texture Streaming Solved(NEW!!!!!)" config edits listed on his guide
and have since it was listed, no issues. The MaxAnisotropy set to 16 may help your draw distance being higher, combined with high settings / medium. Changing your video settings will revert the anistrophy setting, so ensure you apply it each time you change your graphical settings, or make the ini file read only.

Also i wouldnt advise using someone elses tweaked configs, some of them contain data about your cpu rating and other stuff. Best tweaking yourself.

In general, yes i agree the foilage is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess. I've got a beefy rig and playing it on ultra with anistrophy set to 16. But i'm putting myself at a huge disadvantage doing so, lately i've put it on medium. I'd rather see whos shooting me and cope with the popins then to put myself at a severe disadvantage.

[Forrest Gimp]

Thanks for the tips. Something weird happened though, when I tried switching off dynamic shadows, in guide it says I still can see blobs, but in-game character shadows appeared crisp high quality and my FPS tanked, haha. Reverted all back, I can live with most stuff as it is, and FPS is in general fine, but foliage... of well.

[Damien]

About the foliage, you can try to play with the "foliageradiusmultiplier" in engine.ini , regular value is 1.0 I didn't see any major differences going past 1.5 and it affected performance poorly at 2.0. I can testify that I don't see ♥♥♥♥ in the jungle and is killed by invisible man 2/3

[Forrest Gimp]

I tried both foliageradiusmultiplier parameters at 0.1, 0.2 and 0.0. It doesn't do jack. You can probably increase it, but you can't lower it beyond minimum, looks like its hardcoded in the engine. Still not sure why tho, minimal available in-game, as I said previously, just grows under your feet, it doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever.

I've seen games where foliage draw distance (on UE3 at that) is pretty high and doesn't completely destroy performance. I'm sure somehing can be made to have actual jungle for everyone (locked) and not being too big of a resource hog. It would be pain in the arse to actually mess with lod textures further, but it would be completely worth it.

The way it works now just hurts map design, IMHO.