Better visuals on Nvidia cards

how to optimize your nvidia card to get stunning visual experience on vanilla

Intro

Hey Guys, if you allready saw something like this picture on top you allready know that FF13 can look kinda messy and weird.
You also might know there are a bunch of possible solutions and attempts on fix stuff and they all work for some people.

This one is NOT for 1080p via 3rd party tool and might be not the right thing for everyone but as those methods are still in alpha and get some weird new issues while trying to fix something, i´ve decided to go another route on fixing with actual improving the image quality without the drawback of getting new issues that need to be fixed. I prefer waiting for a stable way to add higher resolution for now but i wont suffer overall image quality for resolution.

(i will add 1080p later if i found out a way of doing this without messing things up)

I will add some general fixes on the microstutter thing and stuff later on in the guide aswell to make it as complete as possible and if you´re stil interested, i´ll show you how to turn the above lightning into this lightning:

Prepare

Okay, first of all the fullscreen fix, so you wont have problems running the game in fullscreen even on some exotic resolutions.

GPU upscaling does the trick and its also quite simple to setup.
just open your nvidia control panel and look for this, tick it and your done





The next step is to download the nvidia inspector tool, it´s like a more complex way to set up things like in the control panel but there are things you can only change or add via this method

click[www.guru3d.com]

Setting up Nvidia Inspector

Allright folks. lets do this now...

Open up your new best friend and click on the left button to get a new window that might look confusing to you at first.



Next we want to create a new profile. To do so, hit the this button on top:



Name it like "FFXIII SGSSAA" "sexy chocobo" or whatever you like so you can identify it later.
Next step is to add the Game.exe to it. located at:
Steam -> SteamApps -> common -> FINAL FANTASY XIII -> white_data -> prog -> win -> bin -> ffxiiiimg.exe




Allright, time to make this game look sweet. the basic idea is to optimize the rendering and make use of the SGSSAA Antialiasing. On Information about the different types on AA just have a look at this awesome website out there. This should give you a basic understanding on this.
click[naturalviolence.webs.com]


lets go:



Variables:

Antialiasing compatibility
This one is tough and not that easy to explain but basicly this value will change from game to game. As there are not that many scources out there by now i needed to experiment a bit and put in some different values. This one might not be optimal by now but and i might change it later but for now the game is looking sweet so i just left it as it is

Sync and Refresh
This is where you need to play around with the settings that fits you best.
Vertical Sync Tear Control should be set to adaptive, VSync either 1/2 for 30fps cap or force on for 60fps cap. As the game has an issue that some parts are capped at 30 for me whatever settings i use i just leave it at 30 now as it´s getting quite spiky for now. but play around with.

Maximum pre-rendered frames and Smooth AFR behavior can also help on getting a smoother gameplay on lower fps, 8 and ON works quite nice for me on the 30fps cap but this might differ if you set it to 60fps cap

AA - Mode: set to override any application setting
Transparency Multisampling set to disabled.

AA Setting and Transparency Supersampling needs to run on the same lvl.
like if you are using 8x Multisampling, set it to 8x Sparse Grid Supersampling, same as with 4x4, 2x2

FXAA Usage on disabled as i do not want to trigger any other filter than the sgssaa.

Anisotropic filtering mode: set it to user defined 16x

LOD Bias:
This one is important as it works against the natural blur of the AA filter to make things more clear.
allow negative LOD bias and edit the values, based on the amount of AA you put in in the first place

2x MSAA + 2x SGSSAA: -0.500
4x MSAA + 4x SGSSAA: -1.000
8x MSAA + 8x SGSSAA: -1.500

Texture filtering Quality set to: High quality and disable the trilinear optimization.

Last but not least:
power management set to "prefer maximum performance" and set the Threaded optimization to on.

Apply changes on top and lets move on into the nvidia control panel. Go to your 3D settings and on your program tab. You might need to delete the FF13.exe and readd it to get those settings refreshed.

if you have done everything correct you should now see something like this:
a new exe file with the name add from the nvidia inspector and a lot of user defined setting in there




Thats it! You are now able to play the game with your new visuals :)

Images are better then text...

Thats what this guides is all about right? so here we go with some images to show you how those settings look like ingame:

This One is a crop of the vanilla version without the optimizations

The second one is after we optimized our settings via nvidia inspector


as you can see the entire image is much more clear, getting details that where just a blured nonexistent mass before. on top of this the performance of the sgssaa filter is just stunning but i cannot show you this on images alone as this comes into play at actual gameplay.

if its diagonal lines or all those fine metalplates on the ground... you wont see any flickering at all, its smooth, its sexy and it will be while running over it, turning the camera around and stuff.
this is a real hard job for any AA filter but the SGSSAA is doing such a nice job on FF13.

Here are some more random screenshots i took but if you really wanna see how it looks, try it out yourself : )

(note, it could be possible that the images are kinda compressed as i needed to use paint on this rig for doing this lol :D )

a fix that might help you out

We are done now but there is more.

You know that strange issue of microstuttering (ingame and videos)?
Some people posted that adding a gamepad could fix this but i cannot test this as i dont have a gamepad.

BUT

something that really got rid of all my microstuttering and was working for couple other guys aswell is something i saw on reddit:

click

For me i believe its my keyboard thats causing this issue.
I´m using a mechanical one that is adding virtual other keyboards to windows to gain a higher bandwidth for lower latency and stuff.

Most of current devices have some sort of feature. if its the ability of using macros on your keyboard or your mouse, or whatsoever,
This thing basicly temp. disable those features and FF13 seems to like it. but dont forget to activate them again after playing : )

[Briggsey]

Thankyou so much this guide is an absolute lifesaver!

Game looks great at these settings!!!

[MasterChief99]

Thank you for this :)

[CTP4rr07]

WOW congratulations man, I had trouble with this game being all slow and stuff on my NVIDIA 960M GTX but after using your tips it's running with better quality and also smother.

Thanks!

[俄]

http://i.imgur.com/ZVneUIz.png <- comparison of forcing Anisotropic Filter

[俄]

AFx16 will break some textures of trees and foliage, they somehow get lower resolution and terrible edges. You should leave it to trilinear if you want somewhat decent trees.

Also from my experience enabling Threaded Optimization will cause a lot of problems in any game where you enable it, you should set it to OFF at all times.

[Free-range Jimmy a.k.a. BIG PAPI]

I fixed it! Sharing my settings here in case anyone else wants steady 60 fps with the same AA tweaks. http://puu.sh/cTTQ4/3edc484de9.png

I'm using these settings with GeDoSaTo and the lighting effect plugin to go with it which can be found here .

[Free-range Jimmy a.k.a. BIG PAPI]

I was able to get 60 fps with these settings but had to disable coverage sampling in GeDoSaTo due to the issues with eyelashes, now it's locked at 30 fps in-game no matter what I change as far as v-sync and such. If I reset the nvidia settings to default I get 60 fps again.

Not sure what to do at this point.

[Zelphrin]

Good fixes. Changed up vert sync to force on because I liked my 60fps, but I did everything else. Works fine for now.

[Snowtaex]

Hey (:
I'm coming till the ffxiiiimg.exe. add but then nothing changes for me .. also not like the screenshot http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/30722514075348530/D2A51B46A030357B0464FAF62386A48E4CA6244F/
What do I have to press or something? :D