Psi-Epilepsy: Fixing Object Pop-In and Refresh Rate Bugs

I saw a lot of people using AMD Crimson still having issues with getting this game to work on their Radeon GPUs, so without further delay, here's a guide to solve your problems in a few easy steps! No downloading or modding required, just a quick game profile and maybe an INI tweak or two... if you're lucky. RadeonPro may be required, but we'll get to that later.

Keep in mind, I'm kind of rushing through this guide to get to as many people as possible with the Radeon bug. Like similar guides I've made for Half-Life and Rollercoaster Tycoon, I intend to update this as necessary to give as much information as possible (I've also learned from the mistakes I've made with that HL1 guide and will do my best not to clutter/confuse everything). As I've yet to solve many of these bugs myself, any information you can give me would be greatly appreciated here.

Psychonauts is an awesome game, and definitely worth taking a look on sale/before the sequel/literally any time as there's no excuse not to play it. Don't let a few compatibilty snags stop you from checking it out!

Object Pop-In

Ah, drivers... poor ATi never got a break with their rep here. Thankfully they've come a long way since the horror stories of their drivers before 2013, with all of the crashing and freezing of the past. However, AMD made a bit of a mis-step with their Crimson drivers that killed Psychonauts and Battlefront II in one fell swoop. Thankfully, Psychonauts is an easy fix.

If THIS is your issue... don't panic! Fixing this will take all of two seconds on a modern graphics card.

Step 1:

First of all, you'll need to open up AMD Crimson Settings. Do this by right-clicking your desktop and following through each click below.
First, click on AMD Radeon Settings. Easy enough.

If you do not see this, or see AMD Catalyst Control Center instead, a) you shouldn't be having this issue and b) go update your drivers if possible.

Second, go through the Gaming tab. (Crimson might lock up for a "few" seconds while loading all your crap, be patient ;)


Now, slog through your entire game library until you see Psychonauts.


After that, change the Antialiasing settings. The antialiasing method should be "Adaptive Multisampling." You may need to change the mode before this shows up.

• If you intend to play on the lowest settings, set the mode to "Override."
  
• If you have a decent computer that can handle the in-game FSAA, set the mode to "Enhance" (as shown in this GIF).

Keep in mind, Crimson seems to reset your gaming profiles occasionally when you update your drivers. If you happen to update your drivers and Psychonauts breaks again, just repeat the steps here.

Low Framerate/Stuttering?

This section is still in development as I've been unable to replicate the problem, outside of the AMD Radeon problem. If you have a problem and have any info as to what might be causing it, by all means drop a comment so it can get sorted out!

Refresh Rate Bugs?

Again, still investigating this one. This isn't exactly severe, as generally Psychonauts will settle for 60Hz regardless of your monitor-- safe, but not exactly what we want for those of us with 144Hz monitors.

I'll continue looking into this one, and once again, leave a comment if you find anything regarding this. I got 144Hz working once, but I don't really remember what I did. The game caps at a framerate of 100 FPS, but if you get locked to 60Hz for whatever reason it'll look like less.

Let's be clear, this section is kind of useless to most people as you're probably playing this on an Average Joe (r) brand 60Hz monitor. And that's great, sure! You don't have anything to worry about here. Still, there are those of us who have no financial self-control opted for the improvements of a 120Hz or 144Hz monitor (or higher... oh dear) and want to see the full benefits there. I'll keep hunting for those INI commands, but feel free to drop a comment if you already know it.

If you don't mind 3rd party tools, read on and we can fix refresh rates alongside everything else.

Controller Problems?

For now, I'll suggest that you avoid compatibility mode. While it seems smart to run Windows XP SP3 mode for this game, this turned out to break support/detection for my wired Xbox One controller a while back. Not only that, but it disables Steam's overlay-- this also means no using the Steam Link.

I also found that early on, the best way to guarantee that the controller was working was to mash B as fast as possible during the Double-Fine logo-- it seemed to make the difference between exclusivity to Keyboard or actually using a controller.

During the Tutorial, you may see a prompt for "Button 12--" that means clicking down the Right Thumbstick. This game originally had generic controller prompts (Button 1-12) instead of showing proper Xbox prompts, and it looks like they missed a spot when adding more modern controllers with Voodooman's patch. This only shows up in the tutorial, and everything else will prompt you accordingly, so don't worry about it.

You'll also notice that some of the menus are a bit unreliable. Personally, I can't access Options (Input, Graphics, Sound) on a controller, and need to use a mouse, while others have no problem. Your mileage may vary here, so make sure to experiment with menus and see what works.

If you're one of the unlucky ones who can't use the mouse at all in the options menu (it should work everywhere else though), I'll show basic INI commands at a later date. For now, I just want to push the guide out there so those struggling with the AMD bug can get a fix quickly.

P.S.: An "Easy" Solution with Third Party Tools (RadeonPro)

As of 17.5.2, this fix no longer consistently worked for me. After some messing around with the driver software for a bit, I eventually gave up and tried RadeonPro for a bit. WARNING: This does involve a downloadable program. Use downloadable content from the interwebs at your own risk!

http://www.radeonpro.info/

RadeonPro is a third party tool used to override your drivers and applications, designed specifically for Radeon graphics cards (but without AMD/ATi's involvement). I've previously used it to limit the framerate in games such as MDK 2 and Armed and Dangerous with varying degrees of success, but in Psychonauts it is quite effective and reliable.

Here are the settings I used in my profile for the game. This not only fixed the issue of model pop-in, but also allowed me to fix the refresh rate bug that kept the game locked at 60Hz, even overriding the game's 100 FPS lock (I recommend keeping 100 or lower as your refresh rate to prevent weird physics bugs).

Here are the settings I eventually came up with:

<Profile name="\steam\steamapps\common\psychonauts\psychonauts.exe" title="The Most Excellent Game Psychonauts!" executable="C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Psychonauts\Psychonauts.exe" args="" launcher="" method="1">
<Property name="_ForceVSync" value="0" />
<Property name="_VSyncControl" value="4" />
<Property name="_ForceRefreshRate" value="60" />
<Property name="_ForceDoubleVsync" value="0" />
<Property name="_ForceTripleBuffering" value="1" />
<Property name="_UseAAProfile" value="" />
<Property name="_UseCrossfireProfile" value="" />
<Property name="_DisableAero" value="1" />
<Property name="_Exes" value="" />
<Property name="AntiAlias" value="2" />
<Property name="AntiAliasSamples" value="4" />
<Property name="EQAA" value="1" />
<Property name="MLF" value="1" />
<Property name="TemporalAAMultiplier" value="0" />
<Property name="TemporalAAFrameThreshold" value="xxx" />
<Property name="GI" value="1" />
<Property name="MVPUMode" value="-1" />
<Property name="MVPUVisualConfirm" value="0" />
<Property name="_ForceRefresh" value="1" />
<Property name="_ForceWindowed" value="0" />
<Property name="_ForceFramerate" value="0" />
<Property name="_MatchFramerate" value="1" />
<Property name="_Affinity" value="255" />
<Property name="_ForceHighPriority" value="0" />
<Property name="_OSDLocation" value="1" />
<Property name="_OSDApiFps" value="0" />
<Property name="_OSDDateTime" value="0" />
<Property name="_OSDPlayTime" value="0" />
<Property name="_OSDFlags" value="135" />
<Property name="_OSDSize" value="0" />
<Property name="_OSDColor" value="65535" />
<Property name="_OSDShowAtStartup" value="1" />
<Property name="_OSDHideNormalView" value="1" />
<Property name="_OSDHideReducedView" value="0" />
<Property name="FlipQueueSize" value="0" />
<Property name="EnableTripleBuffering" value="0" />
<Property name="AnisotropyOptimise" value="0" />
<Property name="TrilinearOptimise" value="0" />
<Property name="SurfaceFormatReplacements" value="0" />
<Property name="_UseAO" value="1" />
<Property name="_AOType" value="1" />
<Property name="_AOQuality" value="2" />
<Property name="ASTT" value="1" />
<Property name="ASD" value="1" />
<Property name="ASE" value="0" />
<Property name="ATMS" value="-1" />
<Property name="AAF" value="0" />
<Property name="Tessellation_OPTION" value="2" />
<Property name="Tessellation" value="7" />
<Property name="_FXAAQuality" value="2" />
<Property name="_FXAAGreenAsLuma" value="1" />
<Property name="TextureOpt" value="0" />
<Property name="LodAdj" value="-30" />
<Property name="_ForcedTripleBufferingCodePath" value="0" />
</Profile>

If you put that in a text document, rename the ending extension to XML, and open it up under Backup/Restore with RadeonPro, you can easily copy over my settings to not only fix but enhance the graphics of Psychonauts.

I tested this on an MSi R7 360 and scored around 88-100 FPS at all times, but if necessary you may want to drop the additional antialiasing (namely MLAA) on a lower end card. The R7 360 is by no means a powerhouse by today's standards, but there are still many other cards out there with different specifications so your mileage may vary.
To disable MLAA, hit ctrl-F after copying that over to a file and search MLF. Set it to 0.

Oh, and I did mention this fixed the refresh rate bug, didn't I? Well, when you copy that over, hit Ctrl-F and check for ForceRefreshRate. Set that to 100 (don't go any higher!) and you'll be good!

Questions? Solutions? Stale memes?

If you have any of your own tweaks, problems, or fixes, make sure to drop them here with as much detail as possible in the comments.

I made this guide as Psychonauts is an excellent game, and while recently trying to fix it myself to help a friend I figured someone out there could use this as well. After all, my Half-Life guide of a similar purpose (though poorly organized and crammed with unfunny jokes) ended up helping a lot of people. So, here we are...

With Psychonauts 2 less than two years away, there's no reason to let a few technical snags get in the way of finishing this one first. Trust me, it's MUCH better than the alternative.

I first saw the awful PS4 issues from a livestream, and trust me, sound cutting out is the LEAST of your audio problems there. Input lag, cut audio lines, awful compression, random audio quality nosedives... You REALLY don't want the PS4 version, not when the Steam version is so easy to run and readily available.

[Space Coward]

No problem! I wanted to get it all down on paper [so to speak] since I was fixing it again on my own systems, so I'm glad I was able to help some people out along the way.

[jungleboyjeremy]

Thanks for writing this up. Now I feel stupid for putting up with the graphics issue for as long as I did

[Amy_Aimée]

Thanks a lot

[Ginsu2k]

I'm using Crimson, friend.

[Space Coward]

No problem. Did Crimson work for you, or did you need RadeonPro?

I'm thinking of rewriting that section to simplify it, since messing around with XML files and abusing a backup feature isn't exactly the most streamlined of processes.

[Ginsu2k]

Thanks for the manual. Solve my problem of objects pop-in.