Graphics Settings Explained

[MrGadget]

Could someone clearly and in lay terms explain the various graphics settings in the launcher, and identify where and what in-game one might observe visual differences for them?

[LigH]

BASIC SETTINGS

• Texture Quality: If less than "Highest" or "High", everything will look noticably blurred
  
• Shaders: Higher settings will add nice effects, like embossed surfaces, but very old graphic chips may not support them
  
• Particles: If set to "Medium", torches and firebowls will not have visible flames (and even spells effects may be reduced?)
  
• Enable Grass: Foliage grows on outside hills; may be pretty - may be annoying...
  
• Enable Weather: Snow, rain, thunder, fog may occasionally appear, randomly, per sector
  
• Enable Shadows: Related to "decal" shadows (simple dark spots below characters). They were slightly buggy, and slowing down many when in a crowd or between lots of items.
  

ADVANCED SETTINGS

• Enable Bloom: A blurry overlay of exaggerated lights. Do you like candywraps and bling-bling?
  
• Enable HDR: The visible brightness adapts to the light level. Interfers with manual brightness control. Not what you may expect.
  
• Color Depth: 32 bit per pixel. No excuse.
  
• Anti-Aliasing: Smoothen jagged lines of diagonal edges. High levels also reduce ugly flakes in distant fences and trees (mipmap generation errors)
  
• Anisotropic Filtering: Makes textures you look across in a flat angle (e.g. the road out of the East gate) look slightly sharper in the distance; marginal enhancement
  
• Loader Cache: Should speed up loading models, but may interfer with having creatures of different body sizes; keep disabled.
  
• Background Loading: Best tested with your own experience. Try different settings and then move through the East Passage, between Hydlaa Plaza and Hydlaa East, forth and back. Compare how long the game pauses while loading the other map, and afterwards while moving through the city.
  
• Enable VBO: "Vertex Buffer Objects" used to cause issues with ancient ATI (Radeon, pre-HD) graphic cards. Should theoretically be well suported today. But marginal speed enhancement only.
  

If you want recommendations where not to use the highest option, please provide your exact graphic chipset or card model.

Above values are my preferred settings for an Nvidia GeForce GTS 450.

[Bonifarzia]

I knew LigH would be the first to give a useful and detailed answer.
One thing that could need some more clarification: The actual effect of shader settings. As far as I remember, lowest switches to full bright lighting, and high or highest enables dynamic lighting from torches, staffs etc. It would be very nice to see a more specific description, how this shader setting implies some other options (on/off), and if it has a gradual effect on the precision of normal maps, specular and dynamic lighting, lightmaps or whatever other techniques are in use.



And maybe these older recommendations by RlyDontKnow are still useful:

[...]
1.  Lag and poor performance:
If you do not meet the system requirements, expect lag and graphical issues.  Even if you do, there can often be lag caused by network issues, which are simply unavoidable at this point.

Here are a few things you can do to help your system handle problems on your side:

• Update the game and your graphics card drivers (also check the other help thread).
  
• Don't use 16-bit color depth.  CS just doesn't work well with it.
  
• Try enabling the adaptive distance feature in the options menu. It'll try and maintain a framerate by not rendering farther away objects.
• Disable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in pslaunch
• Disable grass
• Disable the loader cache
• Disable HDR and bloom
• Disable background world loading
• Disable background model loading
• Set particle effects to medium and vary the shader details level (depending on your graphics card a lower or higher setting may work better)
• Set Video.OpenGL.TextureDownsample = 0 to some value bigger than 0. The higher the value, the more textures will be downsampled.
  
• You can always try lowering the game's resolution in pslaunch.  If you can't play with 800x600 or even (the horrid) 640x480, and you've tried everything else, ask for help. (note that the available resolutions depend on the aspect ratio, so if the one you want isn't available, change the aspect ratio accordingly)