TERA Online ini Performance Tweaks Guide

Your bottleneck will most likely be your CPU. My rig is dual GTX460’s with 4GB of old DDR2 I think, ram. Windows Vista 32 bit, and a q6600 Core 2 Quad processor overclocked from 2.4 ghz to 3.0 ghz. I never got time to test that myself, so I will probably do it in CBT3. But if anyone got Ambient Occlusion to work, please share how you did it.

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Its a very good visual improvement if you’ve got the extra GPU power to sacrifice.

But my quad core, newer, higher speed CPU can’t handle more then 15 mobs/players on the screen at once, without the FPS dropping significantly. So since tera vsync a single one of my GTX460’s can handle TERA alone, I figured I could get away with using Ambient Occlusion, which is, to my knowledge, a completely GPU powered task. Unfortunately, Nvidia Control panel has no force Ambient occlusion on setting for TERA. However, there is an Ambient Occlusion True/False setting in the S1Engine.ini file. And my other Unreal 3 Engine game has the same command in its .ini file in the SystemSettings section, and its ambient occlusion works just fine. Ok let me start off by saying I spent literally 20+ hours turning .ini settings on and off, and adjusting and testing Nvidia Inspector options.

1. And you will be seeing it at the 2nd best resolution level.
2. I never got time to test that myself, so I will probably do it in CBT3.
3. The highest LOD level should never be 20 feet from the object, but the entire 0-20 feet from the object range.
4. What exactly is changing in that code thats making my CPU slow down my FPS by 30% or so?
5. Let go of your mouse, and give your FPS seconds or so, and take note of what it is.
6. So what I do as a temporary fix is I run GTX460 #1 as the Single GPU.

Again sorry for my bad spelling hope this will help people and people googling this issue will find this to help them out. If there is something more that you could add here just let me know and i will edit this post. Other than those, I didn’t see any bugs or issues, and the game looks fantastic. I pre-ordered the game already so, I may end up building a new PC to fix my CPU issues… we will see. So, in terms of CPU vs GPU, TERA is a very very CPU intensive game.

There could be a better profile, but I haven’t found it, and its not an Unreal 3 Engine game compatibility setting, so good luck finding it. This has many sections that are universal to many Unreal 3 Engine games. I will list all of the settings I’ve edited myself and what I experienced from doing so. So when you get into that feet from the texture zone, you get max resolution, but if you zoom your camera closer to the texture, it will eventually “pop” back into B resolution mode. I noticed an error when playing the game at Texture Resolution setting 0, or 1. (2 being the max) Im pretty sure any player can replicate this issue if they turn down texture resolution from max.

Everytime I made a change I had to restart the client. I ran my game with both GTX460’s in SLi, with the default AF2 (alternate frame rendering) setting. AF2 is the optimum setting for almost every game I’ve played. So, in summary, there is no need to change the SLi compatibility setting as of now.

1. But if anyone got Ambient Occlusion to work, please share how you did it.
2. “PC View Distance” When this option is set to 1, you cant barely see mobs right infront of you.
3. (2 being the max) Im pretty sure any player can replicate this issue if they turn down texture resolution from max.
4. Now walk up to a bush, or tree leaves, or a mountain side.
5. Unfortunately, my PC hit its cap on upgradability about a year ago.

Unfortunately, my PC hit its cap on upgradability about a year ago. Because almost every game I’ve played now has my CPU as my bottleneck. Which really bothers me, because if there is one that has stayed relativity constant in MMORPG’s in the last 15 years, its how much game code processing needs to occur. TERA is not the only game I am playing right now that uses the Unreal 3 Engine so learning the ins and outs of the .ini file was worth while.

If you checked it, your mouse cursor would go from lagging hardcore, to very nice and smooth. So my assumption is that moving your mouse around, or opening a menu, or any other user input, is very intense on the game client’s thread processes. This is most likely a LOD bias / coding bug, because textures should ALWAYS become higher resolution the closer the camera gets to it. The highest LOD level should never be 20 feet from the object, but the entire 0-20 feet from the object range. And you will be seeing it at the 2nd best resolution level.

Any way to limit fps?

But if you zoom your camera out further, and leave your character stationary, the tree leaves will pop into the highest resolution threshold. Out of all the testing I did, tweaking settings over and over. Do you know what the #1 biggest killer of FPS was for me? “PC View Distance” When this option is set to 1, you cant barely see mobs right infront of you. Their nameplates show up before their models do.

P.S. My ram wasn’t the issue, TERA never broke 1.3 GB of ram usage on the noob island. And with Vista, programs get a default 1.9 GB to use, or 2.9 GB or so to use if you use a UserVA tweak. So what I do as a temporary fix is I run GTX460 #1 as the Single GPU. And use the other GPU as the SLi Anti aliasing unit. There are two files you can edit that will alter your graphics options.

TERA Online .ini Performance Tweaks Guide

So put the setting on 0 or 1, and zoom your camera away from your character maybe halfway between max camera distance, and right over your shoulder. Now walk up to a bush, or tree leaves, or a mountain side. You will see the texture of that object at its highest resolution, if you don’t try moving forward or backward until the highest mipmap / LOD level of the texture shows up. Next, zoom your camera in, so your camera moves closer to the texture.

The only reason to edit S1Option.ini would be if you wanted to change an in-game graphic/interface option outside of the client. You can open it up and take a look at the settings and you’ll understand what I mean. Now, wouldn’t you say TERA has a very weak player/mob max view distance? Some of the foilage at max setting shows up before players/mobs do.

If u have any perforamce issues in Tera this will solve at least 95% of it.

Go up to a player and look at their nameplate, set Enrichment to 1, then change it to 2. Their nameplate will get blurry and difficult to read unless your right up next to them. There is no FPS loss to my knowledge from turning Enrichment 2 on. But all it is doing is just blurrying your game, minus the interface. So to summarize, normally the way game graphics work is the textures get mipmap / Level-Of-Detail modes.