How to squeeze every last out of your Nvidia Card

Just in case you, too, are stuck with a P4 on XP SP2

from Stardock Forums

So, I posted this first in another thread but it's since locked.  I have an older machine that I'm keeping running pretty effectively.  Before the modifications below, the game would become unplayably slow within thirty minutes, but the patches and the process below have fixed those problems for me.

 If you're having performance issues and an Nvidia card, here's what I did:

  1. Within the Elemental game, go to your settings and move everything video related to their lowest settings.
    This means:
     - lowest resolution
     - lowest textures
     - no fancy things that make the game look good
  2. THEN, if it's still a problem:

  • Right click the Nvidia icon in your systems tray and open the "Nvidia Control Panel"
     - if it isn't in your system tray, go to your control panel and see if you have a link there.  If you don't, then our systems don't match and you can't glean from me. I'm sure you'll figure something out.
  • Click on "Manage 3D Settings" under the "3D Settings" branch.
  • Move to the "Program Settings" tab in the right-hand side of the screen
  • Click "Add" and find your Elemental executable (right click any link to Elemental link and go to properties then Find Target, then follow the path to that file), "Elemental.exe." If you want to be thorough, do this same process for the launcher.  I'm not going to check which did it for me.
  • There's many things to change here.  I've not touched everything that the documentation at the bottom says is good for performance (which you should feel free to mess with!) and it's good enough for me:

 

 

 

 

 

It's a sad thing to do to a game so pretty, but ... i like strategy games so that I can, among other reasons, keep my computer cheap.  Action games are the ones that should demand big money in hardware.

So. That's what you do to make it run on a minimal system.

 Pull up your Nvidia Control Panel, point it to the right program, and start forcing it to use faster, less pretty methods. 

As patches come out, be sure to revert your changes, marvel at how fast it's going, appreciate how much effort the Stardock Devs are putting into optimizations, and take the time to reconsider if you still need these ugly hacks.

elemental
6,936 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

umm... the cut out section says:

"Here's the settings I've changed:

  1. Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration = Single display performance mode
  2. Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization = On
  3. Texture filtering - Quality = High performance

"

There's a whole number of settings and a description on each one.  Take the time and fix it up as you need.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Or just wait till the patch comes out that fixes the performance bugs. Should be coming today if you're hopeful, more realistically maybe this week. I just play the game on the cloth map while I wait.

Object Desktop - Get all of our enhancement utilities in one suite
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Are you kidding?  I have my EVGA 460GTX 1MB running with every setting at max.  Time for an upgrade if you are having issues with video performance.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Dude strategy games tax your system heavier on every level except graphic rendering then FPS. They eat up way more memory, and require way more calculations and CPU power then say call of duty style game.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I ran Civ4 for the longest time on a 2ghz Yonah core with an Intel IGP. Yeah it wasn't the optimal experience but it ran pretty well. I don't really see much more going on with elemental. I see slowdowns with an i7 860 and GTX280 there is no real reason for that imo.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

CIV games normally run pretty good after they fix the intial memory leaks. Seems like most TBS end up releasing with some sort of mem leak.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

I have a 9500gt and play at 1920x1080 with decent fps. Is there supposed to be a problem with nvidia cards?