Friday 12 December 2014

If you're still suffering from low FPS (like I was), here's some tips



I was able to track down the final culprit of FPS problems today, having tried many things, most of them adding a decent amount of performance boost but always leaving some FPS drops from time to time.
  • First and foremost, delete your D3Prefs.txt file in your Documents folder. This is huge, as a lot of things have changed from 1.8 into 2.0, and some of the customizations you made might actual make things worse now.
  • Next, check Vertical Sync in D3. Something about D3's engine gives you better FPS with VS.
  • Another one, supposedly having your Sound settings on Low will help, although it's mostly a superstition now, and I'm probably going to experiment with Medium and see how it looks because at Low 32 and in a 4 player game, some sound does drop.
  • This one is helpful but not mandatory. If your graphics card has decent FXAA, switch that on and uncheck Anti-Aliasing in D3. This gave me a boost, although the in-game text became soft and distracting at first.
  • Last but not least, the final thing I discovered, which I've heard mentioned in the past but never thought it was a big deal, UNCHECK both Max Foreground FPS and Max Background FPS. While playing, I kept wondering why certain zones were fine and others would slow down, and it was because of that and who knows what it was trying to do. If you're having problems, turn it off.
  • The rest of the settings you can experiment with, as some do add performance boosts, but a lot of it is based on your specs and the ones above seem to be random flukes affecting even high-end systems.
Just thought I'd share because today is a glorious day of finally solving most of the FPS problems.

Edit: Another one!

- This one is a little more advanced and drastic, but if your CPU is quadcore, D3 might struggle with this. A good way to test to see if this is the case is to open D3, then open Task Manager -> Processes -> Right-Click D3 -> Set Affinity and only enable 2 of the 4 CPUs. If this test is a success, then download Prio to make it permanent.