Just Cause 2 - GTX 280

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LstBrunnenG

Supreme [H]ardness
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What settings is everyone using for this game with their GTX 280? I only have the demo at the moment, but my copy is on the way from the gamer that goes.

I find it to do surprisingly well with all options on high, 4x AA, 16x AF, and SSAO off. The opening cutscene is laggy as hell (maybe it's that faux film grain effect?), but the rest of the game is pretty fluid.

(on a side note, what is SSAO, anyway?)
 
I hate when turning off vsync improves performance. I didn't used to, but now I really notice when the frame tears.
 
Core i7 - GTX 275 - VISTA 64

I had to turn off anti-aliasing completely. I turned down one of the shadow settings to medium (doing this made a big difference), and I disabled Vsync completely. Every other slider was maxed out, including ambient occlusion, which I kind of like.

The game runs smoothly at 1920x1080, but just barely. I'm getting a little over 30 fps. I'm not sure what the biggest penalty for this game is, but I think it's probably ambient occlusion and shadows.
 
Wow - is the 280 really that much better than the 275?

I mean, I won't lie to myself and say it's butter smooth, but it's more than playable at 4x AA for me...
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
Wow - is the 280 really that much better than the 275?

I mean, I won't lie to myself and say it's butter smooth, but it's more than playable at 4x AA for me...
Click to expand...

I think that different people have different levels of tolerance.

Crank up everything to the max by going into the advanced settings - and I mean everything - including ambient occlusion, and run the 'concrete jungle benchmark'. If you're gaming at 1920x1080 I doubt you'll go much over 30 fps.

If you have 4x anti-aliasing enabled you'll likely dip below 30.
 
This is what I settled with using a GTX 260, with these settings the game runs very smooth for me @ 1600x1024 (Fraps shows 60 - 100fps during gameplay with drops into the mid 40's at times). System specs in signature.

Dark Tower
DarkTower2x.jpg


Concrete Jungle
ConcreteJungle2x.jpg
 
Yes, those numbers are in-line with my numbers as well. I'm gaming at 1920x1080, rather than 1600x1024.

You've set Shadows Quality to Medium - that's what I did too, because High is really taxing. Then you've switched off Ambient Occlusion, the Bokeh Filter, and GPU Water Simulation. Essentially, you've tinkered with the 4 most demanding settings.

Your frames in concrete jungle are around 42. If you were to turn everything on, and crank up the AA, I'll bet you'd plummet to below 20.

This is one of the reasons I feel it's time for me to upgrade my GTX 275. For the first time I'm having to adjust settings - just a few - to get certain games to run ultra smoothly. It's just annoying when you have to do that.
 
Wow, my framerates for the demo's benchmark went up when I turned on SSAO. Imagine that?

All settings maxed, 1920x1200, 4x AA, 16xAF I get 29 FPS and change.
 
Is GPU water simulation an Nvidia only effect - it's a very subtle effect, but I think it makes the surface of the ocean look a little 'wavier'.
 
Can't say I'm a big fan of the grain effect myself.

I turned off the Bokeh Filter (what does that even do?), the GPU water simulation, and ambient occlusion. I left the rest of the settings around high and it plays good enough for me on the 280.
 
WabeWalker said:
Core i7 - GTX 275 - VISTA 64

I had to turn off anti-aliasing completely. I turned down one of the shadow settings to medium (doing this made a big difference), and I disabled Vsync completely. Every other slider was maxed out, including ambient occlusion, which I kind of like.

The game runs smoothly at 1920x1080, but just barely. I'm getting a little over 30 fps. I'm not sure what the biggest penalty for this game is, but I think it's probably ambient occlusion and shadows.
Click to expand...

idk what your problem is but im running the game with everything on high except that i have high definition shadows off and vysnc off and the shadow setting is on medium
 
Turn on the bokeh filter.

It's beautiful. Seriously. Best depth of field I've seen in a game yet.

This is bokeh. In Just Cause 2, the filter simulates bokeh (out-of-focus blur) from a camera.
bokeh-night-fever-1024x682.jpg
 
Heatlesssun, if you update your video drivers you'll be able to enable the bokeh filter and GPU water simulation - the latter, in my opinion, makes the water look more wavey.
 
I'm running the 197.13s which are the latest besides the 197.25s which only have changes for support of Stacraft 2 Beta. My screenshot was just of the demo, got the full game on the way. Where is this setting? Thanks!
 
WabeWalker said:
Heatlesssun, if you update your video drivers you'll be able to enable the bokeh filter and GPU water simulation - the latter, in my opinion, makes the water look more wavey.
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To bad both of those options decrease the framerate considerably =/
 
mathesar said:
To bad both of those options decrease the framerate considerably =/
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That's true, but Heatlesssun's setup will be able to handle it just fine. I don't know why those two options aren't appearing - maybe they're not in the demo?

Heatlesssun, take a look at mathesar's screenshot above yours. You'll see the options for bokeh filter and GPU water simulation at the bottom. With older Nvidia drivers those options don't appear, which is why I thought you were running on older drivers.
 
Wow, I got an education today. I finally ran the game's benchmark for myself at my current settings.

I'm using a GTX 280 SSC, latest drivers which means I have bokeh and water simulation turned on. Makes a huge difference. More than I imagined.

Ready for this?

1920x1200, all eye candy maxed out except for AA at x4. Bokeh and water sim all turned on and I've been playing the game like this the whole time.

Ran the Dark Tower.

Framerates? Below 30 the ENTIRE time. At some points I saw 22 fps and so on. I'm surprised because I've been playing the game just fine at these settings believe it or not although there's a few things that I've experienced in game that make a lot more sense to me now.

The rest of my rig fwiw: Intel qx9650 overclocked to 3.6GHz, evga gtx 280ssc, 8gb Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz, 2x150GB WD Raptors, X-fi Elite Pro

I tried to put that in my sig but BBcode is turned off so I can't make it nice and small for the sake of courtesy.
 
I just got the game in the mail today. Will try out maxing it out after the game tonight. Go Duke!
 
Q-BZ, at max settings, on my GTX 275, I'm dipping into the low 20's in that concrete jungle benchmark. A GTX 480 will clear that up. :)

Although, I agree that the game, when running, actually looks pretty damned good, and seems to run smoothly for the most part.

I just had a sensation that it could've been smoother.
 
Just found out that the reason I don't have the Bokeh filter in the game is because its NOT supported under SLI. WTF? Kind of makes the option more useful with the extra power.

Well, I guess I'll play around with it and turn SLI off one day.
 
The game looks great with medium shadows, 2x AA, and no GPU water, no hi-res shadoes, everything else maxed on my GTX 280. It's mostly smooth as butter, though there's a bit of screen tearing.
 
capping the framerate to 60fps using the /frameratecap 60 command with vsync disabled works pretty good, for those that cant maintain a solid 60fps with vsync enabled.
 
mathesar said:
capping the framerate to 60fps using the /frameratecap 60 command with vsync disabled works pretty good, for those that cant maintain a solid 60fps with vsync enabled.
Click to expand...

Sorry for the dumb question, but where/how do you do this?
 
So take a look at Heatlesssun's tri-SLI 280 benchmark numbers. His frames are better than anyone else's here (they're certainly better than what my GTX 275 was able to produce in the benchmark).

Which is why I was pretty damned impressed by the GTX 480 review. Check out Guru of 3D's scores for this card.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-470-480-review/25

With 8X AA, and 16x AF, and every other setting maxed out, excluding the Bokeh filter and GPU water simulation, both of which the Guru site found to be incredibly taxing, the GTX 480 is pulling in 76 frames per second. (The frame rate dropped to 56 when the Bokeh filter and GPU water simulation were enabled - but that's still pretty damned good.)

The single GTX 480 is beating Heatlesssun's tri-SLI setup by nearly 30 fps.

That GTX 480 is going to be a huge boost for me... of course, in most of my games, which run just fine on my GTX 275, I won't even see the difference... but I can see that the newer games coming down the pike are going to be challenging my GTX 275... it's time for an upgrade. I'm seriously worried now that I'm not going to be able to buy one of these things. I'm going to stay up late all next week to try and get my order in. Wish me luck, eh.
 
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Q-BZ, you don't have to apologize, we expect dumb questions from you - shockingly, I happen not to know the answer to this one...
 
mathesar said:
capping the framerate to 60fps using the /frameratecap 60 command with vsync disabled works pretty good, for those that cant maintain a solid 60fps with vsync enabled.
Click to expand...

I'll try this out later - had to disable vsync as it gave me hitching (particularly when driving cars/bikes) even though the framerate was pegged at 60 when it happened. I'm running all the standatd options full-whack except medium shadows and 4xAA, and most of the time I'm way above the 60fps barrier. Hopefully this fix will eliminate the tearing.
I might have to try playing with the other options, since it seems I've got a lot of performance to spare. Specs in sig, running at 1680x1050
 
WabeWalker said:
Q-BZ, you don't have to apologize, we expect dumb questions from you - shockingly, I happen not to know the answer to this one...
Click to expand...

Command-line argument. That's purely a guess, but since it starts with a forward-slash I'm confident that's what was meant.
 
heatlesssun said:
Just found out that the reason I don't have the Bokeh filter in the game is because its NOT supported under SLI. WTF? Kind of makes the option more useful with the extra power.

Well, I guess I'll play around with it and turn SLI off one day.
Click to expand...

But these are the niggling little things that crop up when you're running a Crossfire or SLI setup - I wrote a post about this earlier, and all the SLI people jumped down my throat.
 
WabeWalker said:
But these are the niggling little things that crop up when you're running a Crossfire or SLI setup - I wrote a post about this earlier, and all the SLI people jumped down my throat.
Click to expand...

I don't think I or Dan jumped down your throat about this particular issue, we both admitted that SLI or Crossfire weren't perfect. That said with that one option turned off I can get great performance, much better than with a single 280. And this type of thing isn't the norm. And besides with just a single 280 that option kills performance so bad that it almost moot anyway.
 
Q-BZ said:
Wow, I got an education today. I finally ran the game's benchmark for myself at my current settings.

I'm using a GTX 280 SSC, latest drivers which means I have bokeh and water simulation turned on. Makes a huge difference. More than I imagined.

Ready for this?

1920x1200, all eye candy maxed out except for AA at x4. Bokeh and water sim all turned on and I've been playing the game like this the whole time.

Ran the Dark Tower.

Framerates? Below 30 the ENTIRE time. At some points I saw 22 fps and so on. I'm surprised because I've been playing the game just fine at these settings believe it or not although there's a few things that I've experienced in game that make a lot more sense to me now.

The rest of my rig fwiw: Intel qx9650 overclocked to 3.6GHz, evga gtx 280ssc, 8gb Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz, 2x150GB WD Raptors, X-fi Elite Pro

I tried to put that in my sig but BBcode is turned off so I can't make it nice and small for the sake of courtesy.
Click to expand...
Heh. Now turn off some of the eye candy so you get ~60 FPS. It'll feel like a brand new game. At least, it did to me when I killed some of the eye candy.

And it was still a beautiful game without the settings maxed out. Eidos/Square/Avalanche (whoever most rightly deserves the blame) did a superb job.

Still, I'm happy with the fact that my card can still limp along with this game all but maxed out.

Q-BZ said:
Sorry for the dumb question, but where/how do you do this?
Click to expand...
Pass the switch he mentioned at the command line.

In Steam you'd right click on the game, click properties, and then select "Set Launch Options."
 
LstOfTheBrunnenG said:
Heh. Now turn off some of the eye candy so you get ~60 FPS. It'll feel like a brand new game. At least, it did to me when I killed some of the eye candy.

And it was still a beautiful game without the settings maxed out. Eidos/Square/Avalanche (whoever most rightly deserves the blame) did a superb job.

Still, I'm happy with the fact that my card can still limp along with this game all but maxed out.
Click to expand...

But, but...I like all the eye candy. :( ;)

I'll see what I can do here.


EDIT: You were right. Turned down some of that eye candy and was able to get thing closer to 60fps. Big time difference in terms of feel and smoothness.



Pass the switch he mentioned at the command line.

In Steam you'd right click on the game, click properties, and then select "Set Launch Options."
Click to expand...

Thanks! :)
 
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... I also turned off a bunch of settings, and the performance does feel smoother... but a GTX 480 is still going to clear this up...

EDIT: Just to find out what would happen, I decided to turn off every setting. I also lowered all the texture settings, and turned off both AA and AF. Surprisingly, the game still looks amazing. I would've thought it would've looked like junk, but it doesn't - not by a long shot. What's really surprising is how much better the game feels now. In The Concrete Jungle benchmark, I'm now getting 47 frames per second. Riding a scooter on the road is way more fun now.

This has completely convinced me that it's time for a GPU upgrade. If the GTX 480 will allow me to run games like this at max settings with 8X anti-aliasing then that will be massive.

Oh dear god I hope I'll be able to get my hands on one of these cards next week. Guys, do me a favor... don't buy one... and pass it on. Tell all your friends not to buy one, and get their friends to tell their friends. Bah, knowing my luck I'll get shut out. :(
 
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WabeWalker said:
... I also turned off a bunch of settings, and the performance does feel smoother... but a GTX 480 is still going to clear this up...

EDIT: Just to find out what would happen, I decided to turn off every setting. I also lowered all the texture settings, and turned off both AA and AF. Surprisingly, the game still looks amazing. I would've thought it would've looked like junk, but it doesn't - not by a long shot. What's really surprising is how much better the game feels now. In The Concrete Jungle benchmark, I'm now getting 47 frames per second. Riding a scooter on the road is way more fun now.

This has completely convinced me that it's time for a GPU upgrade. If the GTX 480 will allow me to run games like this at max settings with 8X anti-aliasing then that will be massive.

Oh dear god I hope I'll be able to get my hands on one of these cards next week. Guys, do me a favor... don't buy one... and pass it on. Tell all your friends not to buy one, and get their friends to tell their friends. Bah, knowing my luck I'll get shut out. :(
Click to expand...

Unfortunately...because I'm cheap and I like to sit on the fence as long as I can and make excuses to do so...I'm starting to see more compelling reasons to make an upgrade move myself.

I haven't ruled out the 480 although I certainly do have some concerns about it and I need to research the ATI side a little bit more.

The eye candy maxed out in this thing is GORGEOUS but I didn't realize what I'd been putting up with until I got my framerates up closer to 60.

So of course now I want to have my cake and eat it, too.

Damn it. :rolleyes: ;)
 
I'd really like to see [H] do one of their Gameplay/IQ articles on this game.
 
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