Increase FPS in halflife mods like TFC
This has probably be covered a billion times elsewhere on the internet but in all the years of playing the game TFC today was the first time I have got over 60 frames per second.
Using the nvidia drivers own 'Performance and Quality Settings' I added a new 'Application profile' for tfc's hl.exe, where whenever tfc's hl.exe is running the "Vertical Sync" value is set to "off".
Then whilst in the game you use the console command 'fps_modem 100' to set the max fps whilst playing multiplayer, I always thought it was 'fps_max' but no that is for halflife single player. To see current FPS use 'cl_showfps 1' to display the value on the hud, again always used 'net_graph' before but 'cl_showfps' is much cleaner.
This resulted in the in-game FPS running at 99 FPS.
Without turning the VERTICAL SYNC off then the in-game max FPS is directly related to your Monitors refresh rate frequency. For example my cheapy monitor runs at a max of 60Hz when using a resolution of 1280x1024, thus my max FPS was 59 - 60 fps. At 1280-960 the refresh rate increase to 75Hz max, same value then with the in-game FPS.
All this gets helped if the correct driver is being used for the monitor, using Windows 'plug and play monitor' driver will limit use of the higher refresh rates even if the monitor supports them, so installing the correct driver for the model of monitor is a must.
Also keeping the Vertical Sync 'ON' when using a decent monitor with high refresh rates the game still may not take advantage of them. This is known as the 'refresh bug'. This 'bug' is a problem in Windows 2000/XP that sets the refresh rate to 60Hz max when playing any game or using any program that is fullscreen under Direct3D or OpenGL. This problem still occurs even if a higher refresh rate has been set in the Display Properties of Windows. To overcome this 'bug' a tool like 'NVRefreshTool' cn be used to unlock the refresh rates.
stonefisk on 10.30.04 @ 05:19 PM GMT [link]
