Or shorter: Improve BF3 graphics with “Post AA High + Sharpen.h”.

This is a follow-up post to the previous one. This time around, it’s time to sharpen BF3 graphics further and improve the image quality in BF3, at no performance cost and start enjoying some high-fidelity visuals. No, it’s not yet another post about DANOC FXAA.

While the fundamentals of this method are similar to DANOC or other FXAA/SMAA injector, I got super sharp graphics and better IQ (image quality, obviously) in BF3 a bit differently – by trying something maybe a bit counter-intuitive, so here it is:

1. Turn in-game Post AA to HIGH. Yes, this is BF3 in-game implementation of FXAA which I was previously avoiding as much as I could, since it blurs the image so much. But it turns out there’s a benefit to it. So, the first step requires we get this super-blurry image, and then:

2. Apply classic FXAA injector, but with a twist: we’ll use ONLY the sharpening pass (Sharpen.h) which comes with it, and disable ANY antialiasing by this injector. I disabled injector antialiasing by editing these lines in the file “shader.hlsl” to this:

0, //fxaaQualitySubpix (default: 0.75)
1, //fxaaQualityEdgeThreshold
1, //fxaaQualityEdgeThresholdMin

This effectively “disables” antialiasing by the injector. Next, don’t forget to include the “Sharpen.h” by uncommenting the line to this:

#include “Sharpen.h”

Then you can make minor adjustments inside the “Sharpen.h” file by editing the amount of edge sharpening (I leave it at 0.2 or set it to 0.4):

#define SharpenEdge 0.2

Anyway, some of the results first (zoom to see actual image size):

Quite impressive for LOW textures setting, I think (use medium textures for even more eye pleasing porn). Now, I’m not claiming that this method removes all aliasing, but still it yields much better results than anything else I tried.

BTW, here are the FXAA injector files with all the settings which I’m using: Download. If you don’t trust the files, use your own dxgi.dll injector file and use my settings files. Or whatever.

Apart from injector file settings, to get the image quality as in the posted images, set textures and shadows low, all the rest to medium, Post AA High, AF 16x, SSAO on.

In Nvidia Control Panel i have texture filtering set to Quality, LOD bias: Clamp.

So maybe you’re asking – why this alternative sharpening method, when for instance Danoc FXAA injector does just fine and everybody else seems to be using it? Or why use in-game Post-AA instead of injector FXAA together with the sharpening pass?

The simple answer is: I tried it both/all – and wasn’t satisfied with the results at all. This “Post AA High + Sharpen.h” thing was almost an act of desperation, the final thing I was about to try before giving up on trying to get any better image quality in BF3. To be honest: out of the box and on low/medium settings (which quite a few gamers are forced to resort to), Battlefield 3 looks OK, but it just feels like it should look better, and overall just feels a little blurry and unpolished, despite superior lighting and effects. For instance, in BFBC2 I could achieve marvelous image crispness at practically zero aliasing with the FXAA injector, so I found it frustrating that whatever I tried to achieve with the same FXAA injector in BF3, resulted in somewhat non-crisp image and/or jagged edges. And DANOC FXAA injector seemed to spoil the image even more, by making it unnaturally sharp, even without the color correction.

It seems that FXAA injector works differently in BFBC2 vs BF3 because of the differences in lighting between game engines. For instance, in BFBC2 there is a lot more bloom which smooths out object edges, and on top of that these object edges don’t seem to reflect white specular light, and it’s exactly these white object jaggies which are a MAJOR annoyance in BF3 (if you are not using 4xMSAA – and on a low-spec machine you definitely aren’t – yet even 4xMSAA doesn’t smooth out the white aliasing out completely). Apart from white edge “pigeon-shit” aliasing, there’s also black edge aliasing, but it’s not nearly as distracting.

In short, FXAA (and SMAA) injectors did more or less a good job at smoothing out almost all of the edges, except this white edge aliasing on fences and stuff – moving forward in a scene with fences resulted in unsightly edge flickering/flashing. Obviously one thing to try to fix that was to apply more blur to minimize this white aliasing. And this is how we got back to the infamously blurry in-game FXAA (Post AA HIGH) to enhance BF3 graphics. Yet somehow, when you apply the sharpening pass over it, the result is almost, ehm, magical. The shitty low textures actually start looking as if they are at least medium quality, the white aliasing is tamed, and while there is and occasional jagged edge here and there (due to FXAA not fixing it because the line is dashed / or due to extra sharpening), the results are great overall and this is more or less how Battlefield 3 should have looked from the start. Of course, there is also the annoyance of bland colours thanks to much “praised” art direction, but you can fix that by adjusting vibrance/gamma in Nvidia Control Panel.

I’m well aware of the possibility that Nvidia driver FXAA (in 301.24 driver) + sharpening might give even better graphics quality in BF3, but I’ll try that some other time, maybe we’ll even have the highly anticipated FXAA 4 by then.

Hope this helps a bit,
cheers,
Mark

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The takeaway first: Battlefield 3 (multiplayer as well as campaign) is very playable on 9600M GT with 256MB video RAM and a mid-2009 dual core Macbook Pro, with a few tweaks applied and a few compromises, mostly the resolution at which the game can be played comfortably.

***—–
UPDATE: here is a follow-up post to this one on How to get much sharper, crisper graphics in BF3 (no, it’s not yet another post about DANOC FXAA).
—–***

The results are based on the custom resolution of 900×700 (number-of-pixels-wise this is similar to resolution of 1024×600) and span from:

1. Getting great framerates (30-60+ fps with occasional dips to 25 fps) while compromising image quality at mostly low graphic settings (except anisotropic filter: 4x, no FXAA injector)

2. Getting playable framerates (25-40 fps with dips as low as 15 fps) and noticeably better graphic fidelity at a few settings racked up higher (terrain quality: medium, mesh quality: high, ambient occlusion: SSAO, FXAA injector)

If you want to play BF3 on this sort of underspec’d hardware, you’ll probably alternate between the two sets depending on the map you’ll be playing. Unfortunately, this 256MB card struggles with textures set to Medium, so they’ll have to be set to Low. If you have a 512MB version of 9600M GT, set textures to Medium.

Actual framerates are some 5-10 fps higher than in video below:

The specs:
Macbook Pro mid-2009, machine model MacbookPro 5,3
CPU: Core2Duo 2,66 GHz P8800 (overclocked to 2.87 GHz, voltage set to 1.11 V with ThrottleStop)
GPU: Nvidia 9600M GT 256 Mb GDDR3 (overclocked core/memory/shader from 500/792/1250 to 700/1150/1550)
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1, Bootcamp 3.3
Graphic driver: 296.10 WHQL, no 3D driver installed
Nvidia motherboard driver: 6.05.30
Audio driver: default CirrusLogic that comes with the above version of Boot Camp

Software used:
Nvidia Control Panel
ThrottleStop 4.00
Game Booster 3.3.1
Realmware BF3 Settings Editor
FXAA injector (classic FXAA, not Danoc FXAA preset; can use SMAA injector as well but FXAA injector yields better image quality)
LubbosFanControl 64-bit

In-game settings:
Textures: Low
Shadows: Low
Effects: Low
Mesh quality: Low (or High)
Terrain quality: Low (or Medium)
Terrain decoration: Low (or High)
Antialiasing deferred: Off
Antialiasing post: Off (we’ll use FXAA injector instead)
Motion blur: Off
Anisotropic filtering: 4x
Ambient occlusion: Off (or SSAO)

Sound system: Headphones
Enhanced stereo mode: On
Raw mouse input: On

Additional BF3 Settings editor settings:
Field of view (vertical): 50 or lower
DirectX 11: Enabled
DX Deferred CS Path: Disabled
Shadowmap resolution: 1024
Vertical sync: Off
Stereo 3D: Off

Modify user.cfg file by adding or modifying this line and set:
Render.ForceRenderAheadLimit 1

————————

Set a custom resolution, field of view (FOV) and disable screen scaling:

First of all, notice that we are not using screen scaling here – the point is to keep the image fidelity as sharp as possible. Therefore you will still play the game fullscreen mode (as opposed to windowed), only in a smaller area (cropped to 900×700, on the native LCD screen resolution). In Nvidia Control panel go to Display > Adjust desktop size and position and select “No scaling” and select “Override the scaling mode set by games and programs”.

Set the FOV to 50, or even lower, depends what works best for you.

About the custom resolution:

Unfortunately the game starts to feel slow even on a resolution of 1024×768. On the other hand, the resolution of 800×600 is a bit too smallish, so a custom resolution of 900×700 is some sort of a sweet spot where the screen doesn’t look too small on laptop LCD and is not too hard on the eyes. To create a custom resolution, go to Display > Change resolution, click Customize below, then Create custom resolution, enter only the desired width (horizontal pixels) and height (vertical lines), test and save the custom resolution. The new resolution will become available in game.

If you feel that the 900×700 (or similarly sized) area is too small, hook the laptop to an external CRT monitor. With a CRT monitor you can get a larger picture with well smoothed out pixels (not the case with external LCDs). I use a 19 inch external CRT at native resolution 1024×768 @ 100Hz and play those 900×700 pixels on a comfortably large display (again, not scaled). Playing on an external CRT you’ll probably want to set the mesh quality to low, since having it on high in my view only makes a noticeable difference on a native LCD display.

————————

About LubbosFanControl:

Just rack the fans to the maximum (6000 RPM) before playing.

————————

About ThrottleStop, voltages and overclocking:

We are using Throttlestop to set the voltage for a specific FSB multiplier to make CPU run cooler and unlock bidirectional throttling between CPU and GPU (meaning that any of these will shift to a lower performance mode once the other gets too hot). In ThrottleStop, go to settings, select Nvidia GPU and select “Unlock bidirectional PROCHOT”. Then, in the main screen, unselect “BD PROCHOT”.

Other settings in ThrottleStop:

Set multiplier: On, value: 10.0, VID: 1.1125 V (if you have set the frequency to 2.87 GHz in the Nvidia Control Panel). Remark: you could also rack the CPU to the maximum 3.01 GHz at 1.16V, but this way the CPU could get hot enough so it throttles itself down automatically at temperatures close to 100C and you could get performance dips this way. It really depends on how cool the room / surface around the laptop is.

Power Saver: Off
Disable Turbo: Off
BD PROCHOT: Off
SLFM: Off
C States: Off
(all off basically)

Results: CPU goes to 95C max, GPU goes to some 85-87C max which is “low” enough that you won’t be getting performance dips due to auto CPU/GPU throttling. These temps are supposed to be well within operating limits for both CPU and GPU.

————————

FXAA/SMAA injector in BF3:

I won’t go into much detail here, basically you WANT to use Timothy Lottes FXAA injector in Battlefield 3. I use vanilla FXAA injector instead of Danoc FXAA injector (Danoc just distorts the graphics for me, even though the colours are really vivid with it, I prefer using plain FXAA settings and set the preset to the lowest – in shader.hlsl set #define FXAA_QUALITY__PRESET 10.

Anyway, this FXAA injector works miles better (particularly when you ramp mesh quality up to High) and is less blurry than game’s built-in FXAA (Antialiasing post).

Optionally you can use SMAA injector instead. Personally I feel edges are quite a bit smoother with FXAA. If you need extra performance while still retaining some nice antialiasing, but not as smooth as FXAA, I’d say go with SMAA.

Update: to get even better performance with SMAA while still having most of the jagged edges smoothed out, set the Low preset in file “SMAA.h” even lower, for instance edit to something like:

#if SMAA_PRESET_LOW == 1
#define SMAA_THRESHOLD 0.3
#define SMAA_MAX_SEARCH_STEPS 2
#define SMAA_MAX_SEARCH_STEPS_DIAG 0
#define SMAA_CORNER_ROUNDING 100

Don’t forget to select this preset in file “injector.ini”, set “preset = SMAA_PRESET_LOW”.

Download SMAA injector 1.2 here: http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html

————————

Nvidia Control Panel settings:

I have the following settings for Battlefield 3 (or global) profile:

Maximum pre-rendered frames: 0
Anisotropic sample optimization: On
Negative LOD bias: Allow
Filtering quality: High performance
Trilinear optimization: On
Threaded optimization: Auto
Triple buffering: Off
Power management: Prefer maximum performance
Multi-display: Single display performance mode
AA – Gamma correction: Off
AA – Transparency: Off

————————

Game Booster and other tweaks:

Fire up Game Booster gaming mode to stop unnecessary processes while playing BF3.

Other things you can do:
-close browser with Battlelog when you are in game
-close Origin client when you are in game
-close Nvidia tray
-kill other processes in Task Manager (bootcamp.exe, gbtray.exe)

You can also try setting the priority of bf3.exe in Task Manager to High.

————————

That’s it, hope this works well for you. Enjoy the game. Might soon update this post with a video or something.

Cheers,
Mark

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To avoid a lengthy intro, here is the thing: at some point OSX – and I’m talking specifically Snow Leopard 10.6.8 here – started feeling sluggish. The transitions didn’t feel smooth anymore and the general feeling was that OS was not as snappy as it used to be. Turns out all this has something to do with OSX’s built-in GPU power management, which reduces GPU clock speeds in order to save power. So what we want to do here is to turn this sort of throttling off and keep the GPU at its maximum speed at all times.

As all latest Macbook Pros, mine too comes with two built-in GPUs. It’s a mid-2009 model and has the less power consuming Nvidia 9400M and the more powerful 9600M GT. The idea here is to turn throttling off ONLY for 9600M GT and run it at its maximum speed when the computer is plugged into AC power. On the other hand, I want the system to use 9400M, which is less power consuming by design, when laptop is running on battery. Also the point is to keep the 9400M throttling scheme intact, because that’s what helps having an 8-hour battery life.

First, to have seamless switching between the two GPUs without logging out and back in, we will have to install a cool program called GfxCardStatus. It also features power-source based GPU switching, meaning that if we run 9600M GT on AC power and switch to battery power, the system will start using 9400M instead of 9600M GT. That’s the easy part.

Next: how to prevent 9600M GT from going into power-saving states and make it run at maximum power all the time? I found out that one way to do it is to disable a kernel extension AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext by moving it or renaming it (it can be found in /System/Library/Extensions/), but that disables throttling on both GPUs and we are left with no power saving benefits on 9400M; having no GPU throttling on 9400M cuts battery life from 8 hours to 4 hours, which is definitely not an acceptable option.

Let’s get back to AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext. Locate this file (and make also a backup copy of it), right click on it and select “Show Package Contents”. Find file Info.plist and open it with an appropriate editor (you will need Property List Editor from Developer Tools, PlistEdit Pro or a similar program that allows editing of .plist files). Within this plist file, navigate to IOKitPersonalities, AGPM and then find the corresponding model of your Macbook Pro (mine is MacbookPro5,3). It reveals settings for IGPU and GFX0 and LogControl. Turn LogControl to 1 (we will need this to monitor changes of GPU power states in Console). It doesn’t take much to figure that IGPU stands for integrated GPU, 9400M in my case, and GFX0 stands for 9600M GT.

Look in “Heuristic” – there are settings for Threshold_high and Threshold_low. They are not very self-explanatory, but some people on some forums have figured out that state 0 is the state of maximum power (highest GPU clock, memory and shader speeds) and state 3 is the state that saves most power (lowest clocks and voltage).

So the trick here is to set thresholds for going into power-saving states 1, 2 and 3 impossible to reach. The easiest to do so is to set their thresholds above 100.

Original settings, GFX0:

And now modified settings, GFX0:

Explanation: just added “1″ before an original number, so for instance, 65 becomes 165, just for reference, otherwise it doesn’t matter which number you use as any number above 100 will presumably do just fine. Also, power state 0 is the state of maximum power and I have set its Threshold_Low 0 and Threshold_High 90. The following state, state 1, had in its original settings Threshold_Low 68 and Threshold_High 65 (inverted, I know, odd, I know!), but I just simply bumped them to Threshold_Low 168 and Threshold_High 165.

When you finish editing, save the Info.plist. May require some permission acrobatics on your side, but once you get the modified Info.plist saved in the kext package, you will also have to repair permission on the modified kext, otherwise it might not load at startup. You will need Kext Utility for that. I used version 2.4.2 for Snow Leopard and 64-bit kexts. Run Kext Utility and wait one or two minutes for it to repair permissions in the Extensions folder. Then reboot the machine.

Logged back in, let’s check if everything works as planned. At this point I assume you have already installed GfxCardStatus so we can switch between the two GPUs on the fly.

First check System Profiler > More Info > Extensions to check if our modified kext has been loaded. If you see AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext there, it’s been done. Now let’s check how our power state changes are being logged and view the log in the Console. In Console, select “All messages” and filter strings matching “AGPM”. Now, if you are running 9400M (IGPU), you should be seeing quite frequent power state switching in the Console. Now switch to 9600M GT (GFX0) via GfxCardStatus. Then run Exposé repeatedly for 5 to 10 seconds. What you should be seeing in the Console is that GFX0 has been set to the highest power state (state 0) and remains there without any further switching. The last message you should be seeing in the Console (unless you switch back to 9400M, of course) should be something like:

AGPM: GPU = GFX0 G-state set to 0 from 1, ControlID = 17

Noticed how more fluid OSX user interface is now? Good. Now if you switch to battery, the GfxCardStatus should automatically switch to 9400M and you should be getting the same long battery life as before (6-8 hours).

If you feel these power state numbers (0,1,2,3) are too abstract, you can do your own checking of GPU power states translated to more realistic numbers with Nvclock. Nvclock (Linux utility that has recently been ported to Darwin/OSX) will reveal actual clock speeds (core/memory/shader) you are currently running. Explaining Nvclock is a bit beyond this tutorial, suffice it to say that I’m running 9600M GT at maximum speeds 540/792/1350 (540 MHz core, 792 MHz memory, 1350 MHz shader). These numbers reveal an interesting fact that Apple Nvidia Driver runs the GPU at slightly higher speeds than factory settings (which are 500/792/1250). No overclock to brag about, but fine by me, anyway.

While this sorting of hacking works just fine in my case, remember you are doing this at your own risk, and make backups beforehand.

Cheers,
Mark

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(disables BeamSync automatically at every login)

Here is a simple Automator application I put together to automatically disable BeamSync when logging into Snow Leopard. It’s not a particularly elegant solution, but gets the job done; I have been searching online for that one program which supposedly existed some time ago on the link http://glyf.org/beamsync/beamsync.gz, with no success. The other option – to modify com.apple.windowserver.plist with Property List Editor and put value of “deferredUpdates” to 0, just didn’t work for me, not even when doing a terminal command “sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -integer deferredUpdates 0″ and rebooting – the changes just won’t stick.

Anyway, to use this Automator action, you WILL need a Quartz Debug app (version 3.0) from the earlier XCode Leopard bundle (not from Snow Leopard). You can actually download it from this link. Quartz Debug app should be located in the Applications folder. Another thing you need to make sure is that when you launch Quartz Debug app is that the Beam Sync Tools window should already be open – to do so, launch Quartz Debug, open Tools menu, select Show Beam Sync Tools and quit Quartz Debug. Next time you launch Quartz Debug, the Beam Sync Tools should also open automatically.

To automatically disable BeamSync at login, just add “qd” to login items in the Accounts preference pane. Download the app “qd” here.

Hope it works well for you. Cheers.

P.S. Disabling Beamsync results in faster drawing and therefore a more fluid interface. Practical benefits are noticeably smoother scrolling (Safari, Twitter and within apps in general), smoother QuickLook previewing, smoother Exposé and Spaces transitions, more fluid video playback, etc. The downside to it is that you’ll see some tearing of window edges when moving windows around, but it is not too bothersome – for me at least. The increase in frames-per-second is substantial and really makes the interface feel “fresh” again.

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aka “Performance gaming on a low-end Macbook Pro laptop”

This post (which admittedly has nothing to do directly with being more productive on a Mac) was initially meant to be a lot more thorough and longer and cover step-by-step all the essentials on how to optimize old Macbook Pro with ATI X1600 graphics to run games well. Instead I decided just to focus on how to optimize it to run well one of the most demanding first player shooter multiplayer games right now, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (BFBC2 or BC2). You can then, however you find appropriate, apply these methods on other games as well, even though I have to admit that the time to upgrade the “gaming rig” has now finally come. Besides, there’s been said a lot online on how to optimize performance of Bad Company 2, so let’s just see how to get it to be playable in our case. We’re talking only fairly decent 20-30 FPS here, low resolution of 1024×768, low settings, all while retaining good visual quality and what’s also of utmost importance: keeping the game responsive and snappy.

So “our” machine is the first-generation Macbook Pro with specs:

Macbook Pro 15″, machine model: MacBookPro 1,1 (62 months old)
CPU: Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz (T2500 CPU)
RAM: 2 GB DDR2 667 MHz
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600, 256 MB
OS: Windows XP SP2 via Bootcamp (version 3.2)
Game: Bad Company 2 and Bad Company 2 Vietnam (fully updated)

Definitely a vintage machine by today’s standards. Yet it could run first-person shooters very well so far. Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 for instance both ran at around 40-70 FPS (tweaks applied of course) which is overall extremely satisfactory. In BC2, however, you will get varying levels of performance – generally all Vietnam maps will run next to spectacular without any drops in frame rate, while the regular maps run generally well, but experience FPS drops (to something below 20 FPS) in situations where there happen to be lots of trees (not the case with Vietnam though) or dust/snow/explosions on screen, like Valparaiso, Laguna Presa or Nelson bay. With the following enhancements applied you will get smooth performance in maps like Harvest day, Oasis, Isla Inocentes, Heavy Metal, Laguna Alta, Arica Harbor, Atacama desert and as previously mentioned, Vietnam maps (I btw recommend you get this expansion pack if you haven’t already because the difference in performance is substantial).

So here’s the brief summary on how to tweak BFBC2 performance for X1600 on MBP and an intro to what will be explained in a bit more detail further.

1. Check if the game is actually using both CPU cores (trivial but important)
2. Kill or pause unnecessary processes and tame the necessary ones, especially Punkbuster
3. Goes almost without saying but still – get the most suitable drivers for the X1600 GPU (in my case the latest and modded drivers from Catalyst 10.2 suite) and DirectX
4. Overclock the GPU, then overclock it a little more (we’ll see how to apply the extra GPU overclock to the game)
5. Optimize game settings (basically all low, except textures high, makes the game still look good)
6. Apply settings and other GPU tweaks using ATI Tray Tools (settings that work) and also Catalyst Control Center
7. Undervolt the CPU with RightMark CPU, max out the fans and lower the internal temps
8. Tighten RAM timings with Memset 4.1 (probably a very minor effect, but hey)
9. Lower DPC latency by updating other drivers (sound, wi-fi) and uninstalling unneeded devices, set timer with Time Resolution.

————————-

1. Force game to use max CPU

This first tweak is not a tweak really, it is a more of a workaround around the glitch of BFBC2Game.exe not using both CPU cores, at least on the very machine in question. To fix that, just launch the game in windowed mode or alt-enter to get from full screen to windowed mode and run Task Manager. There you can (will probably) see that the game is not using both cores at once, but switches from using one core to using the other. Just right click on the process BFBC2Game.exe and select “Set affinity”. Even though probably both CPUs (CPU 0 and CPU 1) are already selected (ticked out), just make sure they really are and click OK. This way the game will immediately start using both cores, and you will see the change in the usage monitor graph.

Before:

Now:

Sounds like a cheap trick, happens to be the most important one. Before I found out about THAT particular “method”, my in-game CPU usage was 60% with almost unplayable FPS. Now the CPU runs at 90-100%, the way it should anyway. I have to apply this “tweak” every time I launch a game.

————————-

2. Kill unnecessary processes and tame unruly processes, especially Punkbuster

Ok, now that we got the BFBC2 game running at its maximum, we have to assure it actually GETS the maximum possible processing power, so we have to look into other processes that are running on the system. At this point I have to mention that I’m using this WinXP volume strictly for gaming, so there are absolutely no unnecessary programs running in the background and potentially hogging the system. The system is clean, yet I still kill all the unnecessary processes via Task Manager (or rather kill them with a batch file). Examples are CCC.exe, MOM.exe, jusched.exe etc; all the stuff that does not need to be there while you are shooting folks in game. That is the easy part.

However, there are processes that you DO need for gaming, and therefore can’t kill, and they will hog up your CPU, if they are not tamed. One of them is Punkbuster. It will at random times use up 30-50% of your CPU, and of course you will see a FPS drop when that starts happening.

The trick is to get Punkbuster to use only the desired/acceptable % of CPU (and this is somewhere between 2% and 5%) while still assuring you don’t get kicked out of the game. We need two tools for that: Threadmaster with Threadmaster GUI and Process Explorer.

Install Threadmaster (even though it says it’s for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003) and Threadmaster GUI. Add the PnkBstrB.exe to blacklist and assign 3% CPU limit to it. Set 10 seconds sample time. Add BFBC2Game.exe to exceptions. You can add some other processes to blacklist as well – I also added “explorer.exe” to blacklist and assigned it 1% CPU. Save settings. Done.

To monitor if the limits are well in effect (while gaming of course), use Process Explorer. Open up processes in separate windows for BFBC2Game.exe and PnkBstrB.exe and minimize them. This way you won’t lose monitoring data once you exit the game and processes close. Since you’re doing these tweaks anyway, you’ll figure it out for yourself. To conclude: after a heavy session of gaming, PnkBstrB.exe should have an almost flat graph with only occasional spikes (peaking at 1-3 %). Despite that, larger spikes will probably occur in the time frame of the 10 seconds sample time. After that the unruly app will be tamed to the previously set limits. If you look at the process BCBF2Game.exe, it should have a graph with heavy usage around 95%, and that’s exactly what we are looking for here. If that is the case, well done.

The last suggestion concerning getting rid of unnecessary processes, is that you use Game Booster. It will put on hold some processes you’re probably not aware of. Just use it, even if benefits from using it are most probably minuscule.

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3. Get latest graphic card drivers and latest DirectX

I’m using the latest Catalyst 10.2 legacy driver for X1600 (driver version 8.695.000, dated 10th feb 2010), downloaded from ATI, modded with Mobility modder. It does seem to give much better performance in Vietnam maps than the outdated Apple’s X1600 Boot camp driver, even though the old driver seems to load maps a bit faster. How to modify a 10.2 driver with Mobility Modder, is explained on the previous link.

I’m having latest DirectX 9.0c installed (files ending in *43.dll).

————————-

4. Overclock the GPU and use the trick to make the game use a higher clock

I’m overclocking the ATI Mobility X1600 in the Macbook Pro using ATI Tray Tools (ATT). I will not go into the process and details of overclocking, because it is well explained elsewhere. The point here is another: how to apply a higher GPU overclock so that BC2 game still remains stable. It happens that at higher clocks the game will freeze when it tries to load a map, and you’ll need to hard reset the laptop. The trick is to load the map at a lower clock and switch to a higher clock only when you are already in the game. That’s why you need to create at least two overclock profiles (say with lower and higher clocks) and assign hotkeys to trigger them. I am using a lower 445/522 (core/memory MHz) and a higher 465/522 clock and the latter is what the game still accepts without crashing. Even though by testing in ATT I can get to maximum 495/531 without artifacting, I cannot use this clock in the game because it freezes after a little while. However, as it’s a rule when overclocking, my clocks may not work for you (even if it’s the same machine) or, on the other hand, you can go even higher, so just do your own thorough testing.

And a little sub-tip: when you are switching clock speed in BFBC2, press ESC beforehand to get to the scoreboard screen, and only then do the switch. Otherwise if you try to switch mid-game, the game may freeze. And when a game on a map is over, switch to a lower clock before the next map starts loading.

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5. Game settings

Edit the settings in settings.ini (in “/My Documents/BFBC2/” directory) like this, save the file and make it read-only.

[WindowSettings]
Width=1024
Height=768
Fullscreen=true
RefreshRate=60
VSync=false
[Sound]
Quality=low
VoipEnable=false
SpeakerCount=2
[Graphics]
Effects=low
Soldiers=low
Vehicles=low
Overgrowth=low
Undergrowth=low
StaticObjects=low
Terrain=low
Shadows=low
Bloom=false
HSAO=false
MSAA=0
Water=low
MainQuality=custom
Texture=high
DxVersion=9
Aniso=0
Detail=low
RenderAheadLimit=0
Fov=55

Basically all settings except textures are set on low. You could, however, set soldiers and vehicles to medium or high without a performance drop. And, if you are really bothered by how water surfaces look, switch it to medium.

We are using RenderAheadLimit=0 here, which tells the game to use graphic driver settings, and we will set that driver value to 0 (instead of the default 3) in the next step with ATI Tray Tools.

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6. ATI Tray Tools settings and tweaks (and to a very minor extent settings in Catalyst Control Center)

Direct 3D:

Antialiasing: Application-controlled (meaning no AA), no adaptive AA.

Anisotropic filtering: 2x, performance, no high AF /// we override the Application settings which tell the game not to use any AF – for some reason the performance with no AF, application controlled, is much worse than our setting.

Flip queue size: 0 /// Yes, set this to zero. It means the CPU will not render ahead any frames for the GPU. It just happens to give best results under the circumstances – increased responsiveness and frame speed even on graphically more demanding maps such as Laguna Presa, Oasis, Port Valdez etc.

Optimizations: Anisotropic filtering optimizations on.

Catalyst A.I.: disabled /// tested and having it set to low (standard) or advanced seems to produce additional input lag without cranking out any additional FPS. I am aware that the general recommendation is to set it to Advanced, but it’s not what works in my case.

Texture preference: High Performance /// seems to play a bit nicer than High Quality, not much of a difference, really.

Mipmap: set to Performance.

Vsync: off.

Other ATT settings (see pictures below):

Catalyst Control Center settings:
Disable Powerplay in CCC. After that you can exit CCC and kill CCC.exe and MOM.exe processes (as mentioned before).

————————-

7. Lowering the internal temperature and monitor it

Use RightMark CPU to undervolt the CPU and use Macfan to have the fans run at 6000 rpm when gaming. Monitor the temps using CPUID HWMonitor. My temps hit max 80C (CPU) and 77C (GPU – diode), which is supposedly acceptable.

My CPU voltages (stable, could go as low as 1.05V at 12x)

————————-

8. Try tightening RAM timings with Memset 4.1

It could supposedly give a very minor FPS boost, so I’m just using it. It makes me feel better at least. Download Memset here.

Default settings (left) and tweaked settings (right):

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9. Lower DPC latency

Improve system responsiveness by lowering latencies. Measure with DPC Latency Checker (using V1.3.0)

You can lower latency by uninstalling the devices (in Device Manager) you don’t need for gaming – in my case those are: trackpad, iSight camera, ethernet, DVD drive and some others.

The next thing you can do is to update the drivers – I have updated wireless and sound drivers.

And another thing is to keep timer resolution to the minimum. Use Timer Resolution for that.

If you are connected via ethernet cable, then disable the wireless card. And vice versa. Wifi does seem to generate latency spikes though so go with ethernet when you can.

————————-

Conclusion

It’s definitely time for a hardware upgrade but you can (hopefully) have some more fun with your old machine, at least for a little while longer.

Happy gaming!

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• Disable spell check in Mac OSX system-wide
• Use less than default 1GB Spotify cache, save disk space (SSD)
• Claim back disk space from Mail.app (Gmail)
• Maximize battery cycle time and extend Macbook battery life

Ever since I installed 10.6 Snow Leopard, the all-new, slow, laggy Exposé has been a constant annoyance for me. The windows in the 10.6 Exposé were now all neatly aligned and labeled, but the transition animation was choppy, adding to the perception of a slowed down OS. As always, I am running the OSX user interface mostly with BeamSync turned off, but that didn’t help the choppy 10.6 Exposé much. Being an optimization freak, a slow interface is sort of a worst thing for me. The general conclusion was that Exposé in the previous version of Mac OSX, 10.5 Leopard, was faster, smoother and also more intuitive, and the question was how to get the same functionality of Leopard’s Exposé back into Snow Leopard.

Luckily, a guy named miknos at MacRumors Forums came up with a solution and all I can say is thank you very much. The fix requires to replace Snow Leopard’s Dock.app (found in System>Library>Core Services) with a fixed Dock.app from an early BETA version of Snow Leopard. I’m running 10.6.3 and the solution works with a 10.6.4 as well. It requires you to download the fixed dock and use some Terminal, so here are the instructions, copied from the MacRumors forum:

——————-
Instructions:

1 – Download the fixed Dock.app from this link on a MacRumors forum thread. Extract to Desktop.

2 – Create a new folder on the desktop called OldDock.

3 – Open terminal and (changing username) type:

sudo chown -R root /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app
type your password if necessary

sudo chgrp -R wheel /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app

Now copy/paste everything. Don’t forget to change to your username:
sudo killall Dock && \
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app /Users/USER/Desktop/OldDock/ && \
sudo mv /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app /System/Library/CoreServices/

Restart and Enjoy! To revert, just put the dock.app inside OldDock folder in Desktop and repeat everything.

—————————

Read the whole thread here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611

Most Commented Posts

• Disable spell check in Mac OSX system-wide
• Use less than default 1GB Spotify cache, save disk space (SSD)
• Claim back disk space from Mail.app (Gmail)
• Maximize battery cycle time and extend Macbook battery life

Ok, this is another post related to saving more disk space, particularly in the context of using a small SSD drive. My Kingston SSDNow SNM225-S2 (Intel X-25M) SSD’s capacity is only 80 GB and there is a constant need to have less clutter and pack more useful stuff into it. In my previous post I explained how to snatch back disk space from the jaws of Gmail, and I’ve been since monitoring who are big “squatters” on my disk. It turned out that the client for the popular music service Spotify can actually use more space than it really should.

If you’re using Spotify, then you probably already know that you can set the size of the cache anywhere between 1GB and 4GB, or even set it to automatic handling.

Naturally I have set the cache all the way from 4GB down to 1GB. But thinking about it, I really don’t need as much cache as 1GB – that’s still quite a lot of music (at non-premium bitrate) taking up disk space. I figured out that it is actually possible for Spotify to use less than 1GB cache – I have set mine to 384 Mb, which should be perfectly adequate for my listening habits.

First quit Spotify if it’s open. Then go to ~/Library/Application Support/Spotify/

Edit the file “settings” with a plaintext editor – change the “cache_size” value to the wanted size in megabytes.

Save the file, start Spotify. Even though the preferences in Spotify will show as if you are still using the minimum “allowed” cache (1GB), you’ll be using less than that – if you watch Finder, you’ll see you have freed extra disk space.

Enjoy!

Related articles (Zemanta)

• Move Your Caches to a RAM Disk to Reduce Wear on SSDs [Hard Drives] (lifehacker.com)
• Superfast SSDs are coming, but will they be used the right way? (arstechnica.com)
• Boost you Mac’s speed with a hybrid drive (macworld.com)
• Hybrid drives: the next generation (go.theregister.com)

Related posts on this site

• Claim back disk space from Mail.app (Gmail)

There is a good chance you read your mail from Gmail with Mac’s native Mail app. There is also a good chance you never really paid attention to how much disk space all this content synced with Gmail IMAP really takes up. Having recently replaced my internal 160 GB hard drive with an Intel X25-M SSD drive half the size, I’m naturally eager to strip all the unnecessary stuff out of the system in order to save some SSD space. So how to free a few gigabytes of space from Gmail?

This question has long been lingering around, it’s just that I didn’t care about it when I still had disk space to throw away: Why does ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-marknanut[...] folder take up almost triple the size (some 7 GB) of the amount of actual mail being shown in my Gmail web account (some 2.5 GB)? Gmail messages seem to take up too much space when used with Mail.app (or any other client that uses IMAP, really). Right click on the “IMAP-youraccountname” folder and select Get Info to see its size:

Ok, this isn’t that hard to find out and goes roughly like this: Gmail’s tags are not exactly compatible with IMAP’s folder logic, thus being displayed as folders in IMAP. In very rough terms: a mail with multiple tags, say 2 or 3 tags, gets locally copied to the same number of folders with these tag names (2 or 3 folders). If you do a Spotlight search in Mail, you’ll usually get duplicate results – for instance the same received mail message appears in “All Mail”, “Inbox”, also “Starred” and so on, whereas a sent message appears in “Sent Mail” and “Sent”.

It would obviously be best to prevent Mail.app from downloading folders where there are most certainly mail duplicates. You’ll figure it best for yourself, but for a start we can eliminate the “All Mail” folder. So how to do it?

Inspired by the post of Rajiv Pant, I went to my Gmail settings, and under Labs section I enabled “Advanced IMAP controls”.

Next uncheck all tags (folder) you don’t want to download locally (for instance “All Mail”) in the Labels section.

I also unchecked “Starred” and “Spam”. I restarted Mail.app, and voila – no All Mail, Starred and Spam folders, no duplicates and more than 4 GB extra space.

Which IMAP folders you’ll prevent from downloading, is of course up to you to figure out. I wish you success. Check out Rajiv Pant’s post too.

Related posts on this site

• Use less than default 1GB Spotify cache, save disk space (SSD)

Annoyed by text underlined with red dots? Tired of having to turn off spell checking every time for a particular application? Here is a quick solution to disable spell check in Mac OS X, derived from what I’ve found here at Dry Fish blog.

Apparently, “disabling” the system process AppleSpell.service by renaming it is not a good solution since you’ll keep getting the dialogs about the service not being able to be found. Dry Fish suggested renaming the language directory en_GB.lproj within the AppleSpell.service package. I did that, but found out that wasn’t good enough since the spell checker also checks spelling for other languages (German, Dutch, etc).

So all I had to do was to try and rename the whole “Resources” directory within the AppleSpell.service application, quit the AppleSpell.service process in the Activity Monitor and open any app that uses the spell checker (used Tweetie for Mac in my case) to bring back the AppleSpell process. No red dots anymore, finally. So here are the instructions.

AppleSpell.service is located in System > Library > Services. Right-click on it and select Show Package Contents.

You won’t be able to rename the Resources folder directly in Finder, so use Terminal and run the following line in it (you will need the administrator password!):

sudo mv /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources.disabled

You should now see the renamed directory:

Quit AppleSpell.service process in Activity Monitor and bring it back on – by running any app that uses the spell checker. You’re done.

Disabling spell checking works in Snow Leopard. Re-activate spell checking by renaming the “Resources.disabled” folder back to “Resources”:

sudo mv /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources.disabled /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources

Cheers.

Most Commented Posts

• Disable spell check in Mac OSX system-wide
• Use less than default 1GB Spotify cache, save disk space (SSD)
• Claim back disk space from Mail.app (Gmail)
• Maximize battery cycle time and extend Macbook battery life

Here’s how: ‘Get Info’ of an app (Cmd-I), unlock permissions (click lock icon at the bottom of Info window; requires admin password) and change permissions of user ‘everyone’ to Read & Write.

Now you can paste in the new icon from the clipboard, return the permissions back to “Read Only” and lock the permissions.

If you’re not yet familiar with replacing icons, here’s a short how-to:

1. Open the file containing icon graphics (PNG, JPEG,…) in Preview. Naturally, it’s best if this file is a PNG file with transparent background. For instance, you can find some PNG icon files for Fluid apps on Flickr.

2. In Preview, select the graphic (Cmd-A) and crop if needed, then copy to clipboard (Cmd-C):

3. In Info window of the app whose icon you wish to replace, click on the top left icon to select it:

4. Paste the graphic from the clipboard over the selected icon (Cmd-V):

Done:

Most Commented Posts

• Disable spell check in Mac OSX system-wide
• Use less than default 1GB Spotify cache, save disk space (SSD)
• Claim back disk space from Mail.app (Gmail)
• Maximize battery cycle time and extend Macbook battery life