For the people who play Team Fortress 2

**K.D** · December 19, 2010, 06:41 PM

This will certainly help you out if your computer is lacking

I've copy pasted this from steamforums, I take no credit just thought people might take some advice if they play TF2, If this thread is in the wrong place, Or has been posted before, Do what ya' gotta do

Most of this info will work for any other game aswell

A lot of people have complained about FPS/performance drops after every major update, but I'm pretty sure that it's not completely Valve's fault that the performance has dropped so low. Over time, your computer slows down and this slow down may have negatively affected the performance of your game. I have compiled a list of every method I know to squeeze FPS out of your game.

The options are ordered based on how much it will affect how the game looks. The first options don't affect the appearance of the game while the ones near the end drastically affect the visuals while being extremely effective.

1. Defrag your computer.

Windows has a built-in defragmentation tool. Start/Program Files (All Programs if you're running Vista)/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter. This effectively cleans up your drives. Over time, files become scattered among directories, so a bit of a file is placed in another file and Windows has to go to the other files and find the scattered pieces. By defragging, your programs will run faster.

Defrag the game's GCF files by right clicking on TF2, opening the properties, clicking on the "Local files" tab and choosing "Defragment cache files."

2. Clean your registry

Over time your registry will become untidy. This is from programs not removing themselves completely from the registry when you uninstall them, or from spyware and viruses. There are two ways you can do this. Manually, or with software. Do not attempt to clean your registry manually unless you know exactly what you're doing. Deleting the wrong thing can screw up your computer.

3. Update to the latest drivers

For everything. Your sound cards, CPU, video cards; everything. Go to the manufacturer's website and they may have a tool which detects exactly what hardware you have and may automatically update them for you. If you have older hardware, the drivers are still there, but harder to find.

4. Open Task Manager, and close all unnecessary processes and programs.

Since TF2 is so CPU intensive, you must make sure that it is using the CPU optimally and efficiently. Some people may have unknown viruses or spyware which can slow down your computer quite a bit. While TF2 is running, minimize to the desktop, run Task Manager, right click on hl2.exe in the Processes tab, and set the priority to high. Alternatively, download Game Booster which does this automatically with one click.

5. Run scans for viruses and spyware.

From my experience, viruses and spyware will slow down your computer, and most of the time, you may not notice it. Run online scans for viruses here, here, and here. If results come up positive, you may want to do something about it.

6. Make sure TF2 is using your RAM optimally.

Take the amount of RAM your computer has in megabytes, divide it by two, and multiply it by 1024. Then, right click on TF2 in steam, click properties, launch options, then add -heapsize [yournumberhere].
Example: If I have 2 GB of RAM, that's 2048 megabytes. I divide it by two, and get 1024. Then, I multiply it by 1024, so I get 1048576. In the launch options, I will add:
Code:
-heapsize 1048576

Also, type -nojoy, and -noipx in the launch options if you're not going to use a joystick to play TF2, or play TF2 over IPX, respectively. These will free up some memory.

7. Enable Multi-Core rendering.

In the game's video options, enable this setting if your CPU has two cores or more. This feature will allow the game to split the workload between both cores. It may improve performance for some, while it may do nothing for others. Keep in mind that this feature is buggy, as far as I know.

8. Lower the graphic settings.

You can use the in-game sliders and scroll-down menus to control how detailed you want your game to be. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering puts a lot of strain on hardware, so you might want to lower those first.
If you own an nVidia card, open the NVIDIA control panel from the Windows control panel, then set the slider to performance instead of quality. Then go to "Manage 3D Settings," scroll down to "Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration", and change it to "Single Display Performance mode." Turning off Vertical Sync may increase performance, but may also result in tearing.

9. Lower the DirectX software level.

I'm sure that a lot of you know this already, but here it is for the sake of people who don't know. Go to launch options (described in step 6), and type "-dxlevel 81." This removes the phong shading, which gives TF2 its glossy look, but increases FPS by quite a bit. If you're willing to sacrifice more looks for performance, type "-dxlevel 80" instead. Remember to take this out of the launch options once you have run TF2 with it. This is important.

10. Use an FPS config.

FPS configs turn off various effects in the game. If you do not already have one, I recommend these ones which I am using currently. To install it, copy it to the CFG directory in your Team Fortress 2 folder. Go to C:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/[yourusername]/team fortress 2/tf/cfg, and copy the file there. Next time you launch TF2, the settings should be in effect. If you want to revert to your old settings, go to the launch options (detailed in step 6), and replace everything with -autoconfig, which will run TF2 with the settings it ran with when you first started the game.

11. Manually crank down the level of detail lower than the game will normally allow.

Credit goes to nub on a mission for this one. Since the game will not normally allow the the LOD to be set higher than 2, follow these steps to force the setting in the game. This will lower the level of detail in the textures. I'm not sure if it will make much of a difference since I haven't tried it myself, but this was worth a mention.

12. Reformat your hard drive, clean off dust in you computer, etc.

Self-explanatory. This gives a bit of a boost to your FPS if you've been using your computer for years without cleaning it.

- Kev

P.S: If you do play Tf2, add me for a game on KDprod

**Top-Tier-Tech** · December 20, 2010, 06:39 PM

All of those are very basic tips which are largely generic to any game. Even the specific ones only are useful to someone with a very old graphics card.