hello.

ok, over 130 hours played. many many many tweaks done now, what I feel, is my best vid set up.

all was running extremely well until recently when I started getting random lockups. Primarily during night travel for some reason.. but the occasional day travel lock up as well. So back to tweaking.

The three noticable tweaks that have made a difference

pre rendered frames.

forced off vsync.

and the one that has oddly enough stopped my random lock ups. Antialiasing trasnsperency. I set this to "off". where as before it was set to multi sampling. Multisampling is the best way to go if using AA.. and multi helps with between areas like fence posts and the like. Should have nothing what so ever to do with random lock ups. But once I set this to off. I no longer have had any lock ups for the last 20 hours or so. Odd.

at any rate.. it may or may not work for you. just thought I would share what has worked for me.

of course now that I have said this.. I most likely will start getting random lock ups again.. lol.

cheers
d


ps. this is specific to lock ups.. not ctd's, bsod, loading lockups.. ect. I have had no issues with those types of problems.

I hope that really fixed it for you, but usually it seems you'll think it's fixed only to have it lock up yet again I'm afraid

Forcing vsync off has a nasty side effect (and I'm not talking about screen tearing) of speeding up with the framerate. Ex. - If you are getting 120fps the game will run twice as fast! I've been playing around with transparency AA and this game (on an nvidia card) too and the in-game transparency AA uses a dithering pattern on alpha textures which is more noticeable at lower resolutions and lower levels of AA. It makes the grass look a lot better and the power lines/fences as you mentioned with driver multisampling, but one negative is the blood uses alpha textures and it basically reduces 75% of the blood using the in-game method. Using driver multisampling for transparencies, unlike fallout 3, has almost no effect. I did a screenshot comparison of fences. It almost is like it's on by default because the fences/power lines don't look bad with it off and there is no performance hit with it on. Only when moving up to a supersampling method does it impact performance. Speaking of supersampling, if you have a third party tool for your video card (ex - nvidia inspector) you can force other levels of AA such as supersampling. Multisampling AA only smooths polygonal edges which is why there is a separate option for transparency. Supersampling does it all, so if you have the power to do it, even 2x supersampling would look better than just about any multisampling method

Turning off vsync does not "speed up the game". Stop with this crap already.

Playing with vsync off is the only way to play games where pinpoint accuracy is critical to survival.