The Warhammer Performance Guide

For the most part, Warhammer is a well polished game and Mythic deserves a lot of credit for creating it. There are a few graphical anomaly’s and the occasional drop in FPS. However, there are some reporting a “memory leak” in the game while others are complaining of “lag” when loading new zones. Then there is a minority of players complaining about Bluescreens (BSOD), disconnects, horrible FPS throughout the game and unplayable conditions when playing in RvR areas and Scenarios.

Dailywarhammer has decided to create a “Warhammer Performance Guide” designed to help improve your system’s ability to run Warhammer. We cannot guarantee any of these steps will “cure” your issue, but at the very least they should help your overall experience. This guide will be available in the Forums. We ask that you signup and contribute to the thread as we will consistently add information to improve the guide. We want this to be a helpful guide for those who are having issues running the game. The guide includes tweaks, macros, addons, and strategies to improve system performance and frame rate.

If you have not already done the basics (chances are you have) then please follow this guide starting from part 1.

Part 1-The Basics

-Defragmenting: Defragment your hard drive through windows. You will g

ain increased performance in and out of the game. You should already know how to defragment your computer. But if you don’t just do a quick google search and the information is there. Defragmenting should always be the first place you start when trying to increase performance.

-Task Manager-Stop Unwanted Programs: This will help eliminate some unnecessary programs from running in the background. This will free up valuable system resources. CTRL+ALT+DELETE will grant access to the task manager. Look under Processes and use Tasklist.org to indentify which programs can be ended and which programs are needed. *Note* Please research the names thoroughly and don’t delete necessary programs that will make windows unstable. We do not take responsibility for your actions. We are merely stating that, if this is done properly, it will help your overall system’s performance.

-Antivirus: You should run a complete anti virus scan and anti spyware scan.

-Power Options (Vista): Windows Vista has some advanced power options that have a huge impact in overall system performance. Windows XP doesn’t seem to have this. For those having shuttering frames in Vista, please try the following:

In Vista:

1. Open Control Panel, type power in the search box.
2. Click “Change power-saving settings”
3. Make sure the power plan is on “High Performance”.
4. Click “Change plan settings” under “High Performance”.
5. Click “Change advanced plan settings”.
6. Scroll down to “Processor power management” and expand that window. Check the values for minimum and maximum processor state. They should both be at 100%. If not, change both of them to 100%.

This seemed to help some “stuttering” issues within the game. We found that our settings were at 5% min and max. By increasing to 100%, we noticed a moderate difference in overall frame rate.

Part 2-Drivers & Settings:

-Drivers: Nvidia has released new drivers for all graphics cards as of September 25th. If you do not have Nvidia hardware, check with your hardware manufacturer for the latest drivers and software updates. We also recommend you boot into safe mode, remove drivers from Add&Remove Programs, restart back into safe mode, install your new drivers, and then restart into windows normally. If you have Drivercleaner, run this program after uninstalling the drivers through the Add&Remove Programs Utility. This will create a clean installation to eliminate any registry problems or potential blue screens in the future.

You may also want to re-install your soundcard drivers (unless you have onboard sound) and any other PCI device drivers you might have.

-Video Card Settings: Depending on your system and specs, you may want to adjust your game settings and video card settings to acquire better performance.

Our system:

Intel e6700 core 2 duo over clocked to 3.25 GHZ.
BFG 8800 GTX OC2 (NO SLI)
EVGA 780I SLI
4GB (800mhz) OCZ Platinum Edition RAM
Windows Vista x64
Koolance Liquid Cooled System
Nvidia Control Settings:
4xAA/4xAS
AA Gama Correct: On
AA Mode: Enhance The Application Setting
AA Transparency: Supersampling
Conformant Texture Clamp: Use Hardware
Error Reporting & Extension Limit: Off
Anisotropic Sample Optimization: On
Negative LOD Bias: Clamp
Texture Filtering Quality: Quality
Trilinear Optimization: On
Triple Buffering: On (only when vertical sync is on)
Vertical Sync: On

Note* Try adjusting vertical sync on and off. Make sure to adjust triple buffering to the same setting (on or off) as vertical sync. Vertical sync makes the game stay in sync with your monitor’s refresh rate. We had best results with it on.

Adding WAR.exe to 3D Settings (great article on warhammer alliance)

-Ingame Settings: Choose between “balanced”, “best framerate”, or “high quality” for your game settings. We did not notice a huge difference between the three. But for low-end systems, use the “best framerate” option. The game still looks great regardless of the option you pick. But we are looking for the fastest performance.

Windowed Mode: Set your game for windowed mode, and set the resolution to match your desktop. For some reason, windowed and full screen modes look exactly the same, but windowed mode is far superior in performance. This will help your framrate. Uncheck full screen, and check windowed mode for best results.

Part 3- Macros & Addons

-Macros: “A few macros increasing performance” is an article written at Curse.com which includes a list of macros which seem to help low-end computers play Warhammer.

-Addons:

Buffthrottle from Curse “adds a minimum delay in between consecutive refreshes of a given frame’s buffs and debuffs. This helps performance immensely in situations where there are a large number of buffs/debuffs flying around.”

The default delay is set to half a second (0.5) - you can tweak it to your liking by setting the BuffRefreshDelay variable, like so (change the number to the delay you’d like, in seconds)

• /script BuffRefreshDelay = 0.5″

If you are experiencing poor performance in RvR situations where numerous players are in close proximity, then this should help improve frame rate.

Squared is a highly-customizable unit frame addon similar to the widely-known WoW addon “Grid”. It provides a very compact view of health for you, your group, your warband, or your scenario. Clicking on a square will target the associated player.

To install this Addon, simply create an “Interface” folder in your base directory, and an “Addons” folder in the newly created interface folder. Unzip addon into “Addons” folder.

Part 4- Tweaks

/reloadUI in game will drastically help performance. This will reload the games UI which should help clear some issues with performance. Use this regularly.

Please Note* This project is constantly being updated. If you have an issues or want to contribute to this project, please post your thoughts, experiences, and feedback.