Tribes 2/Nvidia card tweaks

Dustaz

OK, First tribes 2 tweak post
I ripped this directly from the TW forums, but its handy for anyone with an nvidia card.

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I have done a bunch of research and find that these things that I am about to list are the best ways to get tribes2 to run well especially on an nvidia based graphics card. If you are a 3DFX owner - think about spending $80 on a geforce2 MX. It will give you a MAJOR increase in tribes2 gameplay and for ALL of your games. It is also the cheapest method of doing so. Now to list the things that will give you at least 15 fps more in the game. Most computers will get more fps out of this.

1. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your video card and directx 8a installed. I have found the detonator 6.50 drivers work better than the newest 12.00 drivers because of slow down in other games. Make sure you have the newest opengl build 121 from http://www.glsetup.com.

2. Make sure Tribes 2 is patched to the latest version. After this your need to go to your start menu and pull up the 'find files or folders' menu. Type in to find this "*.dso" without the quotes in the drive you installed tribes2 on. Select all these files and DELETE them. The game will recompile them with the NEW patch info once you play again. Old files are not re-written because they are already there, and have OLD patch info in them witch causes problems. TRUST ME. There is an article about this at http://www.tribes2review.com.

3. Download the NVIDIA Reg Patch for ALL NVIDIA cards from http://www.tweakfiles.com on their main page. Install this by clickin on the one that your operating system is. Go to http://www.nvmax.com and download and install the beta 2 version of nvmax (always have this running).

4. Don't change any of the settings in NVMax except Turn
OFF antialiasing if it is on and use geforce accelerated lines and fast pixel copying in the opengl menus. Also turn ON sideband addressing in one of the nvmax menus. Most of these settings will be carried over from the Reg Patch you installed so LEAVE most of them.

5. Load the game up now after you have done all this and set the graphics settings in your game. You can use whatever you want but the 3 things that make the MOST difference are View Distance, Terrain Texture Detail and using Full Sky or Skybox depending on your CPU, so play around. ALL other settings can be turned on full including 32bit textures and 32bit display. This will leave the game looking very good and still give you good performance.

6. If you have 128MB of ram or less, you need to use the palletized textures. To use even less memory, use 16bit textures. You can also use 'nicest' texture compression in the graphics option in the game menu if you have that option. There is not much of a noticable difference in quality between 32bit and palletized textures or 'nicest' 32bit texture compression, and it gives you big performance increase for lower memory systems.

7. Choose resolution, by now - 1024x768x32bit will work ALOT faster than it did before so use either this or 800x600x32bit depending on the card and the cpu. Go higher if the game plays too easily at 1024x768x32bit.

8. You can turn down your sound to 22hz and in your control panel\audio.

You will get ALOT more performance from this game by doing these things especially with an nvidia based card. I am guessing most peoples FPS will jump 15-30 more some less, some more. Copy this by selecting all of it and using C and paste it into your notepad. Then save it and print it out. This will be a regular post now so try it and post your results with it. If you are happy with these things I have researched and they work, keep bumping up this message with results so more people can find out.

Thanks, and enjoy!

ttyl KaKa
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Note that deleting the .dso files actually works - it's not something he stuck in to screw up your game

LegacyUser

Nice 1 m8,

Do any of the files you refer to have BIOS settings for Nvidia's Detonator Pack?

If not I'll Whack 'em up here!!

LegacyUser

hmmm Nvmax is nice.

Thanks for the tips all I need now is a copy of T2

Any idea how to best set up all those nvmax options for the best fps in cs?

gwan pls help the cause (my fps hehe)

LegacyUser

Just about the deleting the *.dso
I found 266 file's
are you sure I am to delete that many file's ??

Dustaz

Yeh, delete them all. Make sure they are all in your tribes folder tho.
The way i usually do it is perform a find within the t2 dir and just delete the results. Its usually about 150 files.
Next time you relaunch tribes, it will recompile them all with the patched info.