ini files....To edit? Or not to edit?

[edgeburner]

At the risk of rehydrating a redundant topic...Are they really worth it? Personally, I have tried dozens of tweaks, used some prefabs and also use the configurator and in the end, most of them seemed to improve performance, but destabilize the game. I am now left with just the two cellbuffer entries and the preloadsizelimit entry tweaked.

I have also read on some forums that the ini files should not be altered at all, especially the hardware threading tweaks. Many find it curious why none of the game devs have offered any input regarding ini file adjustments. There are some that think that of these tweaks as mere placebos.

I realize that there are many variables at play here, system specs, mods installed, ect, but what has your experince with ini adjustments/experiments been like?

Are there any that you would (as a rule of thumb) recommend experimenting with?

 

[LordCaptainCommander]

Well, I think as long as you know what your doing or have a good guide then editing the .ini's is a good thing to do. I use the configator, and I'm not having any problems. I have a lot of mods and textures too.

 

And My laptop is ancient. inspiron 9300 with a pentium m 740 and a ..*sigh* a nvidia go 6800...yeah..thats what I got.

 

I run with medium-high settings (I don't use anti aliasing though, still use hdr and AF), poco beuno and I have absolutely no problems, In fact the game ironically runs MUCH better for me then fo3 did.

 

The only things I use are the fallout configator, the texture optimizer (for vanilla textures, i don't compress poco bueno or the weapon retexture) and the game defragmenter on razer gamebooster

 

 

I've gotten much better results using the configator to do simple things like make grass thinner or lower shadow resolution then I ever have trying use any of the so called performance boosting mods out there (snake oil)

 

As long as I don't use AA I can crank everything else up, View distance and such are overmaxxed. If you are unsure then do what I did, I made copies of all of the fallout nv ini files and archived them in case i messed up something really bad, which hasn't happened.

 

 

Edit: Something you can try is raising the amount of ram used for preloading, I upped mine from 50mb to 223mb, I left cell buffers alone though, and it made a big difference. YOu can also use the Zan's auto purge mod' which will keep your framerates up pretty high.

 

I also use threaded morpher, blood, particles, Ai,

Background pathting - on (1)

loadfiles in backgroun on. ect

 

Again just make backups but i've never had any trouble, I did it all manually for months before using the configator but thats the way to go, so eacy and convenient.

Edited November 8, 2013 by LordCaptainCommander

[edgeburner]

Funny thing is...I tweaked the hell out of my Oblivion ini's and it really helped with stability.

I'll probably try some more edits for my next playthough, mainly wtih the LOD settings. I just discovered that that the "enhanced shaders lite" may have been causing the stability issues. I run NMC small with Poco Bueno on top, inproved LOD noise, cinemantech+ dynavision+imaginator combo, Nevada skies URLified and the Weapon retexture project, so i don't actually need the shader pacakage. I have and AMD based system and have read where some folks with AMD systems have had issues with the .dll file that runs that shader package.

I do use those threaded AI, morpher, particles ect but they don't seem to make any difference. I will, however, try returning my cell buffer values back to default and upping my preload size. Thanks for the tip, LordCaptainCommander.

Oh, I tried to run the buffers and the preload to the 4gig recomendations, and got smoother preformance, but corpse looting and container opening slowed consideralby after about a half an hour of playtime. I was forced to purge the buffers way too often (I use the PCB hotkey mod)

[LordCaptainCommander]

Bethesda games are an odd breed to be sure, when the game was completely pristine it ran so terribly that I thought I had wasted the entire 10 bucks I spent on it, after several months of cycling through various mods and tweak guides i've got it running like a dream, My 1.73 ghz single core, 2gig of ram, 6800 video card, 9 year old computer handles it perfectly.

 

I will say, Urwl stuff seemd to always cause problems for me, I use nevada skies now..before that Fellout, which is good, before that realistic lighting which is solid, before that Urwl, which caused my game to jerk, twitch and spaz out more then I do irl in social situations, when i tried nevada skies with urwl interiors same deal.

 

Sometimes the process of getting everything "right" is just trying something, playing for a while, then trying something else and comparing, again and again.

Not really all that bad, I think most people who play games modded have a touch of an obsessive disorder that causes us to want to find "the perfect" set up anyhow.