Framerates ( FPS ) in Neverwinter MMO on a Laptop

 

Higher FPS on Neverwinter MMO by Tweaking Settings

Many of us are transitioning from desktop to laptop, and are running into the problem of underpowered CPUs and GPUs. AMD and Intel promise us a good gaming experience for around $700 dollars, but consistently fail to deliver on their promises. This becomes a serious problem when your desktop is no longer available, but fortunately you can sacrifice some eye candy in-game for a better experience. Every game is unique, but some settings changes are common across different games. Here I will be looking at Neverwinter, the mmo by Hasbro.

There are three main settings that need to be attended to when configuring Neverwinter to run on slower hardware, and another option which much be enabled every time the game is started or you alt-tab to the desktop and back, making this an unusual game.

The first setting is to enable Direct X 11 as the API that the game uses. This setting will not only speed the game up significantly, but will give you more eye candy, counter-intuitively. The second setting is to turn off SSAO, by doing this you will see a significant improvement. The same level of improvement can be had by turning off post-processing, the third major option.

Other minor options are in the advanced settings, and are fairly straight-forward. Limit CPU and GPU use is obvious. Selecting the memory bank size the game uses requires knowing the amount of RAM allocated to the video card, or in the case of dedicated cards, the amount of RAM that ships with the model. A quick tip I can give is that the Radeon GPU on the AMD APU tends to default to 512MB. Other settings can be found in the video.

The fourth major change you need to make is to ensure the game is running in Fullscreen mode. Simply changing it once during a game is not sufficient as any drop to the desktop or even some loading screens in the game, will change it back to windowed mode. I would say the game is twice as fast on desktop as opposed to windowed, so it is worth keeping an eye out for this.

I have an AMD A10-5757m with a dedicated 8750m Radeon in crossfire, and the game is difficult to run, so I can only imagine the pain some of you are going through to play. If my system can’t keep up with defaults, most sub $1000 laptops don’t have a chance. I hope this helped, see you in-game!

Apologies to Amd and Toshiba, laptop and rift perform very well!

I must have hit the wrong setting somewhere when I started tuning rift the first time. When returning ccc (vision control center) to balanced mode and putting rift on default settings for each tier of graphic quality I began to see quite decent performance overall from the satellite p775d with a8 APU. So good in fact that this is a 100 percent turnaround of a post. While not close to my main rig it is decent enough to walk around in the capital city of Meridian without a lot of drag. Outside in the game world there was a much more notable improvement.

A number of points to consider. For one, we must simply assume that the apu is set up by driver tuning for defaults since my previous changes I made were to reduce computational stresses. It is an assumption because I have been known to reduce framerates when fooling around with ccc without entirely understanding the reason. I also can conjecture that the apu has to balance processing power with graphics output and thus I may have accidentally bunged up the works by trying to run too much data through.

Either way I’m glad I rechecked my settings. Rift plays very well on defaults with both vision control center and the various graphics settings in Rift. One thing to note, turning shadows down in the settings greatly improved frame rates, saying that while the game world is fully rendered, you still need a dedicated gpu if you want all the bells and whistles. However, you need to buy a 1300 dollar laptop to achieve the same effect I have been able to get on a 700 dollar laptop. Amd vs. Intel, game set and match AMD. Now if only they would raise the clock speeds :-d