wow in-game graphic detail macros (helps performance)

[keyclone]

ok.. i thought i would put these here for others to reference.

basically... make 3 macros. detail-lo, detail-med, and detail-hi . the difference in quality is fairly massive.. but the cpu/ gpu savings between hi and lo detail is massive.

here you go:

/say detail: low
/console groundEffectDensity 16
/console groundEffectDist 1
/console horizonfarclip 1305
/console farclip 177
/console characterAmbient 1
/console smallcull 1
/console skycloudlod 1
/console detailDoodadAlpha 1


/say detail: medium
/console groundEffectDensity 136
/console groundEffectDist 70
/console horizonfarclip 3765
/console farclip 477
/console characterAmbient 1
/console smallcull 1
/console skycloudlod 2
/console detailDoodadAlpha 1


/say detail: high
/console farclip 777
/console horizonfarclip 6226
/console groundeffectdensity 256
/console groundeffectdist 140
/console smallcull 0
/console skycloudlod 3
/console characterambient 0
/console detailDoodadAlpha 100

:D

edit: updated hi-detail .. thanks Maz

[crebble]

did i say i love you?

E-loving FTW

[Diamndzngunz]

Awesome Ill take note of this.

[Maz]

You're missing detailDoodadAlpha from the high detail one. I think it needs to be 100.

[Atros]

Lol, the high-end one basically kills my machine...like the machine kept flickering and stuff. Thankfully, I launched keyclone in windowed mode and it was fine. :P

[Canasou]

Would the lower settings have an impact on mini-map points like tracking and find minerals and such?

[keyclone]

it shouldn't... these details are for rendering the virtual world... things like vegetation, mountains in the distance.. even a town (at lowest settings, cross roads didn't appear until i was real close).

by dropping the need to render those things, yes.. it drops the look of the game, but it will free up the cpu/gpu... allowing you to squeeze more fps out of it.

[Canasou]

thanks keyclone, look forward to trying it out

[Pent]

Is there any way to also set the other options from low to high or do they not effect performance much? (like specular lighting, texture resolution etc)

[keyclone]

there might be. do some research and if you find anything, drop it on this thread and i'll update the OP

[Toxicreaver]

Thanks for the macros took me from 200ms and 10 fps to 40ms 53 fps. Using the lo macro

[Knoxious]

Thanks a bunch! :thumbsup:

[Aaron]

From my personal experience, I've found moving all the sliders to minimum and unticking most boxes that say "may improved performance when disabled" etc, to work better than the low-res macro. The difference was 480-500fps facing a wall with my method, then it dropped to 400fps when using the low-res macro.

Also, the best fps gain is to cap the fps of your slaves to 15 or 30 (30 is a little better on the eyes if you need to check your slaves from time to time) by doing the following in the chat box:
/console maxfps 30
There's also /console maxfpsbk 30 (which caps the fps to 30 when its minimized I believe).
I use both and found fps on my main to be a lot smoother when going through cities with my slave.

[Ellay]

Added to the wiki http://www.dual-boxing.com/wiki/index.php/Ingame_Graphic_Detail

[Icetech]

This may sound silly.. BUT.. does this need to be hit at every login, or just once to set the graphics and it stays?

[Diamndzngunz]

It does not need to be added every time you log in.


Also added this to the FAQ Guide.

[Icetech]

Thanks!

[ChaoticMonk]

Would it be too much to ask for someone to state what each command line affects for those that want to alter it to their personal needs (eg. be able to lower gfx but still see mobs/npcs at a distance etc.)?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

/say detail: low
Says, "detail: low" in the [say] channel :D
/console groundEffectDensity 16
I set this to 1 on my alts. This is how many little bunches of grass and bushes it draws on the screen within the defined visible radius. less is better. Affects terrain effects only.
/console groundEffectDist 1
How far away from you can you still see bushes/grass/etc.
/console horizonfarclip 1305
This is how far away you can still see those shadows of mountains. If you look out on the horizon, you'll see the sky and then at the edge, you can just see the outline of the tops of mountains or trees. The lower this is set, the shorter the distance you can actually see those outlines of objects.
/console farclip 177
This is how far away you can actually see objects/terrain/etc. Past this, it does not draw anything at all...just the sky or fog.
/console characterAmbient 1
This is a "glow" effect from your character that stems from the textures "reflecting" a certain amount of light back to the viewer.
/console smallcull 1
Not positive, but I think this prevents geometry smaller than a certain size from being drawn. Reduces fine detail.
/console skycloudlod 1
Turns on the ability to reduce the complexity of rendered clouds.
/console detailDoodadAlpha 1
This is like spraypainted textures and artsy additions to textures.

For a good example movie, go here and download the movie and watch it full screen. ('http://files.filefront.com/wowmacros+hdxvidavi/;10060907;/fileinfo.html')

[ChaoticMonk]

Awsome! thanks for the info and the vid link :) 1 more question, are these settings account wide or character wide?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Account-wide.

[BGuru]

Are these macros still good to use since the 3.02 patch?

[Katharsis]

I found these this morning.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8202277367&sid=2000&pageNo=1

[Ken]

I think there's an error in the startpost:
"/console characterAmbient 0" disabled ambient lighting on characters while "/console characterAmbient 1" enables it. Enabling it is higher quality, but it is enabled for low and medium quality settings while high quality settings has it disabled.

[Ken]

Some of the startpost settings didn't work anymore, some required some tweaking and others were added in my version of the quality settings.
The current settings work best for me while multiboxing:

Low:
/console farclip 177
/console characterAmbient 0
/console skycloudlod 0
/console particleDensity 0.3
/console maxfps 20

Medium:
/console farclip 700
/console characterAmbient 1
/console skycloudlod 10
/console particleDensity 1
/console maxfps 30

High:
/console farclip 1000
/console characterAmbient 1
/console skycloudlod 10
/console particleDensity 1
/console maxfps 60


The far clipping was good already. The high quality settings could be 1000 or maybe higher.
The characterAmbient is now used correctly.
skycloudlod basically sets the cloud detail. I didn't notice much fps improvement in the cities, but I decided to add it anyway, because it might be pixel shader intensive (because of the bloom).
The particle density is set here too, but I didn't notice a big difference since I wasn't casting many spells. It probably offers a big difference when firing 5x fire nova totem or something similar.
maxpfs offers a big relief to your CPU and GPU. This will probably improve your computer's temperature. You might want to tweak this further, but 20 was good as a minimum, because there was no noticable 'shocking' behavior on the slaves(which is clearly visible at 15) and 30 is good as high quality setting, because your eyes probably won't notice much difference on an LCD when this value is set higher.

Here are some sample screenshots:
low quality (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3653/3460416232_522b87d5ef_o.jpg)
high quality (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3524/3459599907_43c136b5a2_o.jpg)
Notice the wolf's paws, the lighting on the charactes, the sky and the landscape geometry.

[edit] I have edited the related wiki page (http://www.dual-boxing.com/wiki/index.php/Ingame_Graphic_Detail).