Improve your BDO framerate

[Ronin]

This guide will help most people in BDO improve their frames per second and smooth gameplay, this will primarily help gamers with less than top end machines. However this can benefit even extremely high end computers, because the most important part of the guide is turning off V-sync for BDO which the game doesn't normally allow.

I'll try to give a short explanation of why gamers typically HATE Vsync and will jump through hoops to turn it off. The short way of saying it is this, under almost any circumstance it is just throwing away a large amount of the performance/framerate a gaming computer is capable of. I'll try to give a longer more accurate explanation in my own words. So the primary purpose of Vsync is this, reach the the default refresh rate of your monitor. For most people this means 60 frames per second(fps). During this explanation I'll assume you have a 60 fps screen but works for all screens of any framerate with just slightly different math.

One important thing to understand about this guide is it typically doesn't run at high frames per second. So how Vsync would work is this, if it can't reach 60fps then it will try to run it at a multiple of 60, which depending on the type of vsync BDO uses, may mean dropping down to 30fps, or 15, or worse. So let's assume your computer is capable of 99% of the power required to run at 60fps, then vsync will NOT allow you to run 59fps, instead it will force 30fps. Which means the game just basically threw away almost half of your graphics power, half of your frames per second, and the picture instead of being relatively smooth like a movie just became more like a slide show. However if you turn off Vsync, you then just got back that performance that Vsync was stealing, you'd then be running at 59fps instead of 30fps. Hopefully this explanation is helpful in letting you know why Vsync is undesirable for the average computer playing BDO.

Most games have a simple box to turn Vsync off, but this being BDO they have to make everything difficult, so we have to find a way to override the games graphics settings.

 

Now that the why is out of the way, here's the how. There will be 2 sections to this guide, since the steps are slightly different depending on your video card. So please know or find out what Video card brand you have, Nvidia or AMD. In either case please make sure you have the newest stable graphics drivers, or at least the best driver you know works for your card.

 

For Nvidia Geforce Users:

 

Open windows control panel, then open Nvidia control panel, under "3D Settings", click "Manage 3D Settings", then the "Program Settings" tab. Under select program to optimize, click the down arrow and find Black Desert (blackdesert64.exe) IF for some reason you don't see Black Desert 64 there, click the "ADD" button, then "Browse" then find the folder where you installed BDO and select blackdesert64.exe from there, then click "Open". Scroll down to "Vertical Sync" and select "OFF". Here's what that should look like. http://i.imgur.com/5es24f2.png Click "Apply". You should now notice a framerate improvement as well as the gameplay becoming much more smooth from this setting alone, you can stop here and likely benefit greatly. However, if you so choose you can go through the other settings in this window and change them as well but what you should set them to is dependent on your hardware, so it's difficult to make recommendations here, however Nvidia has highlighted some options that they recommend and SHOULD be safe to try. But for now Vsync being turned off should be a nice improvement on it's own, so you could stop there and go enjoy BDO running more smoothly and at a higher average framerate.

 

For AMD Radeon Users: Update Coming Soon

 

 

 

 

[BigDeady]

http://imgur.com/a/MEKw9

Here are all my Nvidia settings.  Big ones are anti-aliasing, texture filtering and v-sync.  Depending on which graphics card you may not have the same setting available as I do so don't worry if you can't find options or settings of the same name.

Edited May 13, 2017 by BigDeady