Full Circle Magazine FR

Improving a game's graphics without having a negative effect on the performance or frames-per-second (FPS) can be a very daunting task. Unless you know what you're doing, there are greater chances of rendering the game un-playable while trying to make it look more appealing to the eye. There is a fine line to be crossed which, if you know how to navigate your way through it, can yield some amazing results. If you don't know which settings to tweak and which to leave alone, then this guide should help you take your game to the next level while keeping its performance almost unaffected. Before diving into your favorite game's graphics settings menu, it might help to know a little about what's going on under the hood. Graphics Drivers & rendering APIs Until only a few years ago, it was nearly impossible to play AAA game titles on Linux. The main reason for a lack of games was due, in part, to the inadequacy of graphics drivers. Other factors were involved as well, such as OpenGL not being as compatible for gaming as Microsoft's DirectX, but times are slowly changing. We now have a growing catalog of games available on Linux, with older titles being ported over as well as new games being released on Linux at the same time as they are released for other platforms. With the release of Vulkan, the successor to OpenGL, we should see an even greater influx of games released on Linux. It's expected that many game developers will see the benefits in using the Vulkan (API) instead of DirectX – which should eliminate the need for multiple ports needed for different platforms as Vulkan would be universal regardless of what platform you're using. Any game that uses Vulkan has the potential of being released for Linux at the same time as being released for other consoles. Essentially, this would mean that games could be developed to run on PS4, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One (if Microsoft allows Vulkan to run on it), Android & Linux, without the need for a port. Vulkan supported games are already beginning to appear, and we expect that number to grow at a rapid rate within the next couple of years. As of August 2016, a couple of top notch games that you can play using Vulkan (instead of OpenGL) are The Talos Principle and Dota2, among others.

Essayer d'améliorer les graphismes d'un jeu sans diminuer les performances ou le nombre d'images par second, peut être un défi considérable. À moins de savoir ce que vous faites, les chances de casser le jeu complètement tout en essayant de le rendre plus beau, sont énormes. Il faut être un fin équilibriste, mais si vous connaissez le chemin et comment éviter ses embûches, les résultats peuvent être époustouflants. Si vous ne savez pas quels réglages peuvent être ajustés et ceux qu'il vaut mieux laisser tranquilles, ce guide devrait vous aider à faire passer votre jeu au niveau supérieur tout en n'affectant que peu ses performances. Avant de plonger dans le menu des paramètres graphiques de votre jeu préféré, avoir une idée de ce qui se passe sous le capot pourrait aider.

Les pilotes graphiques et les API de rendu

Jusqu'à il y a quelques années, c'était presque impossible de jouer à un jeu AAA sous Linux. La raison principale de la rareté des jeux était, en partie, tout simplement lié à l'insuffisance des pilotes graphiques. D'autres éléments furent également impliqués, notamment l’incompatibilité d'OpenGL avec les jeux par rapport au DirectX de Microsoft, mais les choses changent lentement. Nous avons maintenant un catalogue de jeux disponible sur Linux qui croît sans cesse, grâce au portage sous Linux de vieux titres aussi bien qu'au nouveaux jeu publiés pour Linux en même temps que pour d'autres plateformes. Avec la sortie de Vulcan, qui succède à OpenGL, on devrait voir la publication d'encore plus de jeux pour Linux. On s'attend à ce que beaucoup de développeurs de jeux deviennent conscients des avantages de l'utilisation de Vulcan (API) à la place de DirectX, ce qui devrait éliminer le besoin de portages multiples pour différentes plateformes, puisque Vulkan seraient universel quelle que soit la plateforme utilisée. Tout jeu qui utilise Vulkan a le potentiel de sortir pour Linux en même temps que sa publication pour d'autres consoles. Cela signifierait que des jeux pourraient être développer pour

Another factor to consider is your graphics drivers. It should go without saying that you will have a better experience if you use proprietary drivers instead of the default open source drivers that come standard with most Linux distributions. I'm not going to go into the details on how to install the correct proprietary drivers, but I'll leave you with some basic understanding of what you need and what you don't. If you have a Nvidia graphics card, then you'll want to use the nvidia-graphics-drivers instead of the Nouveau open source driver that your system came with. If you're using an AMD/ATI graphics card, you’ll want to use the fglrx proprietary driver from AMD instead of the open source Radeon driver from AMD that comes standard with most distros. For more detailed instructions, please refer to the Ubuntu Community Video Driver How-To which contains information for AMD, Nvidia and Intel drivers. Resolution, Refresh Rate & VSync Having resolved your driver issues, let's now delve into the mysterious, mystical and mythical world also known as the graphics menu settings. One thing to keep in mind – while we explore the settings we can change and the ones we shouldn't – is that not all settings are called the same across all games. Three games may very well have three different names for the same exact graphics setting. So, if the suggestions I give you here have different names from what your game might have, it is to be expected. For the most part, most of the standard settings have somewhat similar names.

First things first: most games will give you the option to run either “Windowed” or in “Full Screen Mode”. If your graphics card & CPU can handle it, then you want to go with the “Full Screen Mode” so that you get the best experience possible. Then there's the Resolution which should give you a few different options such as 1920×1080, 1280×720, or 720×480, among others. For this choice, you want to find out your monitor's native resolution and make sure that you select that in the game – if it wasn't already selected for you upon initial game run. Along the same lines as Resolution is the Refresh Rate, which should also match your monitor's refresh rate. These numbers will be something like 24Hz, 60Hz, etc. Although you can change this setting, you want to leave it as is, especially if you're going to be using VSync, otherwise VSync won't work properly. So now, on to one of the most crucial settings that you definitely want to enable: Vertical-sync, also known as VSync. Vertical-sync is basically setting a limit to how many frames-per-second your GPU will allow. Although it would seem that you'd want more frames-per-second for a better experience (which makes sense), it's actually a good idea to put a cap on it. The reason for this is that, without using VSync, your GPU will try to put out as many frames-per-second as it can which can lead to system instability and perhaps even your GPU overheating. By placing a limit on the FPS output from your GPU, you're securing system stability as well as ensuring that your Frame Rates are synchronized with your Refresh Rates, otherwise you'd have what's called Tearing, which is an unwanted screen glitch.

Anti-aliasing This is perhaps the one setting that will make the biggest difference in both performance as well as the appearance of the game. Rather than go into a very detailed explanation of what anti-aliasing is, which you can find by going to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing, I'd suggest you watch a youtube video which, rather than explain it with complex jargon, does a good job at showing you what it is. There are multiple different types of anti-aliasing, such as SAA (Spatial Anti-Aliasing), SSAA (Super-Sample Anti-Aliasing), TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing), among others. In a nutshell, anti-aliasing is what helps get rid of jagged edges in images. It's what helps some images look blurry, smooth & more realistic instead of jagged, square and artificial, which is what you want to avoid. If you can afford it (if your graphics card can render it), you definitely want to enable some sort of anti-aliasing as this will have a dramatic effect on how your game looks. However, you may also notice there's a performance hit if you use one of the fancier types of anti-aliasing. For the most part, you can get away with using FXAA (Fast ApproXimate Anti-Aliasing) if it's an option for you, but feel free to try out some of the other options. SSAA will probably give you the best appearance but it will also give you the greatest performance hit. Tesselation & Ambient Occlusion There are some settings that are either ON/OFF or that will give you a Low/Medium/High/Ultra-High option. If we're dealing with Tesselation or Ambient Occlusion, it may be optimal to leave these settings either turned off or put on a low setting so as to not sacrifice game performance. Both of these settings will make your game look better if enabled or on a high setting, but the performance hit will be noticeable unless you're using one of the top-notch high-end graphics cards. The recommended course of action to take here is to start with both of these settings turned off and then one at a time, turn them on but at a low setting, then run a benchmark and compare your result to the baseline result that you get with the default settings.

Other settings There are other settings that you can turn on, which will have little to no effect on the performance and will slightly help your game look better. Again, it's best to turn them on and set them to a low setting, then crank them up and run the benchmark again to see what result you get with an ultra-high settings. Some of these include Anisotropic Filtering, Depth of Field, Shadow Quality and Mesh Quality among others. Benchmark Although not all games give you the option of running a benchmark, more and more games are including that option as of late. If your game gives you the option to run a benchmark, then I recommend running the benchmark with the default settings you're given and then running it again after you've tweaked some of the settings previously mentioned. The result you'll be given at the end of the benchmark is the frames-per-second, so you want to make note of what result you get with default settings and compare that result to your post-tweak benchmark result. If there wasn't much of a negative difference, then your optimization was successful and you may still have room for improvement. If you noticed a significant decrease in the FPS score from the benchmark, then your optimization failed and you may want to revert back to default settings and tweak your options a bit more conservatively. I prefer to change all options aforementioned at once and run the benchmark again. If unsuccessful, then I try to change these one at a time while running a benchmark in between to find out what I can get away with and what I can't.