Edit: Hey all I am working on a guide for increasing FPS on every OS (well windows anyway) with any video card. Give me some time to complete it. I will be combining my method for xp with sayids guide for vista, and my own guide for win7 as well as homewreckers suggestion for ATI cards. Also I will be explaining how FPS is calculated in game. This is a work in progress, I should have it finished by this weekend. Look forward to the new comprehensive guide.

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Ever wonder why alot of people have about 250-300 fps even with newer video cards, like the Nvidia 8800GT series. Ive heard alot of people say in global that newer cards dont perform well with HB when that honestly just isn't the case. There is a very simple fix that will give you a major fps boost with these kind of cards. As an example, I have an XFX 8600GT card. Now before I did the fix i got an avg of 70-80 fps, which is not bad, certainly better then the 20-30 I was used to playing with on my old computer. After I did the fix i get an avg of 250-300 fps. A lot of people are going to hate me for this because not everyone knows how to do it, and those of us that do reap the benefits. So heres how you do it:

1.) Go to your desktop and right click, then select properties.

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2.) When the menu pops up select the tab that says settings.

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3.) When in the settings tab click Advanced

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4.) That will bring up this screen, now click troubleshoot.

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5.) Now set your hardware acceleration down to none and hit apply

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If it prompts you to restart, then do so.

Now remember this fix will not increase everyones fps, it will only work with newer cards as far as I know. But because its so easy to do you might as well try it out to see if it works for you. Also when your finished playing HB and want to play other games then simply repeat the process but turn your hardware acceleration back to whatever it was before or to full. Like I said this simple fix just helps increase FPS in Helbreath as far as I know and I haven't tested it with any other older game. I'm not sure all the vid cards this will work with, but if you have one from the past few years it should work fine. Test it out for yourself and see if it helps you, if it doesnt then sorry I wasted 2 minutes of your time.

Hope that helps some of you out there.

thank you to whoever moved this, i wasnt really sure where to put it before and i somehow overlooked the tech lounge

i had a problem with the hardware accell.... im usin a geoforce 8700 and the driver was causing my lappy to crash, freeze, and get blu screen of death

i found the 164.2 driver and turn hardware accell off and its been running smoothly ever since

The best is to find the best forceware for ur graphics card.

The latest Forceware doesnt always mean better

yea making sure you have a good driver for your card is always a good idea. and like spacemunk said the newest driver isnt always the best, its best to find the most stable rather then the brand new.

heres another tip, keep emblems turned off. that definitely helps me keep a constant fps rate, with it on i sometimes get a drop in frame rate depending on which map im on.

Vista doesn't have this setting?

np it seemed more appropriate here in the tech lounge then in gm help

Hmm honestly I dont know if vista does or not. I only had vista on my computer once and it didnt really perform as well as i had hoped so I took it off. Im using windows xp dark edition, so thats why my theme looks like vista. I probably should have mentioned that earlier.

I have vista. I am happy with it's performance but gaming is shitty. You can not change anything with the graphics card, it's retarded.

Personally i feel that if your going to use vista and your a gamer, you might as well dual boot with XP. This way if a game doesn't work to well with vista, which most older games really wont, you could use XP instead and use Vista solely for newer games and everything else you use the comp for. I plan on doing a XP/Vista dual boot soon when I get a bigger hard drive (currently i only have an 80 gig and a 20 gig). But vista just gave me so many problems with games last time it was installed i just said screw it, Id only use it if i was dual booting both OS's.

Dual booting always the best.

As far as gaming goes Windows XP out performs Vista anyday.

*bump* this was starting to get lost down the page. Can someone re-sticky this please. Its still very helpful to people.

Thanks alot Dragonis it went fps62 to 240+ on my shitty laptop now i can play everywhere thanks again dude and boosted 300 to 350+ on other pc's nice solution thanks

Thanks a lot !!
from 100 to 250 fps

I believe Vista supports hardware acceleration, but certain graphics cards don't? Or maybe it's just vista has it disabled.
I tried to change mine but the button is grayed out, but I thought it was just my crappy ATI Radeon HD 2400XT card.
Anyway, if I was to consider dual booting with XP, how would I go about that? I'm not so keen to setting up operating systems on my comps :<. I realize I could prolly just google it, but is the XP OS free download somewhere? orr do I have to purchase it too? -sob-

The best way to get ~100 FPS boost is to take off vertical sync.

Hmm I have a very OLD PC and like 2 know can i increase my fps from 35 higher?
My PC is - Athlon 750Mhz Video GeForce 4200Ti SDRAM 512.
Can I increase FPS in HB on *this* PC ?

Hello all, look who's back! Anyways, to just randomly comment on this quote of mine, I'm now using vista ultimate x64 with no XP dual boot. Haha looks like I cant even take my own advice. But its more because I haven't had a problem with vista this time around, and I haven't been playing HB again till just recently. Also I have much more HDD space now, well over 2TBs to be exact so all I really have to do is install XP on one of my different HDDs that I'm currently not using (For instance my 80GB that I mentioned above.) So I can play HB (As well as Diablo II) with well over 400+ FPS again.

Anyways I got off track, back to what I originally wanted to say.



Vista does support hardware acceleration, and certain graphics cards do disable it in vista for some reason. I know this because I have since upgraded my 8600GT to a GTX260 (and will soon be getting a GTX 285 with my eVGA step up) and It will not allow me to mess with the acceleration settings. I'm currently working on a way around this little dilemma so I don't have to actually re-install XP on my old 80GB HDD because I'm that lazy, and quite frankly I'm actually pretty pleased with vista this time around (Probably because my computer has gotten a couple upgrades since last time I tried it out).

Sooo long story short expect to see a new guide how to do this in Vista, with a much beefier card like mine, whenever I actually get around to cracking the problem.

Cheers!

hmm sorry but need move the place selected to second " left to right "
[( ) --- (here) --- ( ) --- ( ) --- ( ) ---]

thanks idiot, you cost me ALOTTA EK ...

well done telling noobs this trick ****

@ the 2 ppl above. Your welcome, you guys obviously suck at playing if your worried about n00bs having the same framerate as you

Well there goes my guide I dont think I had the pics saved anywhere else.

lol, i love it when they start flaming . its not about fps its about skill i got full godly with 32 fps on constant and im using vista cause thats the highest it will go to.

btw may i add a suggestion for Vista users.

You can turn your fps to a high standard of 220-300 by simply disbaling your graphics card (this might not work for many people).

1) go to Control panel

2) Search for Device Manager

3) Find Adapter and find your graphics card

4) click the driver tab

5) Disable Driver and restart your comp.

If this helped congratulations if it didnt well i dont know any other methods.
goodluck.

How on earth would disabling your graphics card fix the issue at hand... wheres your proof on how that works. Disabling it would mean you wouldnt even have a picture to look at on your monitor,e because its functionality is DISABLED. Was this a troll attempt? And drag, any luck with the disabling of hardware acceleration in vista?