Borderlands 2 - graphics settings on my setup

[computernerdforlife]

Good evening,

I've been losing my life to Borderlands 2 since its release. I have a question about the graphics settings according to my setup. I have everything maxed out in the settings, with 60fps max selected. Here's my rig(it should be in my profile too):

- Intel i2500k at 4001Ghz turbo
- Gigabyte z68a-d3-b3
- 4Gigs of RAM
- 650W PSU, non-sli
- nvidia GTX660Ti MSI PE
- flash drive...
- 1920x1080 Asus monitor
- Cooler master full tower, great airflow with too many fans

The issue I have is during heavy combat, fps drops are normal and that makes sense. Sometimes my rig is bottoming out at like 30fps during chaos. My questions is: is it naive for me to expect more and if so, what settings do I drop slightly to give a smoother 45-60fps. SLI? Thank you for your input.

 

[HEXiT]

im not sure what i get but i will check andf get back to you... it seems to be playing pretty smooth on unlimited with vsnc off i dont see any tearing.

 

[casualcolors]

I'm playing the game on its highest available settings with a 2500k@4.8 and a gtx 570 overclocked a fair bit, but I never even get remotely close to dipping below 60 fps. I'm almost never below 90 to be honest. For 1080 I think you're going to be fine man.

 

[HEXiT]

had a good 20 mins or so playing and ran a fraps bench for the whole session. max avaiable settings 16x anno x4 fsaa fxaa hbao all on. minimum 45 max 90+ average 63. so my guess is its lack of maturity on your drivers... see if theres a new set available if not you will have to wait a couple of weeks and hopefully all will be sorted.
you should be getting nearly a 1/3 more fps than me on the same settings so yeah you should be pretty much minimum of 60.

 

[specterk]

My questions is: is it naive for me to expect more and if so, what settings do I drop slightly to give a smoother 45-60fps. SLI? Thank you for your input.

Your problem is probably VSync - turn that and triple buffering off. If, after doing so, you're having major problems with tearing, update your Nvidia drivers and try adaptive VSync. It's not perfect yet, but it's miles better than standard.

 

[computernerdforlife]

Thank you for your responses - there's a lot of good feedback here. I should have noted that i'm using Windows 8 CP. I'll test with beta and non-beta drivers today after I do a full format of WIN8. Thanks again!

 

[computernerdforlife]

Best answer selected by computernerdforlife.

 

[ITBrad]

I am having some issues as well and don't have any friends playing it yet to benchmark against. I am running...

AMD FX 4100 black edition 3.6GHz 4core
ASUS GTX 560 factory overclocked to 850MHz (with latest drivers as of BL2 launch day)
8GB corsair vengeance DDR3

I run my rig to my 55" HDTV via HDMI
I'm currently trying to run this game at 1920x1080 with medium textures and low detail. FPS is set to "smoothed 32-62", PhysX is set to low, Aniso is at 16x, everything else is OFF. Vsync is on, i will try that next but usually when running to my HDTV i must run vsync with 60hz refresh to avoid bad tearing.

So my issue is bad choppiness and slow down when in big areas, big fights, or when moving quickly in a vehicle. Its almost unplayable. Horrible FPS drops. Yet when exploring a friendly town with no combat it runs super smooth and pretty. Im thinking my rig should be able to handle this game much better than it is.

So my question is... Is my machine not behaving properly, or do I need to go out and grab a 600 series card in order to play this game and have it pretty. If the answer is the former, any suggestions on where to start looking for the problem?

EDIT: forgot to add that GTX 560 is 1GB video memory, and not 512MB which is the minimum for BL2

 

[HEXiT]

if anything you want to dump the cpu...but thats by the by. you want to set the frame limiter to unlimited. its likley that its causing the issue. your tv is probably partly to blame if it has only 2 frequencies. it may be swapping between 30 and 60 hz forcing the fps to be either 1 or the other so your getting massive dropps in fps all over the shop when the action picks up and the fps drops below 60.
turning off vsnc and the frame limiter may solve this problem completley. also with that card you should be able to max the game out and get 40-80 fps no problem.

 

[ITBrad]

if anything you want to dump the cpu...but thats by the by. you want to set the frame limiter to unlimited. its likley that its causing the issue. your tv is probably partly to blame if it has only 2 frequencies. it may be swapping between 30 and 60 hz forcing the fps to be either 1 or the other so your getting massive dropps in fps all over the shop when the action picks up and the fps drops below 60.
turning off vsnc and the frame limiter may solve this problem completley. also with that card you should be able to max the game out and get 40-80 fps no problem.

Thanks Hex. It's good to hear someone else's input. So Vsync off and unlimited FPS. I'll try that next.

So from what you said, I take it you think my CPU is my next bottleneck? I'm also looking into an SSD and some more RAM. Right now I'm using a standard 2TB HDD along with my 8GB RAM. It takes 1.5 - 2 minutes between clicking play and the game actually loading up. I was thinking maybe a possible problem was that I might be running low on free RAM during more stressful parts of the game and having to load from storage faster than my HDD can keep up. Is that a possibility, or would that be a VRAM issue? I'm not running anything in the background other than my OS (Win7), AVG widget, and hardware support stuff like KB and mouse software. Interested to know what you think on that.

Hopefully the FPS change will fix it though. I'll find out when I get home tonight and let you know. Again, thx for the help

 

[ITBrad]

Well... that didnt work. Vsync off causes tearing and no noticeable change in performance. Unlimited FPS didnt seem to have any noticable effect either. My buddy finally got the game. Same rig as me with the exception of his GPU being a 570 over my 560. He's running it maxed out just fine. So like you said, mine should too. I'm now thinking this may be a Steam related problem. Most of my steam games run fine, but the only games I ever have issues with are from Steam. I had a very similar problem with Portal 2 but never resolved it. Totally forgot about it until last night. Any merit to that? I'm going to go search the forums some more. Hopefully I will find an answer. If anyone reads this and it rings any bells I would love a reply. This is day 3 for me of spening time trying to figure this out :\

 

[Sojourn_uk]

Oh and 8gb or ram is plenty...

 

[Sojourn_uk]

Well... that didnt work. Vsync off causes tearing and no noticeable change in performance. Unlimited FPS didnt seem to have any noticable effect either. My buddy finally got the game. Same rig as me with the exception of his GPU being a 570 over my 560. He's running it maxed out just fine. So like you said, mine should too. I'm now thinking this may be a Steam related problem. Most of my steam games run fine, but the only games I ever have issues with are from Steam. I had a very similar problem with Portal 2 but never resolved it. Totally forgot about it until last night. Any merit to that? I'm going to go search the forums some more. Hopefully I will find an answer. If anyone reads this and it rings any bells I would love a reply. This is day 3 for me of spening time trying to figure this out :\

1.5-2mins to start is very slow, have you got the mainboard drivers installed correctly, sounds like your HDD is the bottleneck. Check your BIOS and check your SATA config is correct...

 

[computernerdforlife]

For me, I formatted my main desktop and updated nvidia drivers. In the description for the drivers, there's a whole section for improving Borderlands 2 performance. It worked for me! Now I drop to like 55fps in worse case scenarios with 60fps max staying still the whole time. I'm still thankful for the advice that was given to me. Cheers guy!

 

[unlimited4]

Good evening,

I've been losing my life to Borderlands 2 since its release. I have a question about the graphics settings according to my setup. I have everything maxed out in the settings, with 60fps max selected. Here's my rig(it should be in my profile too):

- Intel i2500k at 4001Ghz turbo
- Gigabyte z68a-d3-b3
- 4Gigs of RAM
- 650W PSU, non-sli
- nvidia GTX660Ti MSI PE
- flash drive...
- 1920x1080 Asus monitor
- Cooler master full tower, great airflow with too many fans

The issue I have is during heavy combat, fps drops are normal and that makes sense. Sometimes my rig is bottoming out at like 30fps during chaos. My questions is: is it naive for me to expect more and if so, what settings do I drop slightly to give a smoother 45-60fps. SLI? Thank you for your input.

i ahve a similar system to you, i have core i5-2500kclocked at 4.5ghz, and an asus 660ti

your problem is that in the nvidia control panel physx is being handled by the cpu, go to the nvidia control panel and change the physx settings so the gpu handles physx, now you should be able to set all graphics settings to maximum set fps to unlimited and set vsync on no problem... hope this helps