The Ashton Quake 4 mini-Tweakorama

A-man finds and shares a couple of tasty tweaks.

I played Quake 4 last for the first time last night. Like I usually do, I started by tweaking with in-game and driver settings for the maximum gorgeousness. I figure I don't want to delve into the fun of the game until it's running as fast and as beautiful as I can get (though usually, as you know, the two are mutually exclusive).

I don't know about you, but I found the 60fps internal limit a pain in the ass. I know '60 fps should be enough for everyone' but the game still visibly 'stutters' even with overclocked 7800GTX loving.

Forcing a refresh rate doesn't help, vsync or no, as the 60 fps limit is coded in. But I did find a way to bypass it.

If you bring down the console and set 'com_fixedtic 1' the limit is ignored and the game renders as fast as it can. The difference in smoothness is vast and it's *far* more enjoyable. Problem is, the ticrate seems to be used as the timer for game world speed, and so everything runs like it's on LSD.

No problem. I played around with more settings and found 'com_syncgameframe'. Set this to 1 and it'll render one real world event per frame. The game plays like normally, but on as high a framerate as your monitor can sustain.

It works beautifully, with one caveat -- even if the game renders more than the refresh rate value (with vsync off, for eg) the game world speed is consistent, as it should be. But if the rendering speeds drops too low (around sub 50 I found) the game world speed also slows (it's a bit like having bullet time on in FEAR) which is also, like the 60fps limit, ass. It's fine as long as you can ensure your machine never has a problem rendering less than this limit. Setting a reasonable res + nvidia driver settings makes this possible. A beefy system helps.

It sounds convoluted but it's just two settings at the console, and running with vsync on (I'm sorry, if you're a vsync off 'I love teh tearing' gamer, talk to the hand). Then just make sure your system can render a min 50 odd fps consistently, and the game is super-smooth, super-sexy, and considerably more fun. At least, for me.

The framerate tinkering was actually the second thing I did. The first was to install Junkguy's Parallax Mapping Engine 2.0 for Quake 4 mod (www.junkguy.com). It actually works, and works well. If you haven't installed it yet, do it.

Between this and faster frames, Quake 4 is all sweetness and light now.

* Note: to enable the console in Quake 4 edit your Quake 4 desktop shortcut and add +set com_allowconsole 1, then in game drop it down with the ~ key. To enable FPS viewing, add set com_showFPS "1" to your q4base/quake4config.cfg file. This is also where you can add set com_fixedtic 1 and set com_syncgameframe 1 to permanently enable the change.

Ash