Graphics and Sins of a Solar Empire

Draginol

Join Date 03/2001

+137

Graphics and Sins of a Solar Empire

From viewing the forums around the net, one thing I've noticed is that people assume the default graphics settings are the only settings there are.

So some people don't realize just how good the graphics in the game are. To change the graphics, players need to go into "EFFECTS".

Here are screenshots of not even the highest settings running at the lowest resolution.

There's some bug with my nVidia driver that the game will freeze if I set the bump mapping to highest. nVidia says they're looking into it. So the game can actually look better than this (just not on my laptop right now until the new driver update). So if you do run into a problem with your nVidia card, just tweak down the settings. We'll post when nVidia has an update. But it looks gorgeous either way.

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Im running dual liquid cooled 8800 GTX overclocked to 675, 1075 shader clocks. I play the game at 2560x1600 resolution, with all details maxed and effects turned on. The planets need some graphical improvement.

Are those shader clock figures right? I have my gts 640 overclocked to 1600 on the shaders.

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Once I get my God Box resurrected I will take some 5MP images shots and do some video cap as well. The game is really fluid with two GTX ultras on ultra high res with ultra high graphics.

use the word ultra one more time and I will stab you

Ahh.. Yeah you are right it reads kind of arrogant and has a snobbery feel to it - sorry about that. It is what I get for making all these 2AM-5AM posts. Fingers move but brain does not process things completely with regards to greater context.

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I jacked up my system awhile back trying to do stuff from an article from WGM cuz graphics were bleeding thru once in awhile when i would boot up..said to use driver sweeper and do all this stuff...i should never have messed with it.

Every time i start windows(vista ultimate 32bit) 5 windows error messages pop-up when i get in, saying something like "could not find/run xxxxxx.dll"

Every so often, windows crashes, i reboot and it recovers, and determines it have something to do with my nvidia drivers..ive uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers several times already...

I'm running AMD 64 x2 dual core 4400+
2gigs ram...running SLI 2 nvidia 7800gt 256Mb each...169.25 drivers..20" lcd

Seems like some peeps here who have older/less powerful systems can run the game maxed out, way better than i can. My system isnt cutting edge but should be able to run this game decently i think.

Cant run the game with everything maxed out..slows down..200 ships-frame rate is crap...Cant even run 4x anti aliasing[-btw, is the game AA settings: non/non-maskable/2 samples/4 samples...it this the order of quality from least to best?]

This was my older bros old system he gave me when he upgraded...my trouble shooting skills not too great...he says for me to give him my system and he troubleshoot it-this would mean not having my pc for a few weeks tho!

Any suggestions anyone?

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There's some bug with my nVidia driver that the game will freeze if I set the bump mapping to highest. nVidia says they're looking into it.

I have no problem with bunp mapping (and all other options) at highest on an nVidia 8800GTX. I'm currently using the latest drivers released last month, but the same was true with the previous drivers.

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Speaking of graphics, I've got a bit of a question. Is there any way I can get my stars to look like the one in this screenshot?

https://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/images/screenshots/Sins_Beta4_1920_9.jpg

My stars just have kind of a flat texture without that cool looking refraction shader or whatever it is.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Speaking of graphics, I've got a bit of a question. Is there any way I can get my stars to look like the one in this screenshot?

What video card do you have? Most likely you've got an older one without appropriate pixel shader support.

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It's an 8800GTS, and I was wrong, turning the settings up did give me that effect. It just seems to take a few minutes for the effect to really get going, so I didn't notice it before because I was fiddling with my settings and then spending all of maybe 15 seconds in a game to see if it worked.

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Running the game on an Apple MacBook Pro with a dual-boot of Windows Vista Home Premium. It's a 2.4Ghz Core Duo with 4GB DDR2 and a GeForce 8600GTM 256MB. Runs on full settings at 1440x900 with no lag whatsoever. KUDOS.

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So, are there any "hidden" higher settings, that one might enable by text file editing or something, as one can do with Far Cry? Like "ultra high" settings.

Running a Dell Vostro 1500, Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, resolution of 1680 x 1050, 2 GB RAM (667 MHz), 120 GB HD (5400 RPM), and an nVidia 8600M GT (256 MB DDR2 RAM). Not even close to spectacular specifications, but I can run SoaSE on the highest settings without getting lag. And, I want more.

It can run CoD4 (demo anyways) all highest settings except one thing (again, the demo, perhaps patches made it better for main game), and Crysis on a mix of medium and low settings (two or three highs/very highs, more if I reduce resolution). Kinda' surprising, given the specifications.

- PR-0927

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A 8600GT can run on max setting?

Is it really true?

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A 8600GT can run on max setting?Is it really true?

Probably, but you may be limited in regards to the possible resolution or anti-alias setting. This is based off the fact the card is approximately half as powerful as my card in comparison.

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LOL, yes, and the mobile variant is what I was talking about (8600M GT). I'm amazed and grateful that Stardock could create such a game that looks SUPERB, yet runs on less-powerful hardware.

My resolution is set to 1680 x 1050, my full resolution. Anti-aliasing is set to 2x (never tried above that, perhaps it can do 4x).

- PR-0927

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Just a point of order, I think it's more accurate to say that Ironclad is to be commended for the game both looking great and running on older hardware.

Personally, I run it on a Radeon x850 XT Platinum and it looks and performs fantastic no matter what I throw at it on the highest settings. Even the big several-hundred-ship mega-battles are silky.

And the modding, the modding! It's actually one of the easier games to get ships working in, despite the entity files being somewhat complicated and murky. There's a few places I'd like to see changes to the modability made, but they're relatively minor and overall, the pipeline is well-though-out (and the art pipeline is nicely documented, which is rare).

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I think I figured out why my system has been having so many speed problems with this game. I've run it at 1024x768 or 1920x1200 in a window, even at other resolutions while full screen. I'm running an Intel Core2Quad Q6600 @ 3.0GHz and two HD4850s in Crossfire with 6GB of memory. Since the game played fine while paused and also worked very well for the first 10-20 minutes or so, I started to wonder what the real cause was.

I ended up speeding up the game and letting it play itself for a while just because I was losing and discovered that it got incredibly choppy when I did that. My assumption is that the performance issues are related tome always having all game options on Fast such as income, build, ship speed, research, and culture speed. I would hope those wouldn't change anything, but maybe they do. Anyone know more about this?

I've also seen that it's been recording games of mine. That's also probably slowing it down because those depend on writes to the drive, and probably not the same drive the game's installed on since it saves things in either %ProgramData% or %AppData%, both on my OS drive. It would be nice to tell all games I play "put save files in the drive I installed you in because I installed you in there for a reason, one of them might be data redundancy.

To clairify, my issue is taht the game runs choppy and consistently choppy. There are few times where it'll up the framerate or the animation rate and feel really smooth like it does in the menus before I start a match. Another thing I noticed was that I left AA at 2x. I don't believe that activates when in Windowed mode, but I turned it off anyway just to be sure. Been a while since i've played so I don't know if it affected anything or not.

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