• Season 2 of Secret World Legends is now live with Dawn of the Morninglight!

    Please avoid posting any story spoilers on the forums. If you must share info or ask for help with a mission, be sure to use a [spoiler] tag!

[NVIDIA] How to make SWL run more smoothly!

Symmetric

Moooooooof
Staff member
Donator
Secret World Legends has a tendency to suffer from video lag ("hitching", not caused by network latency), even on very high-end machines. This is a result of several things, but mostly caused by the game engine's asset streaming technology being tied to the game's framerate. When assets load or unload, the game's framerate drops temporarily due to the increase in bandwidth.
At least, that's how I understand it. If a dev or someone who knows this stuff better than me has a more detailed explanation, please share it!

Enabling an FPS cap can significantly reduce the occurrence of this behavior by telling the game to not work any harder than it needs to in order to produce a smooth, stable frame rate. You can do this using third-party tools, or if you have an Nvidia GPU, you can change the graphics driver's settings to enforce an FPS limit.

This guide is intended for Nvidia users only. I have tested the profile on both the DX9 and DX11 clients and it provides similar performance improvements on both. I do not have access to an AMD GPU, so if anyone has any tweaks to offer on that side, please share them. :)

Reduce/Eliminate Hitching with Nvidia Profile Inspector
Nvidia Profile Inspector is a handy utility for manually adjusting individual settings for the default game profiles provided with the Nvidia drivers. Using this tool, you can tweak a few things that typically cause the game to hitch or otherwise offer poor performance.
  1. To start, download Nvidia Profile Inspector and extract it to wherever you like.
  2. Download SWLprofile.zip, and extract SWLprofile.v1.nip from the zip file.
  3. Open nvidiaProfileInspector.exe and let it load, then in the Profiles field in the top left corner, type "Secret World Legends". (If Secret World Legends isn't present in the list, update your drivers.)
  4. Click the Import User Profiles button, then locate the SWLprofile.v1.nip file.
    nvidia.png
  5. Once it looks like the above (note the blue-gray gears next to some settings - these are custom settings from the profile), click the Apply changes button.
  6. Launch SWL and modify your in-game settings. If your computer could handle everything at max in the past, then leave your settings alone. Don't test in populated areas like Agartha - even a Titan Xp will cry for mercy there. Go to a playfield and run around a bit. If you're still getting a poor framerate, try this:
    1. Start by reducing the Advanced GFX Settings and View Distance sliders under the Advanced tab in SWL's Video Options menu. 3 is considerably less demanding than 4 and it makes a negligible difference in quality.
    2. Turn off Motion Blur and and set Anti-alias Quality to FXAA.
    3. Disable FXAA altogether and use an injector like SweetFX to use SMAA instead.
  7. That's it! You should now have a much more stable framerate in SWL.
IMPORTANT: The custom profile settings may be overwritten when updating to newer Nvidia drivers or after a major Windows update. Be sure to open up Nvidia Profile Inspector again and see if the changes were reverted. If so, just re-import the profile again and apply changes.

Original profile based on: Performance stuttering on Nvidia cards - Video Card [SOLUTION] Performance Stuttering on NVIDIA Cards
 

Attachments

  • SWLprofile.zip
    671 bytes · Views: 800
Last edited:
Just a reminder that updates for your graphics drivers and/or Windows may reset your settings, as I discovered this morning when Windows decided to deliver me a new insider build. If your game starts running poorly all of a sudden, re-open Nvidia Profile Inspector and re-import the profile. :)
 
Symmetric, this is awesome! I have not had such a smooth playing experience in a long time! Thank you!!
 
oh sweet i'm definetly gonna try this on my pc. i dont think my fiancee has an nvidea card in her laptop do you know a third party software i can use for hers?
 
oh sweet i'm definetly gonna try this on my pc. i dont think my fiancee has an nvidea card in her laptop do you know a third party software i can use for hers?
I haven't used AMD cards in a while, but there should be a utility that allows you to set an FPS cap. Set it to around 62 and see if SWL performs any better.
 
Thank you for this detailed walkthrough. I am struggling with a short-freeze problem on my 1060.
I will test your config this evening and will update the thread with my results.

Ezraell
Nine Swords
 
I recently got around to applying the config and setting it to a 50 fps cap. The game defiantly runs smoother now, no where near as much stuttering :)
 
.Well, I've applied the files and, well, in the cemetery tutorial it hasn't made any difference yet. We'll see as I go along>
Yeah keep playing. The tutorial is a small instanced area. The performance difference is more noticeable in populated adventure zones and Agartha.
 
As in the game is crashing? Send along some screenshots or error messages so I can figure out what's going on.
 
Back
Top