Advanced Visual Tweakage
If you're feeling intrepid, you can perform a slight hack and get into the advanced options area. This is the same menu as what UT has to offer, however the guys over at Ion Storm Austin have disabled it by default. In order to gain access to it, you'll need to open up your 'User.ini' which can be found under the system folder of your Deus Ex directory. Once open, find the line that says 't='. Add the word 'talk' after the equals so it looks like this 't=talk', and add another line under that for the capital variant (T='talk'). Now, once you've gotten a game of Deus Ex going, you can hit the 't' key and a dialog will be opened in the lower left hand corner of the HUD. Erase whatever it says there, it said 'Say' for us, and type the word 'preferences'. Now the game will go into a windowed mode and the advanced options box will come up.
Advanced Settings Menu
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First up, browse your way to the 'Game Engine Settings\CacheMegSize' option. This defaults to a value of '0', though we recommend changing this to a higher value (but no higher than '8'). The default for UT is '4', though Ion Storm Austin chose a default of '0' for Deus Ex. As we said, we didn't see any differences in performance when going higher than 8 (hell, we cranked it up all the way to 64) so we recommend staying within the 4-8 range.
Next, browse on down to the 'Display' section. Here you can set a ton of options on or off, such as curved surfaces, decals, and dynamic lights - as well as changing other values you set from within the basic video preferences menu we discussed earlier. Of the items we didn't discuss before, Curved Surfaces is probably the most important. Leave this off for performance, turn it on for improved visual quality - but be prepared for a healthy framerate hit.
Display Settings
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After toying in that menu, you'll want to drop down to the specific 'Rendering' option, which allows you to configure your particular rendering type, such as OpenGL, Direct3D, or Glide. These three different modes each have some different tweaks not available in the others, but we'll go ahead and cover the options that all three share in common first.
Coronas Off |
Coronas On |
Coronas are the visual effect shown when you look at specific lights within the levels of UT (besides being a tasty Mexican beer), which look similar to when you look into direct sunlight. These look nice, but are obvious eye-candy, and can be turned off to increase performance or left on to ensure things look pretty. High Detail Actors should be left on for almost any configuration, unless you're really trying to squeeze out higher frame rates.
Shiny Surfaces is another nifty eye-candy feature that can be turned off for improved performance if so desired. This feature basically redraws part of a given scene onto certain surfaces, such as a floor. This can get fairly intensive to render with increased scene complexity, which is why those with low system specifications will want to turn this off.
Shiny Surfaces Off |
Shiny Surfaces On |
Volumetric lighting is another key feature in making Deus Ex look as amazingly beautiful as it does, creating those eerie glows of color in dark areas. We recommend leaving this on in most cases, as the performance hit isn't too high and the effect is nice enough that you'll want it on in most cases. Obviously, if you are maximizing for performance, turn this off.
Next: Rendering Modes and Conclusion...
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