How to improve fps, need some settings explained

[Bones]

So i have an old card (nvidia geforce 9600GT 512mb) and besides the vram being on the brick of death at ~500mb with only having 0ad open (i am on linux mint tara and cinnamon seems to take about 120mb of the vram), i get very low fps even below 10 with the default settings so i am trying to experiment with them and see how it goes so if someone has too an old card i would appreciate seeing his graphics settings

Here are some changes i made

-disabled shadows, seemed to have helped a lot with fps

-from water i only kept water depth and water refraction (disabling reflections seems to have helped a lot), disabling water entirely is eye cancer and i didn't notice a considerable boost on fps to make it worth it

And that's pretty much it, now from top to bottom i don't know what these settings do:

-prefer gsl and fog, they were enabled, i left them so

-post processing was disabled, i don't know what it does, would it help with fps if i enabled it?

-shader effects, less effects for higher fps? what would be the cost on the looks of the game?

-smooth LOS, should it be on or off to help with fps?

-show sky, i don't know what the point of this is, camera is top down, how can the developers see the sky?

-vsync is off, would it help fps if it was on?

-the last 2 throttling setting? how do they work? it says putting it on max disables it and that if it is on it helps with the CPU, so why not have it at min? how do these 2 settings reflect on fps?

Picture of my current graphics settings------>

thanks

Edited July 23, 2018 by Bones

[Silier]

fps throttling means the maximum number of frames drawen per second. Some cpus are so fast they can do 120 frames per second but you could be fine with 60 or even 30 since game looks good and smooth ( I cannot tell you the count of frames for you,  you need to a bit experiment here and find what is best for your computer) . The thing is that if you have lags, the throtling fps to lower number can save cpu time and resources for more important computation ( instead recomputing scene, shadows and so on)   e. g. path finding.

You have it on minimum only for menu, there you do not need it higher. 

 

Smooth LOS I would leave it to off if you need to increase performance. 

 

Postprocesing brings new work to be done for cpu and gpu. I would leave it disabled.

 

And you can try disable fog. 

 

Disabling unit silhouetles could help with performance in later game with a lot of units. But you will not see units behind buildings

 

Normally you would not see sky, since you do not zoom out really very far so you can disable this one I think. 

Edited July 24, 2018 by Angen

[Guest]

You could also try disabling glsl for an even smoother gameplay. (I do not know by how much though)

[niektb]

6 hours ago, Angen said:

[...]

Normally you would not see sky, since you do not zoom out really very far so you can disable this one I think. 

To improve fps, you can safely disable the sky. You can see this with reflections in water and when using low camera angles (which can happen with cinematics for example)