Two Worlds II PC Performance & Tweaks

TopWare Interactive released a few days ago the much anticipated sequel of Two Worlds. In case you are wondering, Two Worlds II was released only in a few European countries, like Germany and will be released in early 2011 in UK and USA. Before you jump off your roof, know this. If it isn't released yet in your country, you can still buy it from GamersGate or Amazon. There there. Happy now? 

Reality Pump, the developers behind Two Worlds II, decided to address a lot of issues that plagued the first game. And frankly, they did. Two Worlds II is way better than its predecessor, with a deep leveling up system. Gameplay wise, it is quite good, though it could have been even better. There are also some technical issues that we will discuss later. Controls are sluggish, the combat system is awful and you'll have to grind a lot. And when we say a lot we mean... A LOT. 


Two Wolrds II uses the Grace Engine, an in-house engine. This engine supports all the funky "effects" you'd expect, such as Parallax Occlusion Mapping, specular maps, godrays, soft shadows, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Depth Of Field, Motion Blur and Deferred Rendering. Even though the characters have a lot of polygons, their overall design is not as good as we'd hoped to. The game takes advantage of the PhysX and can be accelerated via the GPU if you have an Nvidia card. If you don't, there is no reason to worry or get upset as you will enjoy the same effects via the PhysX CPU path. Physics are exceptional and all of the plants bent while passing through them. And all those physics calculations didn't impact negatively our framerate like all the other GPU PhysX games, such as Darkest Of Days, Cryostasis and Dark Void. The game runs in DX9 and doesn't support DX10 or DX11. There might be a patch for a DX11 path, but it's still unknown if and when it will be released.

SLI Mode at indoor environments. Notice the amazing scaling? Too bad it's not as good at the outdoor environments

To test the game, we used a Q9650 @ 4.2Ghz with 4GB DDR2 and a GTX295. Before jumping to early conclusions, we have to say that Nvidia doesn't have any SLI profile for this game yet. We tried to enable it by forcing AFR2 and the following SLI compatibility bit ( 0x00400001 ), but both solutions weren't as good as we'd hoped to. While there is 96% GPU usage at the indoor environments, it radically falls to 50-60% at the outdoor environments. To make things worse, there is a penalty hit (5-8fps) when you're moving your character. We strongly suggest running the game in Single GPU, as there aren't any issues in this mode. You can also force AA if you have an Nvidia card, as by default the game uses a blur technique to simulate it. All you have to do is use the Nvidia Inspector and set the AA compatibility bit to 0x000012C4.


Performance wise, this game is GPU bound. Especially if you enable the GPU PhysX effects. As we can see, our quad-core was barely used. Due to the SLI issues we've encountered, we were not able to run Two Worlds II at 1920x1440 with maxed details and have constant 60fps. To get the 'holy grail' of the 60fps, we had to lower our resolution to 1600x1200. Yes, there were some jaggies here and there, but it's worth it. We've also disabled POM, as AF doesn't work with when it is enabled. It's the same compatibility issue we faced with Arcania: Gothic 4 and Crysis, though Xzero released for Crysis a mod that supported both of them. You can see bellow a comparison shot. On the left we have POM enabled and on the right it is disabled. To disable it, you'll have to open the console (`) and type "engine.paralaxonterrain 0".




POM ON



POM OFF

 
Lastly, here some major tweaks that you can use with Two Worlds II. To use them, create a folder named 'parameters' in your Main game folder, create a file named 'autoexec2.con' and paste them in there (or edit them and use whatever value you want):

Engine.DstFarPlane 1200 (better draw distance for the objects)
Engine.GrassUserDistance 3 (better draw distance for the grass)
Engine.MBlurIntensity 0 (reduces the intensity of motion blur)
Engine.Mblurscale 0 (reduces the motion blur)
Engine.EdgeAABlend 0.2 (use a value from 0 to 1)
Engine.BloomMultiplier 0.5 (bloom intensity, use a value from 0 to 1)
Engine.fov 65 (changes the field of view)
Engine.MaxAnisotrophy 16
Engine.UseDOF 0 (removes the DoF)
Engine.DOFScaleFct 0 (reduces the DoF)

There are also some other commands for SSAO, HDR, Bloom, the camera views, the sun and the wind. You can view them here. And as usual, here are some screenshots. Enjoy!