Tribes Ascend Graphics Tweaks And Hardware Guide Posted Monday, 23rd April, 2012

If your computer or laptop has very low fps (frames per second) while playing Tribes Ascend then I’ve posted some low settings configurations and hardware upgrade advice you can try out below.

The Simple Stuff:
First things first you need to make sure your Tribes Ascend graphics settings are set to their lowest. Load up Tribes Ascend and go to the main menu, select video and change your resolution to as low as you want to go.  Then for graphics details make sure you select minimal.

To push out more fps, deselect V-sync and deselect frame rate smoothing, both of these are only of use when you’re pushing decent frame rates.

The More Technical Tweaks:
If the above Tribes Ascend tweaks still haven’t worked, it’s time to get a bit technical… when you install Tribes Ascend, a file is put into your My Documents folder called Tribes.ini, this file contains a big list of items you can edit in Tribes Ascend and the game will still run, for example inside this file you can disable light bloom or shadows.  This file also contains a lot of graphics settings which you can edit however you like, this includes removing or lowering the quality of various graphics within the game.

To edit this file, first open it up, it’s located here:
C:\Users\YOUR-USERNAME\Documents\My Games\Tribes Ascend\tribesgame\config\

Then, where it says DynamicLights equals TRUE, just change the word TRUE to FALSE.  This will give you a big fps improvement but will make the game look very dark, requiring you to set your monitor brighter.

If you don’t like this, another Tribes.ini tweak is to set StaticDecals and/or DynamicDecals to FALSE, for a slight improvement.

For a complete explanation of everything in the Tribes.ini file, head to this page.

Hardware:
If you’re still getting a game that’s not running smooth enough, it might be time to upgrade your hardware.  There’s 4 parts to your computer that can be upgraded to improve your Tribes Ascend experience, the Graphics Card, RAM, CPU and Hard Drive.

Graphics Card: Tribes Ascend is fairly graphics intensive so be sure to buy the best you can afford.  Though currently there are still some problems with Tribes Ascend and the ATI line of graphics cards, so buying a Geforce card might be preferable.

RAM: Tribes Ascend loves using over 3 Gigs of Ram, so if your operating system is 32bit, then your fps is going to be hindered by this (as 32bit operating systems can only allocate around 3.25 gigs of ram).  Try buying a  Windows 64bit operating system and over 4 gigs of ram for a much smoother experience.

CPU: Tribes Ascend was made using the Unreal Engine 3.0, which is known for being very processor (CPU) dependant.  To massively improve your Tribes Ascend experience try buying an Intel i5 or i7 processor.

Hard Drive: If you’ve tried upgrading your RAM, CPU and Graphics Card then the last update you can make is to purchase a faster hard drive.  I would especially advise buying a SSD (Solid State Drive) which helps you to load up the next map and open the menu system, much quicker.

If you can’t afford to make hardware upgrades, I’ve made a post about setting your graphics ultra low here.

p.s. To check what frame rate you are getting, load up the game and start playing a match.  Then click the Tilde button (`) and type in this command /stat fps this will display your average fps on the top right section of the screen.  60fps is very good, 40 is manageable except when there are lots of explosions and anything below 30fps means you probably need to start tweaking your graphics settings.

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