Hi Fortkentdad
Nice post on your build, and good to see your logic in making decisions. I would not have suggested an iGPU set-up; despite what they say, these are more suitable for notebooks than desktops due to their power/performance ratio, their gaming performance is not comparable to a decent mid-range graphics card. The good overclock helps though, and your efforts at optimising the system seems to have worked
The graphics settings in CloD are confusing due to the choice of names used, as they don’t always affect what they seem to imply. Two things about your settings I would experiment further with are:
• Model Detail: this setting works in conjunction with the ‘Texture quality’ setting – I have found that you will only get high Model Detail if the texture setting is on ‘Original’. If set to below this, the model detail is reduced automatically, but still costs FPS. Try setting this to ‘Medium’ and see how much the frame rate improves, and if you can see any reduction in quality.
• Buildings Amount: this setting does not affect the number of buildings that are rendered, but how many of those rendered are textured. If you set this very low you will see that the outer group of buildings that are rendered will appear as brown boxes, and will have textures closer to the ‘camera’. This is very easily noticeable over London, and you can change this setting ‘on the fly’ to see its influence.
You may also want to try using an ‘after-market’ routine for AA – the in-game AA is not very good and costs fps. I use Buchon’s
SMAA that is solely for AA and works very well with no FPS hit. You can also try SweetFX if you want to fiddle with other graphics effects, but read this
post and see what others have to say.