Improving the graphical quality of the game

[ubermachtig]

Hello everyone,

I've been watching these forums for quite a while now. Back in 2001 I purchased Mafia: City of Lost Heaven the day it came out. When I was notified about a succesor, I re-purchased Mafia: City of Lost Heaven due a broken disk, and enjoyed it just as much as I did in the old days.

9 years later (God, time flies when you think about it), The succesor is almost there. Back in the days we couldn't have dreamed of graphics and details which we have today, but i'm glad that time has arrived, therefore enabling developers to represent the mid-20th century era more accurate than ever before.

Though I can write another 20 pages about how much I liked the original, and how renewing it was back in those days, the main purpose of this thread is to give a few advices on graphical quality in the game itself.

Basically we can point at 3 parts of the computer that determine the quality of the graphics:

• The monitor
• The Graphic card
• The ingame menu

As I'm sure everyone figured out how to adjust the ingame graphics, I will limit myself to the graphic card settings. These settings are very important for the visual quality of the game. Some people think the graphical quality is only determined by the ingame menu, but the Graphic card's menu is a very important factor as well. Therefore, you can enable a few options which will make the ingame graphics substantially better.

Personally I'm using a Nvidia card, but I am aware that ATI also has a menu in which settings can be adjusted in a sort of similar way. I will stick with Nvidia in this short guide:

1: Right click on the desktop
2: Open Nvidia Control panel (should be called something like that)
3: Under 3D settings in the left sidebar, select "Manual 3D setting control" (or something similar)
4: Now, on the primary view, a screen will open containing plenty of options. After a few tests, these settings delivered the absolute best graphical quality possible, combined with little to low drop in FPS:

Maximum pre-rendered frames: 6
Ambient Occlusion: Quality
Texture filtering - Quality: High Quality (A very important step, substantially improves graphical quality

Alternatively, you can force on Vertical synchronisation, Thread optimization, Anti-Aliassing and various other things. Experiment to your liking to determine the best settings on your computer.

Although Mafia 2 is a beautiful game, these simple steps make the graphics even better without a major loss of performance.

Enjoy,

ubermachtig

[Laphin]

I might be a tard but.... why not just do all of these things in the in-game Graphics menu?? o.O

[ubermachtig]

Because, like I wrote, the graphical quality is also depending on the settings of your videocard. To make it easy:

You can put the graphics ingame as high as possible, but as long as you didn't tell the videocard that it should deliver top quality instead of performance, the improvements are only limited.

As comparision, You can put the pedal of your car all the way down, but if the engine is badly optimized, your speed remains limited. Instead, if you finetune the engine, your car will go much faster.

The control panel also gives you various options you don't have ingame. You can force Anti-Aliassing on higher levels, you can set the ambient occlusion to off, Quality and performance. For instance, If you've put Ambient Occlusion to "on" ingame, it doesn't work unless you also selected this setting in the Nvidia control panel. The menu's depend on eachother, yet the Nvidia Control panel is more advanced and could force even better graphical quality.

For example the grass, when you put the Texture quality on High Quality, the grass will appear which some people seem to be looking for.

I hope this explained the control panel a bit, tell me if you have any further questions and I'll try to help.