Mass-effect – How big is the PC demo

OK, I decided not to be lazy and to actually put some effort in myself, and I think it was worth it. Here is the "after" screenshot of the scene from the question. Not quite the right angle and different time of day, but you should be able to get the point.

Notice that the grass goes much further, but also that rocks appears in the far distance and the distant trees that were visible are now of much higher quality. There's even a shrine thing on the left that I couldn't see before. All this with a drop of only ~10FPS to ~40FPS. Very nice.

Here's another shot I took, just to reinforce that this works, before/after the various distance tweaks. Again note the distant trees up the river and through the clearing, but also the bridge up the river and better house on the right:

First, I set the game to it's default Ultra settings. So all the tweaks I make here are based off of that settings group.

In My Documents/My Games/Skyrim there are two files called SkyrimPrefs.ini and Skyrim.ini that we will be tweaking. Back them up before changing anything, or in the worst case delete them if you break them and Skyrim should regenerate new ones.

The most important change: Unlocking the grid

You need to change how many grid cells around the player should be loaded by the game - apparently if a grid cell isn't loaded nothing will make the stuff in that cell render in best quality, so all you'll get are low-quality "big" items like trees/houses/etc and the landscape, at best.

So, in the Skyrim.ini I have changed the following:

uGridsToLoad=5            →  9
uExterior Cell Buffer=36  →  100

uGridsToLoad is the important one, it says how much space around the player should be loaded and active (and thus allow things to render). This will increase RAM usage and load times (but not too significantly). From what I read, it must be an odd number and too high values will crash the game (if it runs out of RAM, you can apparently hack the exe to be large address aware to avoid this, but I didn't fancy messing with that).

I selected 9 as this produced the nice image above, but doesn't (yet) seem to be causing any crashes for me.

uExterior Cell Buffer should, apparently, be set to (uGridsToLoad+1)².

Warning: A saved game cannot be loaded on a lower uGridsToLoad setting. So if you bump this up to 9 and later try to turn it back down again you will be locked out of your saved game. There is a fix for this, which is to load the game at the higher setting and then do the following lines at the console:

setini "ugridstoload:general" 5
saveini
refreshini

Then save and quit, and change the uGridsToLoad to the desired value.

Tweaking the Distances

With it set so distant cells can contain high quality items the next step is to up the loading distances.

Now, Ultra seems to sort most of them out already, and just loading the game with uGridsToLoad increased was an instant improvement (the rocks/trees/etc). If you need to achieve this on lower settings just crank up all the view distance bars in the settings (I'm sure there's ini settings for them, but didn't bother to investigate).

Grass was still an issue. So in SkyrimPrefs.ini I did the following:

fGrassStartFadeDistance=7000.0000     → 25000.0000
fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance=7000.0000  → 25000.0000
fGrassMinStartFadeDistance=0.0000     → 10000.0000

I don't know specifically what each of these three items each do, but those three new values provided the results given, so I'm happy with them.

On advice found in various places I also changed the following variable that should allow more high quality trees. I'm not sure I can see the difference, but it didn't seem to hurt performance:

uiMaxSkinnedTreesToRender=20  →  40

Other tweaks for extra pretty

While researching all this I came across various other tweaks that claim to improve the visual appearance of the game slightly.

The most important (and only ones I could really tell the difference over) are these two, which really improved the game's shadows for me - they are much less "blocky" now:

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3     →  1
iShadowFilter=3               →  4
fShadowLODStartFade=200.0000  →  1000.0000

I can't answer both questions exactly, because I do not have the numbers in front of me because I am at work. But there are clear differences between each level of your weapon, they are rather slight though.

Every blue bar, should increase or decrease slightly with each weapon upgrade, the problem is it is such a small difference its hard to notice. It becomes more difficult when you get to the point of using a weaker weapon with faster fire rate or stronger weapon with slower fire rate. •If can wait 6-8 hours, can give you an exact answer based on fire rate and damage as to which gun is actually higher DPS.

For the sniper rifles, the above applies but with reload and clip size instead of fire rate (my favorite is the Widow, I will take one shot kill over faster shooting). But when comparing the Black Widow to the Mantis you also have to think about penetration, if that matters for you for guardians or cover/glass. So if the blue bar is higher for the black widow than level 10 mantis, the black widow will do more damage. For sniper rifles its more about personal likes, unless you want to compare the incisor or raptor for semi-auto snipers.

I can not find the phaestron in the listing, unsure why...(under assault rifles there is Argus, Avenger, Cobra, Collector, Falcon, Geth, Mattock, Reckoning, Revenant, Saber, Sentryturret, Valkyrie, Vindicator)

• Avenger has 38 damage at I and 48.2 at X . So each level damage increases by 1.02
• Avenger has rate of fire "500" at I and X
• Avenger has reload time of "0.8" believe its seconds
• Mag size is 30
• Max spare ammo is 210 or 262 (unsure how to obtain difference)
  
  
• Geth has 21.9 damage at I and 27.4 at X. So each level damage increases by 0.55
• Geth has rate of fire "900" at I and X
• Geth has reload time of "2.9"3
• Mag size is 80
• Max spare ammo is 400 or 500 (same as above)
  
  
• Saber has 350.1 damage at I and 437.6 at X. So each level damage increases by 8.75
• Saber has rate of fire "80" at I and X
• Saber has reload time of "2.9"
• Mag size is 8
• Max spare ammo is 40 or 50
  
  
• BlackWidow has 514.1 damage at I and 642.6 at X. So each level damage increases by 12.85
• BlackWidow has rate of fire "60" at I and X
• BlackWidow has reload time of "2.97" believe its seconds
• Mag size is 3
• Max spare ammo is 15 or 25
  
  
• Mantis has 615.6 damage at I and 769.5 at X. So each level damage increases by 15.39
• Mantis has rate of fire "70" at I and X
• Mantis has reload time of "2.97"
• Mag size is 1
• Max spare ammo is 9 or 19
  
  
• Widow has 867 damage at I and 1083.8 at X. So each level damage increases by 21.68
• Widow has rate of fire "70" at I and X
• Widow has reload time of "2.97"
• Mag size is 1
• Max spare ammo is 7 or 17