How To Run Crossfire Smoother

I did this with cf from a guide in the warrock section and it seemed to work very well so here goes!

The first thing we want to improve with Crossfire is loading times, ingame stuttering, pausing, freezing, and sound glitches. Unistall your current crossfire and install for optimal performance

Once you have Crossfire ready to install. Check to see how many hard drives you have. If only one then dont do this. If you have multiple hard drives,
install Crossfire on the hard drive that your Operating system is NOT on. As soon as you know where you are going to download move on.

Windows Disk Defragmenter
At this point you have determined which hard drive you are going to install Crossfire to. If you only have 1 hard drive install it on that one. What we want to do before installing Crossfire. Is to run a system defrag on the drive we are installing to.
If you don't know how to run a defrag:
Go to start menu >>
Click All programs >>
Click Accessories >>
Click System Tools >>
Click Disk Defragmenter >>

We are doing this because files on your hard drive overtime will become spread out all over the hard drive. This is called fragmentation. The result will be having files on all different parts of the drive.
The disk defragmenter will move all of the files to the front of the drive.
This will improve load times and overall smoothness of the game.

After your hard drive has been defragmented, go and and install Crossfire on your hard drive. Obviously, when you get to this point you are going to want to point the Crossfire installer to the drive you chose in step 2.

Even if you have one drive. Install it to the front of the directory. Meaning, if you are installing Crossfire on drive C. Select the install path destination to be just C:\Crossfire or D:\Crossfire

By default Crossfire goes to C:\Program Files\Subagames\CrossFire
Crossfire seems to work better and have less errors when you install it at the front of the directory.

Immediately after Crossfire has installed, launch the game and it will go through several patches a few 100 megabytes in size. As soon as those updates have finished, defrag your computer one more time.

Crossfire is now optimally installed. The next few steps will involve tweaking both Crossfire and your computer for the best performance. In the Crossfire options screen you can turn up every single setting in the graphics controls to their max settings so long as you have a reasonably decent graphics card.

If you have an older or onboard graphics card. Go ahead and leave the settings as is. You are done. If you still seem to be experiencing slow speeds. Then it's not anything else in your PC, and you may need to turn down several settings to low.

This article isn't going to cover every single Crossfire setting as again this is not the reason for Warrock running slow. However, the two most effective settings for improving performance:
Change:
Color- 16 bit
Texture Quality - Low

After you have set-up your settings, controls, etc for Crossfire. You can go ahead and close the game. The game itself is now installed at the end of the drive and you have it set up the way you like for when you are ready to play.

Now it's time to improve Crossfire's speed from your computers end. One of the most annoying aspects of Crossfire is the fact that the display refresh rate defaults to 60hz no matter what you have your monitor set at.

Why is this bad for Crossfire speed?
Warrock's engine is a multiplier based engine. The game will cap your frame rate to a divisible of your monitors refresh rate, plus or minus a few frames.
So how can I fix this? With a 3rd party software program. What we need is a program to lock our refresh rate.
Copy and paste this link into your browser:
EnTech Taiwan | Utilities | Multires
Download the program.

Once downloaded and installed; Open the program. The program will appear in your task bar by the clock. Right click the icon and select the largest refresh rate that is listed.

Next while still on the right click menu for the program. Click on "About Multires" You will be brought to a dialog box. Put a check in the box that says "Lock refresh rates" and in the box "Auto-load with Windows"

Crossfire will now consistently run at the highest refresh rate. You will notice an immediate improvement in graphics speed. Depending on other things your guns may fire a bit faster as well.

Audio Latency - This tweak will not boost your frame rate. It can however make Crossfire run faster. If there are too many sounds at once, you could hear crackling and popping and or you you may skip a frame or two while your CPU gets hung getting out those PCI cycles.

Copy and paste this link into your browser:
PCI Latency Tool 3.1 v2 download from Guru3D.com
Download the PCI-Latency Tool v3. Once installed set the latency to the PCI bus your sound card is on to 0. (If you notice any pops or cracks in sound set it to 16, 0 is optimal though)
After setting it to 0. Go into the settings and put a check next to: Apply on Startup.

Next Tweak: Network Card Latency:
Using the same program and guidelines as before. Set the latency of your network card to a value of 0, as well.
After Changing the network card value to 0. You may close the PCI-latency tool.

If you do not have a dual core AMD processor skip this.
If you have a dual core AMD processor and are on Windows XP. Be sure you have the Dual core optimizer by AMD. its absolutely essential for Crossfire.
Copy and paste this link into your browser:
AMD Dual Core Optimizer 1.1.4 - Emuforums.com
Download the "AMD Dual-Core Optimizer Version 1.1.4" and install.

Tweaking your page file has been known to improve Crossfires performance as well. In particular a properly tuned page file helps combat the dreaded gun lag. Again, if you have multiple hard drives put the page file on the drive that your operating system is NOT installed on.
To tweak your page file:

Go to Control Panel
Click system
Click advanced tab
Click on settings
Click on Change at the bottom of page

For optimal page file usage. We want to do like we did when installing Crossfire. We want to defrag our hard drive. However, you cannot defrag the page file while it is in use. So select, "no paging file" and click apply changes. Reboot when prompted and come back to this step.

After computer has rebooted, defrag your hard drive as I shown in earlier steps. Once the computer has finished defragmenting. Go ahead and go back to the Paging File options page.
This time click custom size. Here are the settings:

If you have 512 megs of ram:
Minimum: 4096
Maximum: 4096

If you have 1gb of ram:
Minimum: 2048
Maximum: 2048

If you have 2gb+ of ram: <--- most computers from 2007 upwards
Minimum: 1024
Maximum: 1024
Click the 'set' button, apply changes and reboot.

You have finished tweaking your computer to make Crossfire faster. This article certainly did not cover every possible tweak. If you are still experiencing slow downs on Crossfire. You may need to continue to research and find other general computer and graphics card related tweaks.

Credits to Yacobo for base thread!
Edit: i tried making it smaller but this is size 2 and size 1 is way way way too small

How To Run Crossfire Smoother

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