S3 Series

Some of you may be aware of this, others not. If you want to improve your graphics experience within WarBirds use the following settings in your nVidia Control Panel. This is for PC, running Win 7 or above (it may work with earlier versions also). The higher end your pc, the better.

Right click your desktop and select "NVIDIA Control Panel".
Select "Manage 3D Settings" in the left panel.
In the right panel select the "Program Settings" tab.
In the drop down menu select your WarBirds executable file. It may appear as WarBirds III, WarBirds 2015 or similar. If it does not appear than choose "Add" and selct it from your Warbirds directory.
Before proceeding insure that Warbirds III (2015)exe is displayed in the above drop down menu.
The settings are as follows:

Ambient Occlusion ..... Not supported
Anostropic filtering ..... 16x
Antialiasing - FXAA ..... On
Antialiasing - Gamma Correction ..... Use Global setting (on)
Antialiasing - Mode ..... Overide any application setting
Antialiasing - Setting ..... 32x CSAA
Antialiazing - Transpanrency ..... 8x (supersample)
CUDA - GPUs ..... Use global setting (all)
Maximum pre-rendered frames ..... Use the 3D application settings
Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration ..... Single display performance mode
Power Management mode ..... Adaptive
Shader Cache ..... Use global setting (on)
Texture filtering - Anostropic sample option ..... On
Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias ..... Clamp
Texture filtering - Quality ..... High quality
Texture filtering - Trilinear Optimization ..... On
Threaded optimization ..... Auto
Triple Buffering ..... Use global setting (off)
Vertical sync ..... Use 3D application setting
Virtual reality pre-rendered frames ..... Use 3D application setting

Click "Apply".

You may have more or less of the above options depending on your video card and cpu. Remember if you have an option of performance or quality, your going for quality.


These settings are for high end pcs so if you have problems with these settings you can always go back and change all the settings to 3D application or global which will revert to the original WB settings. Give it a try and I hope you have a great experience with it.

Thanks Kelly!
Looks better than maximum WB settings.

That's what I've been using, however I get some artifacts around the mouse and text due to compression. Any thoughts on fixing it?

Those would be aliasing artifacts, and depending on the quality of your video card, you may or may not have an aliasing artifact option in your nvidia settings. I do not have one (GeForce GTX 760), but Omega does (he has a very nice system) Even if you are running two cards in sli it will not make a difference if the feature is not built into your card bios.
In either case it will be a matter of tweaking the Anti-aliasing options. Try turning Antialiasing - FXAA off. If this does not work, turn it back on and gradually decrease your Antialiasing - setting until you get a better image.

Another issue that can cause the artifacts would be if you are actually using an HDTV as a monitor. TVs are not monitors and you will never get the same image on a TV as you get on a monitor.
If your using an HDTV, go to your tv menu and turn off all post processing features {dumb it down}. What happens is, your computer/video card processes the image and sends it to your monitor. The monitor does nothing to it but displays what the card sends. Your TV takes the pre-processed data from your card and says "Oh, I'm getting a signal, I need to process the data into an image", but its already an image, so its corrupting the image with its processing. Even if you dumb down your TV, you still may not get a quality image. Not all HDTV's are made the same. I use a Vizio 120Hz HDTV dumbed down, but the image still is not 100% perfect. I bought and returned 4 32" HDTVs before I found the one that displayed the best image.

Hope this helps. Let me know how it turns out.

Good info Kelly.

Something to remember for those who see framerate drops, Warbirds is a single core application.... it does not use hyper-threading. What does this mean? It means you are running on one cylinder vs 8 in your 8 cylinder:) CPU becomes the bottleneck for ensuring your FPS stays above 30 in high density (objects and aircraft) environments.

Kelly's info makes the game look better (and for those who have seen my vids...this is what I do). I use a HDTV as my montior and suffer the same artifacts on screen as what zinhawk mentioned....however, it doesn't show up on the video, so it confirms what Kelly said about the HDTV being causal.

Good info. When I design terrains I use the worst settings to preview. Tried to get some nice photos but was having artifacting etc when I went to all the upper settings. I knew I was setting some wrong but just didnt have the time to figure it out. Thanks for doing this.

That is good info as GForce Experience does not support Warbirds.