Wolfenstein New Order - Solutions for Graphics and Performance Problems

Posted in games

Wolfenstein The New Order is a massive download; a total of 40GB with most of that made up of textures. The game demands a hell of a lot from your computer, especially your graphics card and that's where most people are tripping up. Thankfully together with the 10GB day one patch you can tweak your graphics and steam settings to work round most problems.

In this post, I'm covering some of the annoying problems together with solutions for each. On the graphics side, AMD cards appear to have the most problems so if you're one of those people hopefully these solutions will help you get Wolfenstein up and running with optimal quality.

Before I start, here are the quick links to AMD drivers for various OS's:

Bad Performance, lagging gameplay

Many gamers suffer from terrible performance, even though their graphics card should be up to the test. In most cases the problem isn't the game but rather the actual settings you're using. The same was true with RAGE and you'll need to use similar settings here.

One of the most important points is to ensure that the game really is using GPU. For example, I have an AMD Radeon HD 7700M graphics card on my laptop but I have to manually configure each game to tell it to use the better graphics card rather than the onboard Intel HD crap. I do this by right clicking the desktop and choosing Configure Switchable Graphics:

Then in the Catalyst Control Panel you click a game (or browse for exe) and then change the setting to High Performance rather than Power Saving. This ensures when you next run the game it will use the optimal graphics settings.

Other settings to tweak

Depending on your graphics card I strongly suggest you change these settings:

Disable Screen Space Reflections
Turn off Triple Buffering
Lower shadow resolution
Enable VT compression
Vertical Sync - "Use 3D Application Settings"

Game crashes on startup

Symptoms: Trying to launch the game from Steam will cause it to crash instantly. The first solution to try is downloading the latest graphics drivers for your card's model. For AMD that could mean the 14.4 Beta drivers but its best to stick with the last official version.

In most cases this will either be from the AMD or NVidia websites:

Game won’t start, blank screen

Trying to start the game causes the window to crash and the not responding message appears in Task Manager. This is a common problem for AMD graphics cards which seem to have major problems running Wolfenstein. The best way to solve this problem is update the AMD Catalyst driver:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

Game crashes with "display driver stopped responding" message

You try loading the game and the screen goes black, then flickers, then finally the Display Driver Stopped Responding message appears. Again, another driver issue which can be fixed by downloading the 14.4 drivers (or whichever version is the latest Beta). Also check if you’re running two monitors? If so unplug one and try running the game again.

Not enough disk space for installation

Even though the game is advertised as a 40GB download, it clearly isn't. The pre-load option downloads the first chunk and then makes additional copies as it installs onto your computer. There have been reports that people with 80GB of free space are struggling to install the game.

Therefore the recommendation is to make sure Steam is downloading to whichever drive has the most space. By default, the Steam client will pre-load to the C drive, which for some people is just their OS and not data. If that's you then check your Steam folder options and make sure its pointing to whichever directory has the most space - at least 80GB to be on the safe side

Remembering also that there is a 10GB day 1 patch which consumes even more of your disk space.