General

There are some general settings, which you need to change before you go messing around with anything else. Open the Advanced options menu, select Advanced, then Game engine settings. Set CacheSizeMegs to somewhere around 4 to 8MB. I've mine set to 8MB (Some machines might find a setting of ½ or ¾ system RAM to work better).

You can also change the cache directory to another partition/drive/folder. Open Advanced, File system & edit the CachePath setting to the directory of your choice.

Visuals

Open Options, then the Video tab.

Video driver. Select your graphics renderer using this option. You’ll only have to use this if you want to change renderer, as Rune should automatically detect the best renderer for you when you first load it.

Resolution. Selecting a lower setting will improve performance & maintain a stable (hopefully higher) frame rate. Although, higher resolutions will look better, they will run slower.

Color Depth. Set this to 16 bit if you’ve got a 3dfx card (not that you’ll have a choice). If you own an nVidia or other card you may be able to select 32 bit. This should be selected for best visual quality, although performance will be much lower as a result. Software rendering will actually run faster in 32 bit colour than in 16 bit colour. The opposite is true in hardware rendering though. NOTE - Voodoo 4/5 users can select 32bit colour.

World Texture Detail, Set it to High if you can, although a lower setting is advised if you need the performance, it will give a more blurrier look to the game though. Setting Texture Detail to High will improve visuals more than setting Skin detail to High.

SkinDetail. I’d recommend setting this to Medium, the difference between High & Medium is fairly small, added to the fact this will free up video memory & you generally won’t be too close to player models this gives quite a decent performance improvement.

Brightness. Use this slider bar to adjust the brightness level in the game. Sliding it to the Right can well improve visibility (quite useful in multiplayer), although it can the game look washed out if you set it too high & vice versa. You may need to test different settings to see which results in the optimum level of brightness for this setting.

Mesh Complexity. Use this slider to adjust the complexity of model meshes in Rune. This essentially sets the maximum amount of polygons per model. Slide it to the Right for more complex models. Sliding it to the Left will reduce model complexity, which should improve performance.

Player Shadow. Setting this to None disables shadows for your character. Blob enables simple circular shadows. Projected will enable volumetric shadows. Enabling shadows will reduce performance, particularly setting it to Projected.

Actor Shadows. Setting this to None disables shadows for other models. Blob enables simple circular shadows. Projected will enable volumetric shadows. Enabling shadows will reduce performance, particularly when set to Projected. This will also cause a higher performance drop than enabling shadows for the player.

Min Desired Framerate. Set this to equal to whatever you feel is the minimum for a playable game. 30 should be the ideal minimum frame rate for most users. This specifies the frame rate threshold below which Rune will start dropping detail - reducing model detail and not drawing optional effects. If this is set higher than your normal frame rate, then you will never see reduced graphics almost always, but get the best possible performance. The ideal setting for this is about 10 frames below your average frame rate, otherwise you’ll drop off too much detail.

When benchmarking it would be best to set this to 0 to give a more accurate indication of real performance (see later on in the guide for how to benchmark Rune).

Show Decals. Untick this setting to improve performance, particularly with older graphics cards. Decals are the blood splatters or explosion marks that get left on terrain during the game. Of course if you have a 3dfx based card you should be able to tick this setting for improved visuals with little performance degradation.

Fractal Animation. This switch can be turned on for a performance improvement for cards that slowdown with pre-frame texture uploads, especially with OpenGL & to a lesser extent D3D. Glide, Metal & Software rendering will run perfectly with this set to False & gain nothing by setting it to True. Direct3D & OpenGL users may see a slight performance boost when set to True. Although the game will appear more 2D like as a result.

World Lighting. Tick this setting to enable world lighting, otherwise the game will look quite ugly. The difference in performance between both is extreme, disabling the lighting (Untick) if you are totally desperate for a frame rate boost.

Use Dynamic Lighting. Tick this setting to enable the dynamic lighting of maps, e.g. the light surrounding an torch. Performance can be improve by Unticking this setting, although this will reduce visual quality.