The Unofficial Guide to Running TU on a Crappy PC [WINDOWS]

This guide will (hopefully) help you in running TU if you have not-so-beefy PC!
This guide only works on Windows computers.

Now, let’s get right into it. First of all, let’s clear out a few issues.
Some people with integrated graphics or generally terrible cards will get the error of “Video Driver has crashed and was reset! Exiting…” constantly.

Now, the first step you can try to solve this is finding your DirectX/Direct3D version on your card. The way you can do this is by running Win+R and entering dxdiag (followed by enter). Once the window is loaded, navigate to the Display tab (via the top) and under the Drivers section of the information, find “Direct3D DDI”. This is your Direct3D version supported on your card. Most problems with these cards are that they run Direct3D 10, although UE4 games natively run on 11/12. To solve this, right click on Tower Unite in your Library on Steam, and go to Properties. Press the “Set Launch Options” button and type the following into the box:
-sm4 -d3d10
This will force UE4 to run the game in Shader Model 4, as well as in D3D10 Compatibility Mode. Please note that if your Direct3D version is below 10, UE4 will simply not work as it does not support versions older than 10.
After this is done, simply close all of that out. Now, before you get into running the game and testing, make sure to restart your PC. Not sure why, but I’ve noticed that the options only apply after a restart is complete. Once that is done, try and see if the game runs properly. If it does, congrats! If not, you have 2 possibilities.

  1. Your card is simply too weak to run UE4, and that’s it.
  2. You may have done something wrong. You can post in the comments what you did and this can be troubleshooted. (Tip: Add the launch option -log to log game activities and check for issues.)

Now that compatibility is out of the way, lets get into graphical settings. Although you cannot change every setting in TU (from what I know) through config files, you can change some graphical settings if TU won’t start or is too laggy due to high settings. There are two config files that could be found useful to mess with and try and get graphics to lower. First, open Explorer and enter %appdata%\..\Local\Tower\Saved\Config\ and open “WindowsNoEditor”. Within “Game.ini” (can be opened via Notepad/any basic text editor), you will find the [/Game/Blueprint/Helpers/SettingSaveData.SettingSaveData_C] section. There resides some graphical settings for the game. The lowest possible configuration there is:
AAQuality=0 FOV=50 HighQualityShaders=0 ResolutionScale=10 OceanQuality=0
As well as that, you can navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Tower Unite\Tower\Config and open the “DefaultGameUserSettings.ini” file to change resolution.

If all of this doesn’t seem to work in fixing your ability to play TU, feel free to post below with any issues you’re having and I will try and help (possibly some others, as well). If you can, also include -log in the launch options to check for obvious setting mistakes.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this helped! Please note if there are any issues that need to be corrected here, as well.

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Nice guide! Just want to point out that Tower, as far as I know, won’t be playable with DirectX 9 as Unreal doesn’t support it.

6 Likes

Ah thanks, I’ll update that in a second.

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UPDATE:
Some day in the next week i’ll be doing a completely revamped version of this guide. I’ll be doing research into how to improve performance more, and it will pictures to help out as well. I’ll also definitely put more focus into formatting the guide next time

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Wow, er, never actually did that. And it’s been like two months. I might get back to this and write a new guide soon, I don’t know though.
ALSO
Seems like the formatting got messed up on the post. Not sure if that’s just me. But hey, another reason to make a new one.

I should try this guide using my old pc because why not.

Specs:

AMD Athlon X2 4200+
3GB DDR2
Geforce 9600gt

I will post results if i get this to actually work on the crappiest of my computers.

How do I revert the shader model to the current default one as well as switching from d3d10 compatibility mode to dx11?
Also while I was messing with the engine and game text files in the WindowsNoEditor file, my game started to lag more because of bright lights, which may be related to bloom. But I don’t think I changed any settings related to bloom. During the process I even deleted the whole config folder to see if I could reset the settings to default, but nothing changed.

I made a thread recently asking for unreal engine related help, and someone replied with a redirect link to this thread, so I’m hoping there’s someone that can help.

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iirc the game defaults to dx11, so just remove -d3d10 from the launch options
same thing for the shader model, remove -sm4 to switch back to the currently used default setting