At least, that's how I understand it. If a dev or someone who knows this stuff better than me has a more detailed explanation, please share it!

This guide is intended for Nvidia users only. I have tested the profile on both the DX9 and DX11 clients and it provides similar performance improvements on both. I do not have access to an AMD GPU, so if anyone has any tweaks to offer on that side, please share them.

Reduce/Eliminate Hitching with Nvidia Profile Inspector

To start, download Nvidia Profile Inspector and extract it to wherever you like. Download SWLprofile.zip, and extract SWLprofile.v1.nip from the zip file. Open nvidiaProfileInspector.exe and let it load, then in the Profiles field in the top left corner, type "Secret World Legends". (If Secret World Legends isn't present in the list, update your drivers.) Click the Import User Profiles button, then locate the SWLprofile.v1.nip file.



Once it looks like the above (note the blue-gray gears next to some settings - these are custom settings from the profile), click the Apply changes button. Launch SWL and modify your in-game settings. If your computer could handle everything at max in the past, then leave your settings alone. Don't test in populated areas like Agartha - even a Titan Xp will cry for mercy there. Go to a playfield and run around a bit. If you're still getting a poor framerate, try this: Start by reducing the Advanced GFX Settings and View Distance sliders under the Advanced tab in SWL's Video Options menu. 3 is considerably less demanding than 4 and it makes a negligible difference in quality.

Turn off Motion Blur and and set Anti-alias Quality to FXAA.

Disable FXAA altogether and use an injector like SweetFX to use SMAA instead. That's it! You should now have a much more stable framerate in SWL.

IMPORTANT: The custom profile settings may be overwritten when updating to newer Nvidia drivers or after a major Windows update. Be sure to open up Nvidia Profile Inspector again and see if the changes were reverted. If so, just re-import the profile again and apply changes.

Secret World Legends has a tendency to suffer from video lag ("hitching", not caused by network latency), even on very high-end machines. This is a result of several things, but mostly caused by the game engine's asset streaming technology being tied to the game's framerate. When assets load or unload, the game's framerate drops temporarily due to the increase in bandwidth.Enabling an FPS cap can significantly reduce the occurrence of this behavior by telling the game to not work any harder than it needs to in order to produce a smooth, stable frame rate. You can do this using third-party tools, or if you have an Nvidia GPU, you can change the graphics driver's settings to enforce an FPS limit.Nvidia Profile Inspector is a handy utility for manually adjusting individual settings for the default game profiles provided with the Nvidia drivers. Using this tool, you can tweak a few things that typically cause the game to hitch or otherwise offer poor performance.