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This setting controls depth calculations for shadows, and effectively determines the way Dynamic Shadows appear. Higher values gradually reduce the number of shadows shown; a value close to 1.0 totally removes dynamic shadows on objects (but leaves static shadows as normal). Lower values increase the number of shadows, however this can also result in glitches. A current workaround to removing some of the glitchy shadows in Mass Effect is to change this setting to =0.030, however note that this removes the glitchy shadows altogether, it doesn't fix them as such.

This setting controls the shadow filtering in the engine, basically determining how sharp or dispersed the outlines of shadows appear. The higher the value, the more 'blob-like' and faint shadows become, the lower the value, the less dispersed and sharper the outlines of shadows.

This setting is related to the streaming textures in the game, and appears to control whether streaming occurs in the background or not. In my testing setting this to =False seemed to dramatically increase level loading time and then resulted in a crash at the end of loading, so it is not recommended.

bUseBackgroundLevelStreaming=True

Similar to bUseSound above, this setting disables music in the game if set to =False. However it doesn't disable all music - the menu music and some in-game music can be heard periodically even when this setting is disabled.

If set to False, this disables all sound in the game. The main use for this setting would be when troubleshooting an issue such as crashes or stuttering, to see if the audio system is the culprit. If disabling sound helps your game performance or stability, see the Sound section of the in-game settings and Troubleshooting Tips section of the guide for more details of how to fix the issue properly.

This setting controls a form of soft shadow rendering called Branching PCF. If set to False, it results in the removal of soft filtered/smudged edges for shadows, which in turn may increase performance but can also make shadows seem more blocky.

bEnableBranchingPCFShadows=True

This setting controls a range of 'post processing' effects, namely effects which are overlaid on the main game image - these effects include Film Grain, Motion Blur, Light Bloom and the Depth of Field effects which are visible throughout the game. When this setting =False, all such effects are removed, and the result is a performance improvement, and a very clear though somewhat blander image. Since you can already enable or disable Film Grain and Motion Blur individually from within the in-game settings, and adjust Depth of Field using the DepthOfField settings further below, disabling this setting is generally not recommended unless you are really struggling for FPS and/or want to remove all blur/grain/bloom effects from the game at once. Note that light halos are not affected by this setting.

The Unreal Engine 3 on which Mass Effect is based uses a streaming approach to loading up textures. Streaming is actually designed more for helping loading times on consoles. However if this option is set to =False, textures won't be streamed in at all, but instead most of the environment will be black due to a lack of textures. Other texture streaming-related variables in the .ini files similarly seem to have no impact on disabling texture streaming properly. It appears that unfortunately texture streaming cannot be properly disabled in UE3.0 games.

These settings control the framerate range between which the game engine attempts to smooth frames. As covered under the bSmoothFrameRate setting above, if that setting is set to True, the framerate limit specified by the value of MaxSmoothedFrameRate will be enforced. Although you can disable this FPS cap, ideally if you want smooth FPS but don't want the default 62FPS cap, one thing you can do is to set the MaxSmoothedFrameRate to a higher value, e.g. =70 or =85. It's usually best to set your FPS cap to match your , since even with VSync disabled, any framerate above your monitor's refresh rate will simply be partial frames anyway. There's no reason why uncapping your FPS will necessarily provide you a better gameplay advantage, and in fact it may do the opposite due to greater FPS variability, so experiment to see if simply using a higher framerate cap is actually a better compromise of smoothness and performance.

The game engine is capped to a maximum framerate, as determined by the value of the MaxSmoothedFrameRate variable (see below), which is 62 FPS by default. This is done by the developers to prevent FPS spikes and thus provide smoother performance. However, by setting this option to =False, you can completely remove this FPS cap. Keep in mind though that if you then find your framerate varying a great deal and causing jerkiness, this option is best set back to True. Uncapping your FPS doesn't increase overall performance as such, i.e. if you got 35 FPS in certain areas with the cap, you'll still do so without the cap.

Commands which are unclear, appear to have no significant or useful impact, or can be adjusted fully using the in-game settings are not covered in this section. Just because a setting has a tempting name, doesn't mean it has any impact at all on the game. I've pesonally tested all the relevant major settings and hence what is included below are the main settings which appear to have some useful impact.

Many areas of the .ini files do not have any impact on the PC version of Mass Effect - they are unused sections of the Unreal Engine, generic sections designed as templates for other areas, or are for debugging or for the Unreal Editor and hence are excluded (e.g. the [Texture Streaming] or [Editor.EditorEngine] sections have no impact).

Some settings appear under multiple sections - change only the setting under the relevant section shown below. For example, DepthBias appears under both the [Engine.Engine] and [Engine.GameEngine] sections of BIOEngine.in; however changing it under [Engine.Engine] has absolutely no impact on the game, the setting under [Engine.GameEngine] is the one which should be changed. Therefore pay close attention to which section of the .ini file you are changing a setting under, otherwise it won't work.

Important - Make sure you understand the following before reading this section:

The main .ini files we will be examining here are BIOEngine.ini which holds your main graphics and audio-related settings; BIOGame.ini which holds various game world parameters; and BIOInput.ini which holds your key bindings. Each config file is covered in separate sections below.

Mass Effect holds all of its main settings in a range of .ini (initialization) files found under your \Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\BioWare\Mass Effect\Config directory in Windows XP, or \Users\[User]\Documents\BioWare\Mass Effect\Config in Windows Vista. These .ini files can be viewed and edited using a text editor like Windows Notepad, but I recommend backing them up before changing any settings. If something goes wrong and you want to return these files to their defaults, simply delete them and they'll be recreated using the original templates (found under \Program Files\Mass Effect\Engine\Config) the next time you start the game. For this reason, don't ever edit or delete the Base .ini files or any other .ini files found under the game's directories; make sure to only edit those under the user directory specified further above.

Mass Effect is based on the Unreal Engine 3.0, which allows users to access a range of configuration variables and console commands to use for not only altering the way the game looks and performs, but also changing various gameplay parameters. In this section we look at how you can undertake such tweaking and examine all the major variables and commands necessary to do so.

TweakGuides.com - Mass Effect Tweak Guide