- Upscaling mode:
DLSS Quality - Depend if you want some more perf, use Balanced give like almost 6-10% more perf. AND UPGRADE TO DLSS4 (v310) IS A MUST (Just google the way, it's very simple to force update). IT LOOKS CLEANER THAN EVEN NATIVE 1080p TAA or FSR/XESS Native AA. There are some artifacts compare to native especially in fast movement but really hard to notice them and better than the blurry/grainy look of other AA.
Without DLSS I would recommend upgrade your FSR to FSR4 when it available, or try the newest XESS 2 which way better than the one in the game.
- Ray Tracing:
OFF - actually it's usable, RT in this game only affect reflections with like 5-10% performance loss in my test, the thing is it takes a lot of VRAM
- Texture Quality:
High (or medium) - high to medium gives me like 1 more average fps in the benchmark, noticeably worse texture details, on high my vram almost always near it's limit (5.5-5.7gb), in real game it can cause some visibly bad texture/lod load in (especially Oilwell Azuz), medium more manageable (4.4-5.1gb) in case there need more vram overhead.
Textures really important - it also affect grasses and some monster fur too.
- Texture Filtering:
Medium (ANISO x4) - make textures look cleaner when viewing from certain angles, in main menu, highest take 3 fps hit (of 70 fps), medium only about 1fps, no noticeable fps hit in-game.
- Mesh Quality:
High (or medium) - drop to medium give slightly better perf and use less vram, but reduce some polygons, noticable on some model details, like hair strands less smooth, some round objects noticeably less polygons...
- Fur Quality:
Low - Seem barely improve fur quality at all so just leave it at low
- Sky/Cloud Quality:
Lowest - This setting seem doesn't do anything, no visual or perf impact, Low - Should not put it any high than that, no difference, but at lowest sometimes you can see the pixelated clouds.
- Grass/Tree Quality:
Low - grasses look BETTER at Low, with shorter, less grass density = less shimmering and more ground details can be shown, easier to find small endemic life too. Hardly noticeable changes on the trees. Almost no performance difference between low and high.
- Grass/Tree Sway:
Enable - make them more lively, barely performance increase not worth disable it
- Sand/Snow Quality:
Lowest - It looks fine and who cares about pebbles slightly more realistic anyway.
- Water Effects:
Enable/Disable? - Couldn't spot any difference both visual and performance (even in Uth Duna flooding fight), assuming this affect water physics stuff.
- Render Distance:
Medium - you'll notice the choppy animation with far away creatures with this on low, seem zero performance hit and should keep it on
- Shadow Quality:
High - it does take some vram but not demanding at all, High vs Medium almost have THE SAME performance while Low look absolutely horrible and should be avoided.
- Distant Shadow Quality:
Low - I don't notice a lot performance impact or visual changes but lower this reduce like 100mb vram usage
- Shadow Distance:
Far - seem no performance hit, just leave it medium or far.
- Ambient Light Quality:
Low - TURN THIS SHT DOWN, seem like zero difference (perhaps slightly brighter rocks?) for A LOT VRAM hog
- Ambient Occlusion (SSAO):
Medium - small perf cost, add some fine shadow details to many objects. Can cause smeary shadow under character - either it or Contact shadows when they mixed up.
- Contact Shadows:
Enable - No noticeable performance hit. Couldn't spot differences in the benchmark but you can see it in the full game - I believe something messed up and sometimes this setting got mixed with SSAO, and I must turn on SSAO to make this setting works (noticeably add some more shadow details between some objects after SSAO, can cause smeary shadow on under character)
- Bloom:
High - Personal preference, not even 0.5% perf hit
- Motion Blur:
OFF - Less blur the better
- Vignette Effects:
OFF - personal preference, no perf impact
- Screen Space Reflection:
On - add reflections, should keep it on
- SSSS Scattering:
On/Off? - very very minimal performance hit or maybe it's just a variable difference in the benchmark (not even 0.5% difference), and honestly really hard to spot visual differences (characters skin slightly smoother)
- Depth of Field:
OFF - surprising turning it off like give me 2-3 more fps when in the settings menu (like 68 to 70), hard to notice difference at lower fps, in Focus mode it looks pretty cinematic and can hide some ugly far away details tho
- Volumetric Fog:
Low - noticeably save some performance, no noticeable visual change
- Variable Rate Shading:
OFF - Turning this ON give you nearly 1% better performance at the cost of some shader grainy/fuzziness you may notice sometimes.
- Framegen:
OFF - unless you can run stable above 40fps. Yes if you really want that smoothness, stable 35+ is usable too, if you getting 30 and framegen, your real fps will be below 30 and totally not recommended.
And If you don't have DLSS framegen, don't use FSR framegen - at lower fps FSR framegen in this game is the worst I've seen with a lot of flickering and artifacts. Use Lossless Scaling framegen instead, I've tested them and got better performance and visual with LSFG.
Edit: for full game, FSR framegen mod + DLSS has less strange stutters and artifacts than in the benchmark, only character shadows can still look jittery, worth using if you don't want to install extra program like Lossless Scaling (but you'll need REFramework).
Lossless Scaling however can uplift your framegen performance by a lot if you set it using your iGPU (my AMD chip) to generate frames instead of dGPU (RTX 3060), no VRAM cost too