In recent years, We haven't seen any attempts to bring the universe of the Avatar movies into the realm of video games
but The tide has turned with the release of Avatar : Frontiers of Pandora, which is an open world action adventure game, developed By Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment
and for this new Title, Massive has improved their in-house Snowdrop engine, and introduced
support for Ray Tracing to deliver one of the best if not the best looking game of 2023 the meticulous level of detail in the environment is unbelievable and The combination of rich and dense vegetation, along with the high-quality lighting courtesy of Ray Traced Global Illumination delivers truly stunning results, but of course these gorgeous visuals are not without a cost,
as on the performance side, this game can be quiet demanding. that's why Today we will try to lower the performance cost of this game by going through all the graphics settings and examining the
performance and visual impact of each one So let's start by taking a look at the Image Quality Now this game supports both FSR3 and DLSS along with TAA and all these options can be utilized for
Upscaling or Anti Aliasing at native resolution Now when it comes to FSR, this might be the
best implementation I've seen to date. I was surprise to see how stable it looks, giving that FSR often struggles when it comes to moving Vegetation and DLSS as expected and as usual offers more stable image as you can see here, but when using Quality or lower Preset DLSS exhibits noticeable ghosting and smearing on distant objects and particles and finally we have TAA, and when it comes to Upscaling TAA looks more noisy compared to FSR and DLSS. and it also does a poor job at retaining vegetation details at a distance. Additionally there is an option to choose between a Fixed and Biased Scaling Mode, based on my understanding the Fixed Mode applies a fixed scaling factor for Example DLSS Quality will run at 66% of
the output resolution, but the Biased Mode is kinda like Dynamic Resolution to 4K with
Upscaling, it will apply a fixed scaling factor but it will also dynamically adjusts that
factor toward Quality Mode of 4K however, from what I've seen, at least at 1440p with DLSS, the Biased mode option can look and run worse compared to the Fixed Mode, so if you're using Upscaling, I recommend the Fixed Mode. The game also supports FSR3 Frame Generation,
Now I don't have a fast camera to show you how smooth the game looks with Frame Gen Enable but from my experience, Frame Generation here is much better compared to Forspoken or Immortals Of Aveum First it doesn't suffer from any major frame pacing issues, yes the frame time graph is not a perfect line but during typical gameplay I haven't noticed any stuttering or other issues regarding Frame Pacing
also the input latency was fine with a baseline frame rate of 50 to 55 fps, however the biggest
and the most distracting problem of Frame Gen in this game is related to the UI,
now because the UI in this game is updating at a lower rate compared to the rest of the
image, when Frame gen is ON, the UI looks jittery because Frame generation cannot generate
Frames for the area around these UI elements and as a result, I don't think a lot of users will enjoy playing this game with Frame Gen enabled and I hope Massive release a patch
to fix this as soon as possible. Now let's move on to Motion Blur
unlike other games, the camera Motion Blur in Avatar applies to different areas of the screen depending on the direction of the camera if I move the camera Right or Left, it applies
to the Right and Left Edges of the screen and If I run forward it applies to the bottom
edge of the screen and performance wise Motion Blur has almost
no impact. The other Post Processing effect is Depth Of Field which of course can be seen in cutscenes like here but it also appears during typical gameplay like here when aiming a weapon
or here when Underwater and performance wise similar to Motion Blur,
Depth Of Field has negligible performance impact. Next we have Shadow Quality
This setting controls the resolution of both Sun and Local Shadows and it seems like going
above Very Low applies a form of Soft Shadows as you can see here, and performance wise I really couldn't measure any difference in many areas even when going from Very Low to High. but despite that I'd recommend keeping this
one at Medium just to stay on the safe side. Now let's move on to Sun Contact Shadows, Now contact Shadows in Avatar are Ray Traced because regular Cascaded Shadow maps can't
accurately capture Sun Contact Shadows for small objects and details and this setting
controls the quality of these Ray Traced Shadows and performance wise even when going from Off to High we can see a small 4% cost, but again these are Ray Traced Shadows and if you have a GPU that doesn't support Ray Tracing you might see bigger performance impact when enabling these Shadows. so keep that in mind. Spot Shadows adjusts the number of Local or Artificial lights shadows in a scene as you can see here and this setting doesn't function correctly as each time some options show a different
results and even lower options can have more shadows compared to higher ones
like here we can see that Medium has more shadows in the distance compared to High and performance wise at this scene going from low to Med costs around 4% and to High 8, so Here I recommend Low or Med Spot Shadows. Spot Shadows Resolution controls the resolution and quality of Local or artificial lights shadows, like here we can see that High and Very High options show sharper shadows compared to Low and Med and performance wise going from Low and Med to High costs around 2% and going to Very High 4%. so Here I recommend High. And the last Shadow Setting is Shadow Proxies, In theory, enabling this setting should simplify the mesh or the geometric complexity used to cast shadows which should degrade the quality of shadows cast by objects that have complex meshes or geometry but in this game I couldn't find any scenario where this setting makes a difference in terms of both visuals and performance. even in a scene with a lot of shadows like here we can see the same performance and visuals so for now keep this one enabled just in case it works in certain areas of the game. let's move on to Reflections starting with Specular Reflections Now Avatar uses a hybrid approach when it comes to Reflections, Screen Space Reflections are integrated over Ray Traced reflections to add additional details and objects. and this setting controls the resolution and quality of RT Reflections and performance wise we can see some impact only when going from Very Low to High and Very High with around 4% cost
so Here, I recommend High but again these are Ray Traced Reflections and if your GPU lacks support for Hardware Ray Tracing, increasing the quality of these reflections may lead to a more substantial performance cost. The second reflection setting is Diffuse Reflections
This one controls the quality of Ray Traced indirect diffuse lighting, like here you can see how we get more of the white bounce visible in more surfaces with
Medium and High compared to Low and performance wise going from Low to Med shows negligible impact but going to High costs around 9%
so Here, I recommend Medium but similar to the previous setting, if your GPU can't handle
Ray Tracing effectively, consider using Low instead. And the last Reflection Setting is Environment Reflections Now Avatar doesn't use any Ray Traced Reflections for Transparent surfaces, instead it relies on Real-Time Cube maps
and this setting controls the quality of these Cube Maps reflections as you can see here and performance wise going from Low to High doesn't have any significant impact, so here I recommend High. Let's move on to Volumetric Effects Starting
with Volumetric Clouds this one is straight forward it controls the
resolution of Volumetric Clouds Now all volumetric effects in this game scale with the internal resolution so when using Upscaling you'll see lower res
Volumetric effects and clouds compared to Native Resolution
and Performance wise there is no significant difference between Low and High even at native
resolution so Here, I recommend keeping this one at High
specially if you're using Upscaling. The second and the last volumetric setting is Volumetric Fog and here we can see that Very Low disables
the Volumetric Fog effect completely and going from Low and beyond results in an increase
in the resolution and how detailed this effect is and performance wise at this scene going from Very Low to Low and Medium costs around 4%, to High 10% and to Ultra 16% so Here, I recommend leaving this one at Medium. Let's move on to World Detail Starting with Extra Streaming Distance this one controls the draw distance of far objects and performance wise going from 0 to 5 costs around 9% and to 10 13%
so Here, I recommend keeping this one at value between 0 and 5. Next we have Object Detail and this is one
of the most crucial and demanding settings in this game
it simply controls the level of detail of close objects and vegetation and as a result
using anything lower than 10 will lead to a lot of pop-in close to the camera
and performance wise at this scene we can see that going from 0 to 5 costs around 3%,
to 10 6%, to 15 13%, to 20 19% and finally to 25 26% so here, if you want the best balance between good performance and low amount of pop-in, I recommend keeping this one between 10 and 15. The next setting is BVH Quality
this one determines the geometric complexity or how much geometry should be in the Ray Traced Reflections like here we can see that more geometry for these objects is reflected with High compared to Low. and performance wise I couldn't measure any significant impact when going from Low to High so here, I recommend keeping this one at High. Microdetail should control the density of small details but switching between Low and Ultra in many scenes doesn't show any visual difference and performance wise there is no significant
impact, so for now leave this one at Ultra. Next we have Particle Detail and this one controls the quality and density of particles and Initially, I thought that this might be
another broken setting because I couldn't find any visual difference in some scenes like here but it can exhibit a visual disparity in some
scenarios, like here when throwing this grenade we can see that only the High option shows
particles before and during the explosion and performance wise we can see around 4%
cost between Very low and High so for this one I recommend High but consider lowering this setting if you notice performance drop during intensive combat. Moving on to Scattered Density
this one controls the density of foliage scattered throughout the World as you can see here and performance wise going from Low to Med costs around 3% and to High and Ultra 4%
so here, I recommend keeping this one at least at High because the vegetation density plays a major role in the game's visual presentation. And the last world detail setting is Dither
Fade this one determines if vegetation that come
close to the camera should fade out using dithering texture or not
and performance wise when standing still, this setting can have a big impact around 28% but during typical gameplay there is no significant performance impact when traversing the world, and because this setting can help you see
through vegetation more easily and can give you better gameplay experience
I recommend keeping it enabled Let's move on to the last section which is Textures and let's start with Spotlight Projection
Resolution This setting should adjust the resolution
of precalculated projected textures used by spotlights that do no cast dynamic shadows
and after switching between 128 and 512 in various scenes, I couldn't notice any visual difference at all and the performance is pretty much identical
between 128 and 512 so here I recommend keeping this one at 512. Next we have Destruction quality
This setting should determine the density and level of detail of destruction fragments, but visually I can't tell the difference between Low and High, at least at this example
and performance wise there is a small 2% cost when going from Low to High
so Here I recommend keeping this one at Low to avoid any potential performance drop during intensive combat scenarios. And the last setting is Terrain Tessellation
this one controls the geometric quality and level of bumpiness of the terrain
and performance wise at this scene we can see around 5% when going from Low to Ultra
however this is the worst case scenario and in other scenes like here the difference is much smaller that's why I recommend keeping this one at Ultra. and based on everything we've seen so far,
these are my recommended settings let's now do a quick performance comparison
between Optimized setting and Ultra Preset and I'll be using the in game benchmark at
1440p with DLSS Quality Mode and here at the first scene of the benchmark
we can see on average around 43% difference between Optimized and Ultra Preset
moving forward to the second area, and here the performance increase is much larger with
around 62% and here at the last area, the performance difference is pretty much similar to the first one with around 43% increase when going from Ultra Preset to Optimized settings and for the whole benchmark we can see that
the Optimized settings on average run around 48% better compared to the Ultra Preset. And with that we reach the conclusion of this video thank you so much for watching and for your
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