Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora PC - Best Settings - Digital Foundry Optimised

getting over to optimized settings the PS5 version of the game running in its 60 FPS favored performance mode is a great template for optimized settings even though that PS5 version is invariably going to be using custom low-level optimizations that are platform specific in its own right as detailed in my interview with Ubisoft massive the settings reductions that are made that are Universal are going to be the right indicators we need as to where the sweet spots are for older low mid-range gpus which the PS5 is in the year 2023 so without further Ado here are some of those key setting reductions made on PlayStation 5 to help keep that frame rate up first let's talk about resolution on the PlayStation 5 in the performance mode the output looks to be 1440p with FSR 2 using Dynamic resolution scaling it can go all the way down to 720p according to my counts in those areas where the FPS is consistently below 68 FPS like we can see here where in this shot the FPS is constantly below 60 FPS and if we do count the edges on the bow here we can see a 20 out of 60 count making it 720p internally here in a 4K output the lower resolution on the consoles at times makes itself obvious when looking at plants of vegetation or at moving objects where FSR 2 shows some telltale signs so on a mid-range GPU you definitely want to use dlss or FSR 2 to Target your resolution as a way to keep the performance up as consoles do it and PCs definitely should too Beyond a reduction in resolution a number of key effects in the game on PlayStation 5 have had settings reductions to keep that performance up and we want to do the same thing on PC for example the quality of specular Reflections is reduced on PlayStation 5 so there's usually a great difference in the amount of noise in the reflections on the console version in the 60fps mode and it's one of the most obvious differences that you can see if you look at more mirror-like surfaces as well you can also see that the resolution of the reflection being reduced leads to a kind of blurry look on such surfaces another thing that is done is the roughness cut off is changed where there are less Reflections drawn on more rough objects and when you line up all those factors together we can see that it is closest to the medium setting on PC in regards to roughness cut off resolution and all the other aspects here going to medium over very high improves performance by around 5% on the RTX 370 at 4K dlss performance mode and I would say it is a good pick for an optimized setting for an older mid-range GPU following that same line of thinking the PlayStation 5 reduces diffuse reflection quality in a similar way and it's most visually close to medium and we can see that here where the whitish bounce off the pillar is not there on the medium setting just like it is not there on PlayStation 5 but we know that PlayStation 5 is not the low setting because the low setting has screen space errors in this corner of the scene that are just not there on medium or PlayStation 5 on an RTX 3070 we see an 8% performance increase when going from high to medium even in very small simple scenes like this one and little visual loss so I would definitely recommend medium for my optimized settings here as an example of a r tracing setting that we cannot perfectly match on PlayStation 5 we have bvh quality in my side by sides it's easy to see that the PlayStation 5 has the same geometry roundedness and detail as the high setting as found on PC but when you look closer you can also see that some triangles are just completely missing actually on the PlayStation 5 version which tends to leave little black holes in the geometry in more mirrorlike Reflections this doesn't happen on the PC settings so it's some custom value here still I recommend the high setting on PC as it's perfectly cromulent for optimized settings moving over to post-processing one thing that the PlayStation 5 version performance mode cuts and is smart is to turn off motion blur you'll usually notice it on the most fast moving objects or or when you whip the camera around another thing to notice regarding post-processing quality is depth of field quality on the PlayStation 5 the depth of field has a noise in it and it leaves distinct Halos around objects that have a bright surface Edge most likely the resolution is being reduced internally which is causing these issues you will really not notice this in gameplay though only really with side by sides when doing side by sides though with the PC's various settings we can see that the low setting for depth of field produces those same Halos and noise around the edges of bright objects that are flanked by depth of field and it's just not found at all in that same way on the high setting I likewise recommend the low depth of field setting for optimized settings another good optimization on the console is volumetric fog rendering quality here in side by sides it's possible to see how the volumetric fog resolution is decreased internally on Playstation 5's performance mode leading to less obvious Shadow and light beams piercing through the fog as the resolution is often too low to capture small lighting details when lined up with the PC settings we can see that the quality level most closely correlates with the high option is found on PC and as in many games dropping volumetric fog quality is a simple performance win with the RTX 3070 seeing a roughly 5% performance uplift over that Ultra setting in this scene here which definitely makes it a great optimiz settings candidate following the trend with volumetrics Shadow quality indoors from artificial lights is also reduced in PlayStation 5's performance mode from that very high setting down to high so it shows a bit more aliasing on edges but that high setting still looks respectable for shadow maps at a normal camera distance here in this scene the 3070 gets 3% performance back by going down to the high setting and I recommend it for optimized settings one resolution reduction on PC that is hard to pin down exactly versus the PlayStation 5 is the cloud quality setting due to that Dynamic resolution on PlayStation 5 it's a bit hard to actually line up with that PC version but given the amount of noise and Edge flickering it looks to be around the medium setting on PC based upon all those factors and I recommend it for my optimized settings as well perhaps the most important optimization settings Beyond rate tracing on the PC are going to be in regards to draw distance with the extra streaming distance setting we can see how the trees here on PlayStation 5 transition to more real geometry instead of Impostors at the same distance as the value five on PC I will also recommend five for optimized settings I recommend similar reductions for the object detail setting here compared to PlayStation 5 we can see that the performance mode there is closer to the nine value as found on PC based on this missing plant here at this distance and also we can see that it is not the eight value on PC as the tree trunk is more detailed here on PlayStation 5 and the setting of nine while it is deformed on the value of eight being set to nine is key for performance as you can see a near 14% performance improvement over the max 15 setting here when set to to the console equivalent of 9 and is definitely my optimized settings for low to mid-range gpus and with that these are the key settings from the PlayStation 5's performance mode that are a great Baseline for optimized settings on PC especially for something a little bit older like an RTX 2070 super if you have a higher end GPU than that like an RTX 3070 you can perhaps up the internal resolution more or up specular reflection quality if you like versus the ultra settings and not even the unobtanium ones the optimized settings which are those PS5 settings essentially increase performance by 61% on the RTX 2070 super at 1440p FSR 2 performance mode in this scene here that is a huge amount of performance one back for just what is less precision and a little bit less long range distance detail versus the PlayStation 5 version in that same scene we can see the PS5 here is bottoming out at a 720p internal resolution with a FSR 2 and at an internal resolution of 720p the 2070 super here with evsr 2 has a minor 5% performance lead over the PlayStation 5 in this exact shot here although it must be said this is not exactly a 100% one to one with the PlayStation 5 version as we know from our interview with Ubisoft massive the consoles are relying on a lot more low-level tuning than the PC version and it has special paths like mesh shading that is not available on PC even then when trying to get exact perfectly matching scenes we can see that it's not perfectly matchable due to proceduralism in the game in the scene I just showed off for example in a distant tree like we can see here there's little Violet plants growing there on the PC version which are just not showing up at all on the PlayStation 5 version and no setting change on the PC version will actually make them disappear so the game world might have a bit of Randomness in it with its procedural systems that cannot be accounted for at all in the settings regardless even without the perfect onetoone comparison to the PlayStation 5 version I would say an rtx2070 super class GPU can get you a very console-like experience here when targeting 60fps and it might be even a little better in some regards like image quality largely thanks to dlss and with that being said we've reached the end of this optimized settings video Avatar front use of Pandora is a great running game it has no Shader stutter it has really good menus and it has very scalable options for performance as the optimized settings show us it's just about everything I want in a PC version usually but even with that being said I would still love a tiny bit more love in some places I like dlss in the game but I do not think it interfaces so well with things like clouds and it would be nice if that was looked at we have FSR 3 as I showed off earlier but I would also love dlss frame generation and Xs but that's really about it otherwise we're looking at an incredible PC version here

Channel: DF Clips

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Id: SKQhM34G33c

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2023