Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora PC vs PS5 Graphics, Optimised Settings, FSR 3 Breakdown

digital vry is sponsored by the powerful upgradable MSI MPG infinite X2 desktop PC featuring Intel core processors and Nvidia RTX 40 series Graphics as I discussed last week Avatar frontiers of Pandora is a beautiful game that pushes technology hard to enable some truly amazing visuals but how can we get it to scale down while still approaching a good 60fps on older mid-range PC components that that's what this video is primarily going to be about today getting Evar to scale down and still look great in the process of making those optimized settings here though I will definitely talk about that game user experience I'll also talk about the unobtanium settings and what they do visually and I'll also compare and contrast to the game running at 60fps Targets on PlayStation 5 as PlayStation 5 is a great insight and starting point as to how we'll make optimized settings to get 60fps on Lower to Mid midrange PCS but before I get into all that let's talk about user experience as it's a highlight of Avatar in this game there isn't really a very noticeable Shader pre-compilation step when you play it the first time but it does occur according to my conversation with the developers and when you play the game I think you'll notice that there's really no improper High frame time issues in this game there isn't really any persistent stutter the frame time graph when you play will be smooth so even though Avatar is an expansive ambitious game you'll tend to have really frame times and no stutter getting into the menu one thing you will notice is how much can be changed to make the experience your own I talked about gameplay tweaks in my first video which are great but for graphic options you have a whole lot to tweak here as well and it's in those classic Ubisoft style menus which are very good you know what the settings will do you'll know how much they'll affect your vram with a great meter you'll see the visual change of the setting with a preview image and you'll get an idea of how many options there are per set based upon the little Pips beneath the quality level to back up the great menus you also have the game providing you with a benchmark which reminds me of the one we saw in returnal on PC but perhaps it's even more in-depth I love this Benchmark and even though it is not a pure gameplay first person camera with combat in that sense it is representative of the higher load the game will have in its more intense moments so you can definitely use it to gauge how the game will run at its worst and then you can adjust settings from there definitely Bravo to Ubisoft massive here this is indeed probably the best port I've had the pleasure to review this year based upon this user experience alone as I mentioned in my last video one of the great things is that developers have an extreme graphical preset locked away with a command line option when you add the command line option shown on the screen right now it will unlock the max quality setting in the menu for a variety of the graphical options but not all this is called unobtanium settings now I want to talk about them briefly before I actually Det tell them as it's an interesting philosophy now usually I am against locking away things out of the menu in games but guess what I've kind of found out over time that people on PC in general cannot always control themselves unfortunately people can tend to turn things up to the highest settings online with mid-range PCS and then complain on forums or in reviews about performance with not much thought into what the highest settings actually mean in a game it happened with the first crisis for example and I kind of think has left a lasting scar on the entire gaming industry and how PC versions are approached so I'm kind of philosophically against the idea of locking out settings out of that menu I get it completely and I actually respect it and in the end here massive have probably saved themselves a lot of headaches by doing so it being available outside the menu leaves it up to the power users to try out and everyone else can just have Ultra in the menu and have all the vanity too but I digress what do these unobtanium settings do visually in practice the biggest visual difference with them comes primarily in resolution increases per each setting when volumetric fog lighting is set to Max we can see far greater detail in the lighting and shadowing in that intermediate fog volumes that are in the near to Midfield of the camera it will greatly enhance them same with Cloud quality at Max the amount of noise that can potentially occur in the clouds is reduced although I will say most people are probably not going to notice big differences with the high below it with the shadow maps from the Sun this is one of the greater resolution increases and it's keenly seen when set to Max where the highest setting before that really did not hit the heights that it really should have you can see the same with indoor Spotlight shadows as well where the unobtainium Mac settings really clear them up a lot less aliasing there in the shadow Maps the least important unobtanium setting I would say is the one for transparency which adds a subtle few more objects into the game's Cube map Reflections which partially update in real time by the way in a side by side you can scarcely see the difference though and once again I would love to see RT transparency Reflections in this game instead of Q maps for the rate Trace settings the unobtanium Mac settings for diffuse lighting primarily upgrade the resolution as far as I can tell on the medium setting for example you can see that there's both axes scaling with the rtgi which leads to fuzzy edges and weirdness occurring within the rtgi itself it looks a bit grayer and a lot less defined with High it almost looks like one of the axes is only scaling resolution so you start to get vertical edges having aliasing on them on that high setting and an overall less defined look the Mac setting though seems to be native input resolution here and it creates very pristine GI results with no extra added aliasing into the image for specular GI Reflections the Mac setting doesn't seem to greatly increase resolution beyond what is already offered by the ultra mode if it is doing it well then it is not greatly changing the amount of specular aliasing as we can see here where the kind of Speckles look more or less the same and it doesn't really change too much about the very mirror likee Reflections that you can get out of some of the water surfaces in the game they look very similar between the second highest setting and the highest Max one but what you can see with the max settings for Reflections is the added skinned objects to Reflections so like here we can see the na'vi reflected there in a simplified form in the reflections on the water here which do not show up at all on the lower settings they only show up in screen space this will mean less screen space errors and is pretty neat altogether the unobtanium settings will pump up the quality level for a number of Q effects you can turn them up if you want but this is mainly meant for gpus of the future I would say Beyond unobtanium there are two things I want to mention the first is how the game has a software path for its rate traced effects for gpus that do not support direct xray tracing to show you what this looks like I'm going to disable dxr on an an Nvidia GPU you can do this with Nvidia gpus by utilizing profile inspector and in that program as you can see here there's a flag to change how it approaches dxr to disable RT wholly on the GPU so when a game loads up the game will think that your GPU does not support dxr you can test this yourself out if you're curious but it should work with dxr off you can load up Avatar and you can see the software path for R tracing that Mass have been made here and guess what when you put it side by side with the hardware path you'll see that it looks looks really similar that is very different than what epic have done with ui5 where their software RT path has definitely visible inferior quality on the RTX 490 I loaded it up on though the performance difference is key in the first scene I just showed off here we can see an 18% performance increase by utilizing Hardware rate racing not too much but it is a small scene with not very many objects in it in the forest scene there is a 66% performance increase by utilizing Hardware RT on the RTX 490 at this 4K dlss performance mode unobtanium settings so yeah Hardware RT is used in Avatar to greatly accelerate performance the last thing I want to talk about before moving on to optimize settings and more is upscaling and frame generation first with frame generation as I've seen a lot of commentary online about how FSR 3 frame generation in this game now supports vrr and I would say the answer is a little bit more complex than yes yes it does support vrr because you can see it displaying variable refresh rate below the refresh rate on vrr displays older versions of FSR 3 frame gen never did that they would always just stay at the max refresh rate not actually utilizing vrr but is the vrr presentation smooth and here I think the answer is mostly a no but also sometimes a maybe the basic issue is that the frame times with FSR 3 are a bit erratic you can get short runty frames and then longer frames mixing together and alternating this means that under a vrr scenario you can see a greater variation in the time in between displayed frames and the refresh rates that are changing with that do not create the appearance of smoothness even though vrr is activating properly the frame times in the game can often have a great difference in length which gives the appearance of hitching and uneven look at those times when you're below the refresh rate of the monitor I have noticed this in the areas of the game that are more taxing and it seems to occur the most visibly in those areas where there's a lot going on so the open world combat traversal and those heavier GPU loaded scenes but in indoor areas or small cutscenes which are not intense on the GPU you'll have more normalized frame times I think where vrr should actually look pretty smooth so the short answer is vrr works with FSR 3 in Avatar but due to frame time inconsistencies it will not always look like a smooth presentation in fact it will present a lot more like vsync jutter even though vrr is on and is indeed working so I will definitely still recommend utilizing vsync with FSR 3 and trying to maintain frame rates at your max refresh rate with FSR 3 that will make it much more smooth with regards to image reconstruction I have two things to say for one we see the same FSR and dlss differences in this game that we've seen in the past moving objects with FSR has the same disclusion fizzle behind it that we've seen in other games and also that kind of fuzzy look on the edges of moving objects which you definitely don't see with the LSS and I think you can see it pretty well in these moving insects here that I've chose to highlight avsar also has that kind of ghosty pixelated look with particle effects that I've showed off in other games you don't really get that with the LSS here and you definitely don't get some of the weird effects that it has with the smoke and the objects behind the smoke as we see in this scene FSR is also not very Adept at suppressing aliasing on movement especially specular aliasing which you will often see at night time or when the game rains and you'll get less image stability there than for example with dlss with that being said though dlss definitely has issues in this game the first is an issue with clouds the cloud volumetric rendering this game with the LSS has stability issues and you can see it jittering now I'd imagine this is happening due to sample positions not aligning with dlss and I imagine the same thing would occur if XS is integrated in the future actually FSR does not have this issue in this game a similar thing happens with water Reflections here there is a small visible Jitter in water reflections with dlss at lower resolutions and once again I imagine this is maybe due to sample positions dlss also has another issue due to the dlss preset being used as I've shown in games with Hitman 3 or in death Loop and a few path tracing mods the default model 4 dlss that ships in versions past 2.5.1 has issues with smearing in certain light condition conditions and when the camera is perfectly still when it occurs it looks like this basically the game will not stop smearing movement on certain geometry or particles until the camera moves again which you can see here and then it stops but if the world position is halted again you'll see that smearing starting over it's really not goodlooking and I recommend anyone who wants to use the LSS here to try and tweak it perhaps to use preset C preset C does not have this issue as we can see in this comparison here if you don't know how to change dlss presets using the dlss tweaker you can find online you can just dump the 2.5.1 dll as found on tech power up in the game folder here I would love to see DSS's issues with clouds and the preset issue be worked on for future patches but that is about it as I said earlier the user experience in Avatar is actually incredible great settings great menus and a genuinely Great Frame time experience getting over to optimize settings as I said at the beginning of this video the PS5 version of the game running in its 60fps favor 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 indic ators we need as to where the sweet spots are for older to 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 60 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 offr 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 blury 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 3070 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 racing 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 G 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 and 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 postprocessing 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 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 produc 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's settings we can see that the quality level mostly 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 optimized 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 optimize 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 imposters 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 Clos it 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 8 being set to 9 is key for performance as you can see a near 14% performance improvement over over the max 15 setting here when set 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 370 you can perhaps up the internal resolution more or up specular reflection ction 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 FSR 2 and at an internal resolution of 720p the 2070 super here with FSR 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 without the perfect one toone comparison to the PlayStation 5 version I would say an RTX 2070 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 xss but that's really about it otherwise we're looking at an incredible PC version here if you did enjoy this video please hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry post a video support us on patreon comment below follow on Twitter and before I end this video I would like to thank Muhammad who helped me get some of the optimized settings in this video and some of the PlayStation 5 settings so thank you so much Muhammad but here I am as I said at the end of this video and I'm just going to bid you farewell [Music] msi's MPG infinite X2 PC features powerful Intel core processors the latest RTX 40 series graphics and supports ddr5 memory up to 128 GB with Advanced CPU cooling via msi's own 240 mm all-in-one cooler and system thermals handled by the Silent Storm cooling 2 solution every major component in the system is upgradeable with a toolless design for easy access a tempered side panel and MSI Mystic light RGB adds to the athetic and the latest Wi-Fi 6E networking is supported check the link in the video description for full details on the MSI MPG infinite X2 the all new MSI gaming [Music] desktop

Channel: Digital Foundry

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Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023