Back in 2014 , the original Lords Of The Fallen was one of the first attempts to replicate Fromsoftware's dark souls formula however the game failed to achieve the same level of success and now in 2023 we have a new attempt, this time with a sequel/reboot under the same name Lords Of The Fallen, which is developed by Hexworks using Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen and Nanite and thanks to these UE5 features , the game shines when it comes to lighting and specially the geometric complexity however in terms of the overall
polish and the performance and stability it's safe to say that it falls short. that's why today in this video , we'll discuss the technical issues and as usual we'll examine each
graphics settings performance and visual impact Now the game has a lot of technical problems first we have the unstable Frametime when traversing the game world. like here you can see how the
Frametime graph is all over the place and this is an issue that plagued the majority of Unreal Engine 4 games and it seems like Unreal Engine 5 still has the same problem , which is a shame. another big issue related to the first one is it's the occasional massive fps drops ,like here you can see how every time I roll or I sprint the performance drops
significantly with Low GPU usage and I found that the only workaround for this problem is to exit to the main menu and reload the game and now as you can see , the
performance is much better. and of course as an Unreal Engine 5
with lumen and Nanite , the game is so intensive specially when trying to play
at native resolution with max settings and upscaling will be necessary for
most users to achieve good performance and for that we have DLSS and FSR
and here if we compare the two we can see the usual results , with DLSS offering more stable image while retaining more details and FSR have noticeable noise and
shimmering and during fast animations FSR falls apart as you can see here however The DLSS implementation in this game is not perfect either as it exhibits noticeable smearing in small and thin objects when in motion which causes noise artifacts
around these objects as you can see here and the same problem occurs at
native resolution with DLAA. And upscaling is not the only
way get better performance so let's examine the graphics
settings starting with View Distance Now in this game Nanite is only used for large buildings and rocks. other elements such as foliage , trees and ground details rely on traditional Level Of detail system. and the View Distance setting controls the draw distance and LOD for these elements like here you can see how higher options have more ground details and as a result using Low as you can see here causes a lot of pop-in
and going to medium lower it a little but it's still there. but it still there only High and above look acceptable with minimal pop-in and performance wise going from Low to Med costs around 3% to High 4% and to Ultra 5%
so for this one I recommend High or Ultra. Next we have Shadows which is one of the most demanding settings in this game this one is straight forward it controls the resolution of shadows as you can see here and also the view distance, as Med
and low shadows appear much closer to the camera compare to High and Ultra. and on the performance side going from low to Med costs around 2% however going to High costs 15% and to Ultra 20% so here I recommend Medium but if you have enough performance to spare go for High to further enhance the sharpness of shadows. moving on to Anti Aliasing , this one controls the quality of the game's TAA like here you can see how as I move the camera Ultra looks more stable compare to Low and performance wise going from Low to even Ultra costs around 4%. so for this one I recommend Ultra specially if you are playing at a lower resolution. Now for Textures , Unreal Engine 5 is pretty much similar to Unreal Engine 4 as the texture setting here mainly controls the amount of allocated Vram instead of the actual quality of textures as you can see here all 4 options look identical because as long as you have enough Vram the game will load the highest possible textures, regardless of the texture option you choose and In terms of VRAM usage, during
normal gameplay even at native 1440p with Ultra Textures , the allocated Vram never went close or exceeded 6.5GB but the problem with Textures in this game , is the poor quality of the Anisotropic Faltering used as you can see here and unfortunately
there is no setting to control it the only way to improve it is by using
the driver control panel by going to manage 3D settings then go to program settings , look for Lords of The Fallen and after that go to Anisotropic Faltering and set it to 16x and don't forget to apply. and here you can see now that textures look much better with minimal impact on performance. The Visual Effect Quality setting controls the density of some particle effects like the smoke effect as you can see here and it also affect the quality of water surfaces and water simulation effects like here where Low and Medium have limited simulation effects when interacting with water unlike High and Ultra and on the performance side Low and Medium perform similarly and going to High costs around 2% and to Ultra 3% so here for my optimized settings , I recommend at least High visual effect quality. Post Processing adjusts the quality and complexity of post processing effects like Bloom as you can see here where Low and Med disable this effect while High and Ultra enable it and for this one going from Low to Ultra have negligible performance impact the second effect is Depth Of Field which is more noticeable during cutscenes like here and we can see that Low disable
this effect completely and performance wise in this particle
custcene , going from Low to Med costs 2% to High 4% and to Ultra around 6%. and lastly we have Motion Blur and it's similar to Depth Of Field with Low disabling this effect even if it's enabled in the menu and hare it's hard to measure the performance but on average Medium and High perform almost similarly with 5% cost from Low and Ultra costs 9%. so this one is purely down to your personal preference if you like these effects use High as it enables bloom and provides a higher quality Depth Of Field compared to Medium with minimal impact on the performance. Next we have Reflection Quality this one controls the resolution of
reflections as you can see here and these reflections scale with the
in-game resolution like here can see how Low with DLSS looks low res compared to Low at native resolution and according to the settings menu
description , it says that High and above enabled Ray Traced reflections but I haven't noticed any visible evidence of this , you can see here that even Ultra has screen space artifacts caused by these insects and the biggest indication that there is no Ray Tracing at least here at this area and many other areas I've examined is the performance , where going from Low to even Ultra costs around 4%. so here I recommend Ultra specially
if you're playing with DLSS or FSR moving on to Global Illumination Quality , this one controls the quality of the game's Indirect Lighting and Ambient Occlusion like here you can see how Low and Med look identical and moving to High fix some light
leakage and improves the accuracy of the game's lighting but moving to Ultra enhance the
ambient occlusion and adds more bounced lighting and performance wise going from from Low to Med costs around 1% , to High 4% and to Ultra 22%. so Here I recommend Medium or High. And last but definitely not least we have Foliage Quality this one controls the density of the game's foliage and as a result it also affect the terrain quality like here
you can see how going from Off to other settings drastically change the shape of the terrain and performance wise this is the most demanding one because going from Off to Med costs
around 10% to High 23% and to Ultra 27%. so here even if OFF provides great
performance , I really don't recommend it as it negatively impact the game's visuals , therefor avoid OFF and use Medium and if you have enough performance go for High foliage. Now based on everything we saw so far , these are my recommended settings. Now the game has two worlds layered on top of each other we have the world of the living Axiom and if we use the lamp we can take a look at Umbral the world of the dead
and we can even transition to the other world using the same lamp and from my experience Umbral performs worse compared to Axiom that's why we will do two runs to compare optimized settings and Ultra Preset one for Axiom and one for Umbral so let's start with Axiom and I'm running the game at 1440p with DLSS quality on both sides and here at this area we can see
that on average Optimized settings boost performance by around 70% however in Umbral that difference slightly decreases where we can see that optimized settings perform around *65% better compared to Ultra Preset. And with that we arrive at the end thank you so much for watching and for your time , if you enjoyed the video leave a Like and if not leave a dislike, don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell for future videos and hopefully , I'll see you all in the next one.
Here's a summary of the graphics settings, but I recommend watching the video for more details:
https://preview.redd.it/8k7lstlejsub1.png?width=2560&format=png&auto=webp&s=9c72ec6fbbe5d076ba3ab1cda46263577592dfb5
BTW, does anyone know how the resolution scaler compares to FSR2? I think it uses TSR but I'm only going off early info online, always been curious to see how the two techniques compare when they are able to be compared.