Need For Speed Unbound Graphics Settings Explained - The Ultimate Graphics Settings Deep Dive - 4K

foreign [Applause] welcome back to another graphic settings explained video this time I'm taking a look at Need for Speed Unbound just released a few days ago and it's got a lot of graphic settings to unpack I haven't played a lot of it yet because I've been making this video but what I have played it's quite a fun game there's something about driving around with a fleet of cops chasing you in a game of course that just never gets old you should really watch this video at 4K if you can you'll get the best experience to be able to see the difference in settings there's timestamps in the description so you can get to the settings you want easy the settings I'll show below are not by any means an exhaustive Showcase of everything is setting changes it's designed to give you a good enough understanding of what each change does so you know what the settings do in various things within the game world if you find this video helpful feel free to hit the Thumbs Up And subscribe to the channel or leave a thanks in the comments you can also check out my previous similar video I made for tweaking Forza Horizon 5. I'll link it in the description if I've made any mistakes or you have any corrections or additions feel free to throw those in the comments as well I'm always learning and appreciate anyone taking the time to share knowledge there's three settings I'm going to skip all together because they were very difficult to quantify what they did or they weren't working for me I'll discuss those after I go through all the settings if you know what they do feel free to chime in in the comments and let me and everyone else know some of these settings require a game restart to take effect that is accurate if the game says it needs a restart for the settings to take effect it won't apply the changes you made until you restart the game even though it won't force you to restart I've restarted this game many many times I'll go through some of the basic settings really quickly before we get to the good stuff just to give you an idea of what they do if you're not sure motion blur this will make the game blur parts of the scene the faster you go if you don't like a blurred screen you can turn it off it's a personal preference setting really colorblind mode has different settings for colorblind people so they can enjoy the game better if you're not colorblind leave this off gamma correction is a brightness setting 50 is the default screen mode changes full screen or windowed Etc full screen device gives you the option to choose which monitor the game runs on if you have more than one thank you developers this is a great quality of life option all games should include this rather than just forcing it to run on whatever Windows has set as your default screen screen resolution sets the resolution your game will render at vertical sync or v-sync will set your game refresh rate maximum to whatever your screen refresh rate is turning this off can cause screen tearing effects turning it on will also cap the maximum FPS of your game to your monitor refresh if you're getting screen tearing turn this on Dynamic resolution scaling this is a pretty cool setting turning this setting on also enables DRS Target it allows the game to dynamically lower the resolution as you're playing it to try and achieve the target frame rate you've set it's not a setting I want to use but there's a lot of people playing games using less powerful hardware and rather than their game becoming a slideshow when the graphics get too much for their Hardware this setting will lower the in-game resolution on the fly to try and achieve the DRS Target just an example let's say your game runs 90 of the time at 60 FPS but you get drops lower than that 10 of the time when there's a lot going on on screen using this setting you can enjoy the game at your set resolution for 90 of the game but when those graphically heavy sections occur and you'd get large frame dips the game just switches to a lower resolution on the Fly and then when the heavy scene's over it jumps back to your normal setting people with really powerful Hardware are going to hate this setting people with lower power Hardware might like it up sampler this is upscaling using dlss and fsr2 if your card supports it it allows you to achieve a higher resolution using your card's upscaling engine I won't go into this setting in detail you can search it on YouTube and find out what dlss and FSR is NVIDIA reflex low latency just turn this on if you have a Nvidia card resolution scale this setting allows you to increase the rendering resolution of your game a value of 1 hundred percent will render the game at exactly what you set in the resolution setting for example if you set it to 4K and 100 your game will render at 4K if you have the game set to 4K resolution but decrease the resolution scale to 50 even though the window size your game will be displayed in is 4K the actual game will only be rendered at 50 of that which is 1080p don't use this if you just want a lower resolution just lower the resolution of the game or play around with Dynamic resolution scaling if you want to try and render the game at 8K on your 4K screen set this to 200 this setting crashes the game for me every time I go around 110 or more okay now on to the good stuff Graphics quality has six options Auto low medium high Ultra and Custom Auto lets the game decide for you what it thinks your setting should be based on your hardware and the developers presets for that Hardware low medium high and Ultra are fixed settings presets and custom allows you to tune all the settings yourself to your liking custom is what you want to enable so you can change all of these settings that I'm about to go through texture quality there's four setting levels low medium high and Ultra texture quality changes exactly what the name says it changes the resolution of the textures that are used in game higher setting is higher resolution and lower is a lower resolution texture in the example on screen now I'll focus on the gas pump and the trash can if you look at the writing on the gas pump and the trash can on low you can't even really make out what the writing on them says the jump to medium you can read where it says towel and waste and the gas pump labels become more visible it gets better on high and it's the best on Ultra this setting will control a lot of the textures in game the example you see here is just one example to give you an idea of the differences between each setting level and this will apply to a lot of objects in the game another example of texture quality this time a road not as good as the previous example but if you look at the low quality setting of the road you can see it's a lot more blur than the others there's also slightly less detail in the puddle in the lower settings Shadow quality there's four setting levels low medium high and Ultra this setting controls the quality of shadows as well as the quantity of things that will cast shadows in the game for this setting we'll focus on the scene that you can see on screen now it's set to ultra in this example and if you have a look to the left of the screen you can see the Shadows on the road of the tree the crane and the large metal pole the tree trunk is visible you can see many of the leaves shadows and the crane has a pretty clear Shadow let's take a look what happens when you change between each setting level starting with low on the left you can see that there's not a lot of Shadow shown here the crane is completely gone from the seam only a few leaves the trunk is not visible and there's a chunk of Shadow there that doesn't really match anything in the scene the large metal pole is there but it's a bit blurry compared to the other settings you'll also notice that I've synchronized a car drive across each detail level so you can see the shadow of other cars on low the other cars in the world have no Shadows except for police cars your car and police cars will have a shadow on low but all other cars have no Shadow all cars will have shadows from medium upwards onto medium and you can see the metal pole now has a higher resolution Shadow and isn't as blurry as it was on low we can now see the tree trunk Shadow and the number of tree leaves Shadows is higher high and there's even more tree leaf Shadows added and then on to ultra where we see a lot more tree leaves more branches and the crane Shadow has come back into the scene this is a really nice setting to have on Ultra if you have the GPU power Medium as an absolute minimum texture filtering there's four settings low medium high and Ultra this setting is basically an isotropic filtering it'll make textures higher quality in the distance depending on the angle and setting that you have this set to it doesn't apply to all textures though I can only find this working on terrain textures this is a really good example of this setting because it shows how the effect works but also shows that it only works on certain textures like the side of the road dirt but not on the road texture at all take a look at the low setting see the dirt slash rocks on the side of the road if you look from the bottom up notice how the texture starts off with a little more clarity but then gets blurred pretty quickly as you go upwards into the distance now compare it to the medium setting see how the texture retains its quality from the bottom of the picture up to a higher Point compared to the low setting now look at Ultra compared to low you'll notice it retains its higher quality much further into the distance compared to low there is no difference in this setting between medium and high I took many screenshots and compared them there is not a single difference there also note that this setting does not apply to Road textures it seems to only apply to dirt grassy textures mostly ambient occlusion there's five setting levels off ssao hbao aao and aa04 the game's description for this setting is soft Shadows added to objects and textures it's a simple yet accurate description of what ambient occlusion is this setting adds a very subtle yet really nice shadow effect to objects where there should be shadows cast from environmental lights as an example if a sun is shining on a building in a scene and due to the angle of the sunlight certain objects should be shadowed or parts of the building should be shadowed because they're behind the light source for example a certain part of the building is blocking the light behind that area should be shadowed if that makes sense that's what this setting does with this turned off the game environment does look very fakish very 90s 3D game environment the best way to demonstrate this is to flick through screens with the setting off and then on with a particular setting multiple times so you can see it on and off quickly that's what I did for about 15 seconds for each one of these SSA is up first it stands for screen space ambient occlusion it's the lowest quality version of this effect in NFS Unbound and it's almost not visible at all in the scene see the area where I put the Green Arrow the edges of the building you'll probably see very little to no change with SSA next up is hbao which stands for Horizon based ambient occlusion this setting level has a much more pronounced effect and I'd say use this as a minimum if you can you can see where the Green Arrow is the shadow shading you can also see it across a lot more of the middle building on the left side of the building and on the bottom as well aao is next which I don't know what AO stands for it's the first time I've come across this if you know let me know in the comments what I do know is it's a much stronger shadowing effect you can see a much more pronounced Shadow effect on the middle building but we're now also getting some shadowing on the building to the left and the right and also the gas station is getting a little Shadow action as well and finally aao full this is similar to aao in strength of the effect it's slightly less of a shadow effect but it has a different type of effect as well I prefer aao for this option but I'd say try to use hbao as a minimum if you can it's a personal preference thing really but ssao hardly has any effect geometry detail there's four settings levels low medium high and Ultra geometry detail controls the detail of various objects in the game world but not all take a look at the scene on screen now with the four different detail levels you probably won't notice much difference between each item but there are definitely differences you can pause and see if you can find anything it's a game of photo match but I'll point out some differences shortly and then show you the scene side by side again so you can see some of those differences see the arrows pointing at the blue plastic covering the stuff in the yard the billboard sign the metal barrier and the top of the building these are not all the things but it gives you an idea of some things this setting controls I'll flick through this setting on off and Ultra so you can see the obvious differences and then you can jump back in the video if you want and look at all four detail levels to compare anti-aliasing there's three setting levels off FXAA and TAA anti-aliasing is smoothing of jagged edges on objects we've all seen them before 3D games objects they have Jagged edges on things anti-aliasing is what you use to try and smooth out those Jagged edges we'll go through the settings and examples and then I'll talk about this setting a little more and how in this game it really makes a scene blurry with a a turned on if you aren't watching this in 4k it's going to be hard to follow here I also took these screenshots at 1440p not 4K as this helps to showcase the effect better if you look at the top of the bridge where AA is off you can see it has a fairly Jagged Edge on the angle section you can see it pretty well FXAA Smooths this a little bit but not a lot the jagged edges are still pretty pronounced where ta Smooths them even more but you can still see them here's another scene if you take a look at the black window frame you can see how with AA off you can see the jagged edges fairly well but when TAA is on they're almost not visible at all just another example I personally run a off in this game I'm running at 4K resolution so the jagged edges are less visible but I found that the AAA settings give this game a not very nice blur effect over the entire scene Tia is the worst but FXAA does it as well if you're one of those people that hates the blurry nature of some games and this game has that film blur reflect quite strong try turning off AA it definitely cuts down a lot of the blur terrain quality there's four setting levels low medium high and Ultra this setting controls certain aspects of mostly off-road terrains it's a very subtle change to things like rocks and parts of rough terrain but not all rocks on a Terrain take a look at this first example the setting is controlling the rocks that you can see in the ground here I can't see any difference at all between low and medium but when you get to high you can see that the rocks are more pronounced on high than they are on low and medium and if you look really closely they're ever so slightly higher resolution on Ultra than they are on high but it's really hard to see that difference and you probably won't notice it through YouTube compression the second example showcases what I just said about this setting controlling some terrain objects but not all again we can see that there's basically no difference between low and medium however when you get get to high you can see that there's more terrain rocks popping out of the ground and you just can't make out any difference between high and Ultra but no the brown rocks in the center of the screen don't change at all with either setting level this setting is really more about objects that are in the ground as opposed to things that are sitting on the ground there's other terrain items that change with this settings but you get the idea vegetation quality there's four setting levels low medium high and Ultra this setting should probably be called vegetation quantity as opposed to Quality I mean I guess the word quality is open to interpretation but this setting controls how much vegetation there is in a scene as opposed to making any one piece of that vegetation actually render at a higher quality the easiest way to see this at work is look at the top right of the screen on the low setting you can see there's a dirt patch there and go down the screen on the right side and watch as that patch fills with more grass each time the setting is turned turned out I call it grass but it's more like a glitched texture of some sort but that's actually what some grass textures look like in this game a game that was made in 2022 on the highest level of details and what I was saying earlier about this being a quantity setting as opposed to a quality setting there's no single piece of vegetation in the low setting screenshot that gains a higher quality in any of the higher settings as you go down the page it simply adds more plants trees and those flat Brown things to the scene that's it for vegetation it's a really good example that explains it well depth of field there's four setting levels low medium high and Ultra this is a really difficult effect to capture how it works in game it's basically a movie style effect where some of the scene is out of focus they use this in movies a lot and it creates a nice cinematic effect the problem is with all the effects in this game it's really difficult to capture just this effect when you're stationary this effect does nothing at all so I can't capture it and the differences between it just know that it makes part of what you see on screen out of focus somewhat often the backgrounds but not usually the center of the screen or the object of the scene like your car like when you're taking a portrait picture and the person is in focus and the background is out of focus similar type of thing what I can show you though when you change the setting in the menu it sort of shows you what it does to the current scene you're on when you paused and it exaggerates the effect so I can sort of show you what it does it's not really accurate but it'll give you a bit of an idea just look at the fence in this example the car is the object of focus low and medium do nothing but when you get to high it blurs the fence quite heavily and when you set it to ultra it blows the fence but it's a more of a softer effect I'll link to a short YouTube video that explains it a bit better reflection quality there's four setting levels low medium high and Ultra this setting controls the quality of Reflections that you see in game starting from the top on low so if you look at the puddle to the left of the car you can see a small Single Tree reflecting in the puddle also if you look at the trunk slash boot of the car you can see that there's really no objects being reflected there either just a little bit of the sky same with the puddle on the right side of the car no real object Reflections when cars drive past the puddle on low they don't reflect at all in the water puddle now take a look at this setting on medium and you can see we have a lot more of the environment around us reflecting in the puddle on the left and the right as well as Reflections on the trunk slash boot of the car cars also show Reflections in the water now as they drive past a little note here when you change this setting any higher than medium you don't get any more objects being reflected you just get a higher resolution reflection as you go up in the setting on high the resolution of the objects that you see the reflections of are very slightly higher than they are on medium and Ultra gets a little bit more of a bump up as well comparing medium to ultra I can see the difference but it's not a huge difference and I'm not sure it's going to translate so well with YouTube's compression algorithm another example of Shadows for you the same results with this example low has most of the items missing from the reflection in the water and cars have no Reflections as they drive past medium shows all the objects but at a lower resolution and the resolution increases on the reflections as you go up to ultra this example shows the resolution change a little better if you look at the street light reflection on medium and then on Ultra you can see a bit clearer the resolution difference between the settings you're probably going to need to be viewing this video at 4K though so I think you should definitely set this to medium as a minimum you just lose so much on low now let's talk about the three settings that I skipped those are effects detail post-process quality and lighting quality the reason I skipped these is that I was struggling to identify exactly what they changed in the scene I'm not sure exactly what effects detail changes I did try to jump between the lowest and highest option for this and go in game and create what I think these would control screenshotting and comparing things but I just couldn't pinpoint what it was changing I'm not so sure about the specific effects this setting applies to I thought it might be particle effects but I can't see any difference in those between low and Ultra post process quality is a similar thing again a lot of the other settings I just went through are post-processing effects in themselves the effects get applied to the scene after it's created so I'm not really sure what this setting changes exactly I spent a lot of time just trying to compare identical scenes in screenshots and videos and I couldn't work out what it changes lighting effects should be obvious it should control the quality of lighting in game especially at night there's a massive amount of lighting in the game at night car lights street lights other environmental lights during the day there's sunlight lots of it I would have thought this setting will control the quality of all that lighting I compared many many scenes with this setting on low and maximum to try and find a difference but nothing happens when changing this setting there is a possibility that these settings get locked to a certain level when you have other settings set to a high level I always test everything with Graphics turns up to the maximum and just change the single setting I'm testing so it's possible and I've seen it in other games that certain settings are linked to each other and when a particular setting is set to say Ultra then several other settings get tied to ultra as well usually when this happens the item in the menu is forced to the highest settings so you can see I'm pretty sure that's happening here at least with lighting anyways but the menu allows you to change that setting still to a lower option I could probably work this out if I spend more time on it but it could take a day or two of testing and I'd like to get this video done if you have any insights into these three settings feel free to post in the comments and let myself and everyone know I hope you found this guide helpful and it helps you tune your graphic settings to something you're happy with but still plays with the decent FPS if the video did help you feel free to hit the like And subscribe button this game's not supposed to be a Sim driver it's just just a fun Need for Speed Style game so enjoy it I haven't connected a steering wheel to this game yet but I do own three of the supported wheels so maybe I can do a video on explaining the steering wheel and the settings and how they work or maybe not I'll see how it goes if it's anything like previous Need for Speed games they were awful to drive with the wheel so let's hope this has changed this one might be better but no promises on that thanks for watching and I'll see you all next time

Channel: Hectic Run

Views: 14,330

Keywords: need for speed unbound, need for speed unbound graphics settings, nfs unbound graphics settings, nfs unbound

Id: vfpuxgWkHGk

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2022