OK, let’s talk today about the thing I’m probably
getting asked the most in the comments, which is how to make GAMMA run better.
It’s a complicated question, so let’s establish a couple things before we get started.
This video is based on all the information I could find on the discord, on reddit threads,
and a lot of personal testing. And I do mean a lot of testing.
This testing was done on a real potato, my old desktop computer with a i7-1060-8gb ram,
and my laptop which I’ve been using for all my recent videos with an i7-3060-16gb ram.
So definitely not high end stuff, far from it, more like middle of the pack consumer stuff.
This is only to give you a rough idea anyway, a reference point, because results will vary
widely depending on your rig anyway. The goal here is to strike the best balance
between performance and a good looking game while trying to influence
gameplay as little as possible which I think is a fair and
achievable goal for most people. I will leave a spreadsheet in the
comments with all the settings I tested, how big their impact on performance were, how
much they influence the looks of the game and if it’s something worth tweaking or not.
I ran tests in a lot of different locations, places with a lot of character models,
places with a lot of grass, trees, water… a lot of static scenes to spot all the
little graphical details, and also running across levels and recording the drops in fps
and stuttering to see what’s best. I really tried to cover everything to
find the most balanced settings. This video is in 4 parts. First we’ll talk about
what you can do in windows and in the launcher, then in the base graphical settings of the game,
then the different GAMMA mods and reshade, and we’ll finish with covering
everything about lag and stuttering. Ok, enough talking, let’s get started.
If your game cannot run DX11, well first congatulations, you are a true potatoe owner.
I’ll leave some tips for you at the end of the video, but for now we’ll
assume we can all run it. Next, AVX ON or OFF. Here without going too
deep into the technical details of the engine and why in a lot of cases your CPU is
gonna be the bottleneck for performance, the best way is to simply
try and see for yourself. I ran different scenes with it ON and OFF
and made an average of my FPS across all of them. I didn’t notice any difference in stuttering, but AVX ON runs slightly better for me, like a 3 FPS gain on average. So we’ll keep it on.
Next we’re gonna start the game, open task manager, go to our engine,
details, and on the game executable check that priority is on high,
and in affinity remove core 0. Same thing as for AVX, it might not work for
everybody and it’s hard to tell in advance, so just try it. Personally it gave me a
nice boost, with a 4 FPS gain on average. I found two other tips, one is to go find
your executable in Anomaly – Bin folder, then Properties, compatibility, and there
you disable fullscreen optimization. The other one was to try to
play in Fullscreen Borderless. Both of these gave me slightly worse
performance, so I’m including them just in case you want to try and see for yourself,
but I won’t be using them. Let’s quickly finish with the
launcher before going deeper. We’ll talk about prefetch sounds later
in the stuttering and lag section, so let’s check shadow map.
This setting makes shadows projected on surfaces nicer and cleaner,
which is nice yes, but the performance impact is huge.
If you want to start really noticing a difference you’ll need to set it at at least 2560,
and that’s a 10 FPS hit from the get go. It definitely looks good, but personally I can’t
afford it so I’ll leave it at the minimum. We’ll discuss some tricks to have nicer looking
shadows that don’t eat your performance later. Ok, now we can go over the
game basic graphical settings. Vertical sync is useless, just leave it off.
You can cap your FPS at your display refresh rate, mine is 60 so I should put 60.
Leave a little bit of room if you want to, but it doesn’t really matter.
I’m leaving a much higher value right now because I’m comparing all these settings,
but in practice just cap it at your screen refresh rate.
Lowering world and static objects rendering distance gives a slight boost,
average of 3 FPS across all the scenes I tested. The zone looks less vibrant
and dense, we lose a big sense of depth and I personally don’t think it’s worth it,
the default settings are perfect were they are. If you really want to grab a couple
fps lower them to 60 % at most, more than that is not really worth it.
Dynamic objects are the Stalker and mutants rendering distance,
dont lower it too much, leaving it at the same as your static objects value
is your best bet, or things will just pop in and out of existence, which is not
the best if you want to spot ennemies from far away.
Shadow culling should be on, you won’t notice anything in most cases
and it’s a slight boost in performance. The texture settings have a big visual
impact but a low performance one. With all 3 settings at 50 % the game
looks noticeably worse, for a gain of only 3 FPS on average. So I’d say
lower them to 75 % if you want to, but no need to go lower than that.
You have better chances using a light texture pack if you really want
to gain performance with textures, trying to do it with the
sliders is not very efficient. MIP bias makes everything a little bit
cleaner with 0 performance loss for me, so I leave it at the max.
Anisotropic filtering makes things a little bit sharper, especially
the foliage of the trees for example. It has a slight impact on performance,
around 4 FPS on average. I tried to turn if off in-game and have it
on directly from the Nvidia control panel, if you have a Nvidia card that’s
definitely something you can explore, but the results were not as good and performance
was the same. So here it’s a matter of taste, if you want to grab some extra fps for
little visual loss you can tone it down. Anti-aliasing is really nice, especially
if you don’t like the flickering in the trees for example, but damn is it costly. 2X gave me a straight 25 FPS
drop which is absolutely bonkers, but you get a big visual boost straight away.
4X is the sweet spot visually in my opinion but the performance cost is way too high,
and 8x is just out of the question. So if you’re already struggling to run GAMMA
just leave it off, and 2X is plenty enough if you play in 1080p for
people that can afford it. SMAA does absolutely nothing
for me, so I just keep it off. Ok now grass is interesting, because we
finally start talking about gameplay, not only graphics and performance.
Grass is very, very resource intensive, but without it the game looks pretty bad,
and very high and dense grass will completely hide mutants,
stalkers will shoot you through it and it will eat up your performance,
so we need to find the right balance. I noticed that density is actually much
more resource intensive than size, so I like to slightly up the size, I thing it looks
much better and has a somewhat acceptable cost, around 5 FPS, and I get these 5 FPS back
by slightly lowering the density. If you want to squeeze as much FPS as you can grass is one of these settings that you can completely nuke if you have to. I like reducing the rendering distance to 70 and gain 4 FPS on average
and barely notice any difference. Lower than that you can squeeze 2-3 more
FPS, but it starts getting noticeable in large open areas. Up to you.
I’ll leave it at 70 personally. Grass shadows looks very nice but they will
absolutely destroy your FPS. Just leave it off. Lighting distance and Shadow quality did
absolutely no difference in my testing, which was a bit surprising as I remember
in my Anomaly performance video they had a big influence on
how good the game runs. I tried many different settings, restarted my game
countless time, cleaned my shaders just in case… and nothing. So I’ll leave them as is.
Turning sun shadow gives a huge boost of FPS but completely destroys the lighting so uh,
lets say if you’re not absolutely desperate leave it on.
Sun shadow quality though is probably the best setting to make shadows look nicer.
And it has barely any influence on performance, which is a godsend.
Remember the shadow map in the launcher that could produce nice
clean shadows but for a huge fps cost? Well sun shadow on medium solves this issue for
free by making them nicely blurry and smooth. I tried going higher but didn’t notice
any real difference, so medium it is. Here’s the different results for sun rays mode.
I’d say it’s a matter of taste. Screen space had worse performance which was
surprising, around 4 FPS drop. I think the volumetric set by
default is perfectly fine. The quality and Intensity sliders
did no do much in my testing, visually or in term of performance,
so I just leave them as is. Leave SSAO on SSDO by default. Quality doesn’t
do much, I could barely see any differences especially if your shadow quality that
we set up previously is on medium. Volumetric light is nice. It can
eat up your fps in some cases but I actually had a hard time
finding these examples so I’d say it’s pretty rare, so I just keep it on.
Soft water makes the water much nicer and I did not notice any significant performance loss.
Wet surfaces did absolutely no difference, which was a little bit surprising.
Soft particles and volumetric smoke did absolutely nothing too,
so I just keep them off by default. In the mod configuration menu, sss settings,
you can disable the interactive grass and tone down the shadows.
It’s not much, a gain of 3 FPS on average, but it’s honest work.
It’s also here that you disable all the DOF and blur effects.
It doesn’t really affect performance but you can tone it down to your liking.
Ok now that we’re done with all the basic graphic settings, let’s talk about shaders.
Everything so far was tested with the Default GAMMA shader, you have of course access
to other ones that you can try out, but overall they’ll all have a
slightly to much worse performance than the basic one.
Don’t get me wrong, some of them look amazing, but there’s no point in going down
the shader rabbit hole in a performance video. If you have performance issues you’ll
actually want to tone them down by turning off some addons in mod organizer.
Your game is gonna look widely different, much closer to vanilla anomaly,
but it’s not like it’s gonna look bad, just different. And you will get a really nice boost in performance,
around 15 FPS in my testing on average, which is actually a huge deal.
Ok, so far we covered everything to improve your performance while changing
the gameplay as little as possible, now let’s talk about the nuclear options.
They’re last in this video because they will definitely influence your experience
of the mod, so it’s a last resort, but some of them are very effective
if you don’t have any other choices. All this options will improve
stuttering a lot in most cases too. You can go to ZCP in the mod configuration menu,
and tone down the Stalker and Mutant pop. Reducing the amount of
dynamic anomalies helps too. Then in your Zone settings reduce the Stalker
population and turn off the offline combat. You either gonna need a new game, or wait a couple
in-game days to start feeling the difference. It’s a drastic option and It’s gonna
make the zone less dynamic and lively, but it’s a big boost in performance and for
stuttering, so use it only if you’re desperate. You can also completely disable reshade and
reduce the distance at which the AI is loaded. I’ll leave the link to the framerate
optimization thread on the discord where you can find all the info for
this as I didn’t try it myself. Ticking prefetch sounds will make your
loading times a little bit longer and it’s gonna be more RAM intensive
but it can reduce stuttering. Ok, I truly hope this video will
be helpful for some people as it took a crazy amount of time
to test and record everything, and remember that all the detailed
statistics I will leave in the spreadsheet in the comments are to be taken
with a giant grain of salt.
Your results will most likely
vary widely from what I got, but it’s a good reference to spot quickly
which settings have a big influence either on performance or visual quality,
and you can check the results in the video to see if you like the changes they bring or not
before trying them yourself, which I think can be very useful.
And as usual I probably missed some stuff that could be useful,
so if you have other optimization tips please let me know
so I can pin them in the comments.
