Performance Boost - Volumetric Lighting and Shadow Quality

[Spiffo]

SPECS:
RTX 3080
i5 12600kf
32GB DDR4
1440p

So I've basically rushed the game to get to New Atlantis just for performance testing. The MAST area of New Atlantis is a big FPS killer so I would suggest anyone wanting to see how it runs goes there and picks an angle where you're looking across a dense area.

I'm having extremely varied performance on different settings. I started the game on mostly medium settings with FSR on and Dynamic resolution on at 62% and when I entered this MAST area I was seeing around 52 fps looking across the most populated area.

But after messing with settings for a bit I somehow managed to get it to constant 60 while looking over the same area. This is with FSR on, dynamic resolution OFF with the scaling set to about 60-70%. All settings on high except Shadow Quality on LOW and Volumetric Lighting on MEDIUM.

From my limited testing, Volumetric Lighting looks to be the main killer, at least on my machine. While I was originally seeing 45-50fps, I saw about 54fps after putting Shadow Quality down. And then as soon as I put Volumetric Lighting down from HIGH to MEDIUM my fps went up to 60. I've ran around the MAST area on these settings and it seemed to be stable 60 after changing those settings.

If you've played Fallout 4 you might also remember how the godrays (which are also volumetric lighting) killed the performance on that game as well. So it seems Bethesda still can't optimise that very well.

For those of us used to playing at 144hz, 60fps does feel very choppy unfortunately. But given this game seems to be disgustingly optimised I will happily take a stable 60 over anything else. I'm going to try this DLSS mod next and try and test the FPS around New Atlantis as much as I can before the 2 hour refund window closes lol.

[Reinerei]

I immediately tried this. All settings on high except for Shadow (low) and volumetric lighting (medium)

FSR2 - 70% sharpness
Render Scale - 75%

Its now smooth at 55-60fps using 5700xt

Thanks for this bro

[Spiffo]

Originally posted by Reinerei:

I immediately tried this. All settings on high except for Shadow (low) and volumetric lighting (medium)

FSR2 - 70% sharpness
Render Scale - 75%

Its now smooth at 55-60fps using 5700xt

Thanks for this bro

Ty, would like to see if others see similar results

[CruzPR]

Originally posted by Spiffo:

SPECS:
RTX 3080
i5 12600kf
32GB DDR4
1440p

So I've basically rushed the game to get to New Atlantis just for performance testing. The MAST area of New Atlantis is a big FPS killer so I would suggest anyone wanting to see how it runs goes there and picks an angle where you're looking across a dense area.

I'm having extremely varied performance on different settings. I started the game on mostly medium settings with FSR on and Dynamic resolution on at 62% and when I entered this MAST area I was seeing around 52 fps looking across the most populated area.

But after messing with settings for a bit I somehow managed to get it to constant 60 while looking over the same area. This is with FSR on, dynamic resolution OFF with the scaling set to about 60-70%. All settings on high except Shadow Quality on LOW and Volumetric Lighting on MEDIUM.

From my limited testing, Volumetric Lighting looks to be the main killer, at least on my machine. While I was originally seeing 45-50fps, I saw about 54fps after putting Shadow Quality down. And then as soon as I put Volumetric Lighting down from HIGH to MEDIUM my fps went up to 60. I've ran around the MAST area on these settings and it seemed to be stable 60 after changing those settings.

If you've played Fallout 4 you might also remember how the godrays (which are also volumetric lighting) killed the performance on that game as well. So it seems Bethesda still can't optimise that very well.

For those of us used to playing at 144hz, 60fps does feel very choppy unfortunately. But given this game seems to be disgustingly optimised I will happily take a stable 60 over anything else. I'm going to try this DLSS mod next and try and test the FPS around New Atlantis as much as I can before the 2 hour refund window closes lol.

Thank you bro, that's just what I needed, the game was feeling choppy, such a simple solution, yet I did not see it. Take this bag of points!