Performed my own FPS/settings testing

[Proxy]

This is by no means exhaustive professional work, but I was curious as to which settings have the most gain with the least visual fidelity loss. This is not looking for absolute max FPS but what can be turned down with little impact to image quality.

My test platform was a normal midrange PC with an i5-12600K and 32GB of DDR5 5200. I used two graphics cards, an AMD 7800XT 16GB and an Nvidia 4070ti 12GB as those are what I have on hand. 1440p monitor. Windows 10 Pro, latest version.

I loaded the mission I was currently on and just stood still and checked settings to see where there were gains and how the image quality looked. I used the games default settings as a base which is view distance medium, everything else maximum, anisotropy at 4x (if you played Mercs anisotropy was the biggest FPS hog after RT and made zero IQ difference). I have listed the settings I changed that were outside margin of error. GPU usage was pegged at 99% the entire time for these two cards.

4070ti: base FPS of 76
AA to low 84
Global Illumination to medium 91
Reflections to medium 99
DLSS Quality 126
FSR Quality 117

7800XT: base FPS of 65
AA to low 73
Global Illumination to medium 78
Reflections to medium 82
Post Processing to medium 89
FSR Quality 167

The AMD card showed bigger gains with FSR while Nvidia showed no difference with Post Processing settings. If I was forced to make a choice I would use the 4070ti with DLSS as FSR made the terrain quite blurry.

When I have more time I may run through an entire level logging the data and make some charts but that will be in a few days when I have a day off and I will throw a faster CPU and my 7900XTX into the mix.

[Snoopkirby]

Reducing shadows to high or medium also improves the framerate, maybe even more than Global Illumination and Reflections.

[Hans Moleman]

For FSR i have the idea that some kind of crippled frankenstein-FMF is activ for AMD-GPUs.
Officially it's not supported but it simply feels like it because of the massiv performanceboost itself and the fact that if you activate FSR and limit your framerate to like 60 and below it feels like 30 or less and has massiv inputlag just like FMF generally has at low FPS.
While in quality it looks more like FSR2 at most which shouldn have any option for FMF.
Nvidia users should defnitelly go für DLSS if needed which looks quite good.