Which settings are the FPS killers

[The Hoff]

I have a modest system GTX 780ti, i7 4970k (4.7ghz) 16gb ram and an SSD running at 1080p
The graphic settings are quite overwhelming and I am wanting to run at a constant 60fps.
If I set everything to max, which are the most demanding settings and what should I be lowering first to gain the most performance without compromising too much in quality?
Thanks in advance.

[PetiteKerryJay]

I would have thought that you would have been able to max everything and still get a smooth 60FPS @1080 with that rig! Anyway, the FPS killers are supposedly shadows, smoke generation and reflection; though none of those options make a difference for me as I'm CPU bound.

[wikke1984]

i turned anti out en shadows.
but my fps dont goes higher

[Talkie Toaster]

I'm running 3570K @ 4.2GHz, 8Gb 1600 Vengeance and EVGA 780 SC - you can pretty much max everything apart from the reflections and smoke to get 60+FPS with a full grid, so I suggest maxing everything and then setting both the reflections sliders to medium, do a test and then increase them a notch if your FPS is ok.

Smoke I set to low otherwise I get 40fps on the grid when the red lights go out.

You should be able to max every single setting for practise mode without any other cars on track and get 55-60FPS no worries,

[ExiaRS]

Smoke.

[Wolfsun]

Who told you you have a modest system? They're wrong - that may not be the best gamer setup but it's easily in the top 2%.

Set everything to max and then go to practice. Put the FPS app up on screen and drive something like Monza (there's a turn in that track that is a frame rate killer - on my system at least).

Watch your frames thru a whole lap. If it's not what you consider acceptable escape back to the pits and goto options video and start lowering some things.

Shadows, would be a good to start with. Set AF to 16 and AA to 4 if they're not already there (I've found over the years that in games with lots of action you'll never notice the difference between AA 4 and 8 and quite often 2X AA is good enough. I've read that AF is unusually high user of GPU cycles in AC but in my experience so far I haven't noticed it and have no trouble running my setup (which is 3 years older than yours) at 30 to 45 FPS (with occassional drops to 18 or so) with all the bells and whistles turned on except shadows which I set to low (who the hell notices shadows when they're driving on a narrow track at 150 mph anyway).

ASIDE: Constant 60 FPS - great if you can get it and you setup might be able to in a race with 8 or more opponents on a track with some heavy duty background graphics - but truth is anything over 30 FPS and you won't be able to tell the difference regardless of what the tweakers say (human physiology is human physiology and persistence of vision is almost a constant). You might be able to notice some control lag if you've got really really fast reflexes (I know a guy who's reaction times are down in the .015 range which puts him about 3 standard deviations out in right field and is fighter pilot good, who can notice - but for normal people - ehhhh - if they notice its all in their head).

The reality is that smooth/constant is better than high (in other words a constant 40 is better than an FPS of 60 80% of the time with occasional drops to - say - 30 the other 20% of the time). You want to set your options so that your FPS is fairly constant with no drops to much lower and no peaks to much higher which your brain will perceive (usually as stuttering and has nothing to do with persistence of vision - has to do with a rapidly changing environment - we're tuned to notice motion changes in the environment - it's a survival thing). With an nvidia board like you've got you can turn on adaptive vsync, set prerendered frames to between 2 and 4, turn on texture cache and probably stay in the 50's without issue.

Good Luck with your setup. It might take a couple of hours to tweak the settings to what you want AC to look and perform like but it'll be worth it.

[Vis]

If you are trying to race with 24 AI no system will really do it unless every car is the same model. Smoke and reflections definitely are the killers on FPS. They changed the naming structure a bit so it's hard to be perfectly precise now. Face per frame and cubemap were the biggest hits to performance, but I think they've been combined into some reflection setting with the RC.

I personally have smoke off (when do you ever see smoke in a race besides post race donuts or drifting), motion blur off as it's a terrible in every game, reflections on low, and reflection rendering to static. Everything else in the game is maxed. I easily get 120+ FPS, but I rarely do massive races which is where FPS dips.

[HUNGRY-MAN]

i have a msi r9 290 with a an amd 8350 4.0ghz , 8 gb ram and i have everything maxed out and i get 70-80 fps at 1080p have you tried updating your drivers.

[Vis]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Rusty Shackleford:

i have a msi r9 290 with a an amd 8350 4.0ghz , 8 gb ram and i have everything maxed out and i get 70-80 fps at 1080p have you tried updating your drivers.

In hotlap or practice you might. In a 24 car race I highly doubt it as I'm also on a 290.

[The Hoff]

Thanks for all the advice guys, you all saved me a lot of time in testing. I am just a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to smoothness and frame rate.
I started off with EVERYTHING on max and on SPA with 23 cars. With vsync on I noticed the FPS drop at the grid. I worked my way down with the reflections to a stable normal/medium setting (high quality mirror reflection ticked) which gave me a solid 60FPS.
That left me with just a split second FPS drop at the start on the grid, but even that bugged me. I dropped the smoke to LOW and that eliminated the drop at the start of the race. The smoke still looks good going from "medium to low" so I don't know why the sudden FPS drop with medium. Maybe it needs optimized?

Now I have everything maxed and all boxes ticked apart from -

Shadows - high
Relections - medium/normal
smoke - low

All tracks with 23 cars and all replays play at a solid 60fps without a single frame rate drop.
Cheers guys

[Igelschubser]

Your hardware and in-game adjustments are not the problem. I have a lower system and play with everything on maximum and vsync with 60fps.

[Vis]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Chris:

Thanks for all the advice guys, you all saved me a lot of time in testing. I am just a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to smoothness and frame rate.
I started off with EVERYTHING on max and on SPA with 23 cars. With vsync on I noticed the FPS drop at the grid. I worked my way down with the reflections to a stable normal/medium setting (high quality mirror reflection ticked) which gave me a solid 60FPS.
That left me with just a split second FPS drop at the start on the grid, but even that bugged me. I dropped the smoke to LOW and that eliminated the drop at the start of the race. The smoke still looks good going from "medium to low" so I don't know why the sudden FPS drop with medium. Maybe it needs optimized?

Now I have everything maxed and all boxes ticked apart from -

Shadows - high
Relections - medium/normal
smoke - low

All tracks with 23 cars and all replays play at a solid 60fps without a single frame rate drop.
Cheers guys

It's basically just the start that is killer. However, once you add mods it becomes a lot different as most don't have LODs.

[The Hoff]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Igelschubser:

Your hardware and in-game adjustments are not the problem. I have a lower system and play with everything on maximum and vsync with 60fps.

Are you using a full grid of 23 cars and reflections/smoke on highest settings and not dropping a single frame? You must have a good machine to manage that.
I can manage 60fps on everything maxed but just not at the start of a race. I dropped smoke/reflection settings to enable 60fps at the start of the race.

[Talkie Toaster]

What resolution are you running by the way? I can run 2560x1440 downsampling and hit over 60fps on my machine with a full grid and everything on max apart from smoke and reflections, I find that Spa requires me to turn shadows down and maybe a couple other things to maintain 60 with a full grid depending on what cars are selected.

Smoke can be turned to low and it doesn't really look much different, same with reflections, especially the frequency.

[Vis]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Duane Dibbley:

What resolution are you running by the way? I can run 2560x1440 downsampling and hit over 60fps on my machine with a full grid and everything on max apart from smoke and reflections, I find that Spa requires me to turn shadows down and maybe a couple other things to maintain 60 with a full grid depending on what cars are selected.

Smoke can be turned to low and it doesn't really look much different, same with reflections, especially the frequency.

He said 1080p in first post.

[Talkie Toaster]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Vis:

Ursprungligen skrivet av Duane Dibbley:

What resolution are you running by the way? I can run 2560x1440 downsampling and hit over 60fps on my machine with a full grid and everything on max apart from smoke and reflections, I find that Spa requires me to turn shadows down and maybe a couple other things to maintain 60 with a full grid depending on what cars are selected.

Smoke can be turned to low and it doesn't really look much different, same with reflections, especially the frequency.

He said 1080p in first post.

I need my eyes (or brain) tested, was right in front of me.