Can I get some graphical and performance explanations?

[PersonalC0ffee]

Can someone explain what all these do? Wow, I'm impressed. I have never seen so many performance and graphical options in a game before.

[dogen]

Which ones do you want to know about?

[PersonalC0ffee]

Originally posted by dogen:

Which ones do you want to know about?

All of them.

It will be a long list if someone actually does it and I'd be most appreciative.

[MASTAN]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/257510/discussions/0/364039531220811265/

[PersonalC0ffee]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/257510/discussions/0/364039531220811265/

That's some of it. Thanks for this.

I wish there was a more comprehensive one.

[dogen]

Originally posted by Qwerty557:

That's some of it. Thanks for this.

I wish there was a more comprehensive one.

I'll try to go over the whole list later today, sounds like a fun little project.

[PersonalC0ffee]

Originally posted by dogen:

Originally posted by Qwerty557:

That's some of it. Thanks for this.

I wish there was a more comprehensive one.

I'll try to go over the whole list later today, sounds like a fun little project.

I'll be looking forward to it, it expands my knowledge and teaches me things.

It will also help me figure out what to fiddle with to improve my experiences.

[dogen]

You can tell at what point this got tedious(about halfway through the gpu and cpu settings lol).

If you want a more detailed explanation of something I glossed over, just ask.


GENERAL

Graphics API
The graphics programming interface used by the game. Choices are D3D9, D3D11, OpenGL, and Vulkan which is still being developed. Direct3D 11 seems to perform best for now.

Enable V-Sync
Synchronizes frame updating with the screen refresh, eliminating tearing. If a frame takes too long it has to wait for the next refresh, cutting your framerate in half(at least for that frame, who knows what happens next).

Triple Buffering
Allows the GPU to keep working on another frame while waiting for the display refresh. Prevents frame rate from halving if screen refresh is missed.

Window mode
Borderless - A full screen window that allows for faster minimizing, and will automatically enable v-sync and triple buffering through windows.
Windowed - A resizable window.
Fullscreen - You know what this is.



Field of view
How wide(maybe tall as well?) of a viewing angle you have while playing.


Color options
obvious


CPU SPEED

Multi-Threaded Rendering
Uses a second core to submit draw commands to the graphics driver/gpu. I assume this improves performance for 3-4+ core processors(at least in scenes where this is a bottleneck), but my dual core handles much better with it off.

Rendering distance
How far away to draw certain things. Not sure about what things this applies to other than some bushes.

Dynamic Shadow distance
How far away to draw shadows of dynamic objects(like the floating ball things, idk what they're called.).

Debris shadow casting
Debris cast shadows...

Mirror reflections
Mirros cast real time reflections...

Reflection detail
obvious

Reflection bias
How far away models are swapped out for lower quality ones in reflections.

Dynamic Decals
obvious

Max active sounds
obvious



GPU SPEED

Max 3D Rendering MPix
Limits the internal rendering resolution(everything except for the hud) and upscales back to your main resolution. Can be useful if you need more performance, but you'll lose detail and sharpness thr lower you go.

Rescaling Filter
Different image filters to help improve clarity when upscaling. I'm not an expert on these, but I would recommend bicubic, sharpen-bicubic, or lanczos.

Texture Filtering
Improves the look of textures when they're smaller/larger than the actual texture or when viewed at an angle. Trilinear also smooths between mipmap levels(smaller textures used at distance). This doesn't need to be an option, leave it on trilinear.

Anisotropic filtering.
Makes textures look much sharper when viewed from angles. Higher settings will apply this to greater angles with respect to the camera. Set it to 8x or 16x and forget it.

Bump Mapping Distance Bias
How far away to render bump maps(textures that add fake depth).

Multi-Sample Antialiasing
Reduces jaggedness on edges of geometry by taking multiple samples per pixel and blending between them. Can be costly and doesn't usually help with aliasing anywhere else. 4x is the sweet spot usually, but it's worth experimenting with.

Parallax Mapping
Essentially better bump mapping with greater depth. These options set the method of parallax mapping(don't ask me) and the quality of the parallax mapping method.

Transparency Antialiasing
Extends multisampling so it works on transparent textures(like grass and leaves).
Options are sharp and smooth, experiment to find your preference.

Super-Sample Antialiasing
Like multisampling, but instead of extra samples just for geometry this takes extra samples for every pixel(2-4)! Very expensive, but covers all sources of aliasing.

Fast Approximate Antialiasing(FXAA)
The much maligned FXAA. Actually, it's not too bad. It basically looks at each frame like an image, and blends pixels based on certain patters it looks for. Textures to lose a bit of sharpness and it doesn't do a handling shimmering during motion very well, or objects smaller than a single pixel. But it's super cheap and does a decent job, so it might be worth it.

Ambient Occlusion
Draws shadows where objects come near each other, to simulate them blocking ambient light.
The precision and quality options should help with objects too far away causing shadows, or objects having too much shadowing around them(the halo effect), and perhaps the smoothness of the shadows themselves.

Fast Lights
Enables/disables certain dynamic lights.

Fast Lights in mirrors
Fast lights are rendered in mirrors.

No dynamic lighting
Pretty self explanatory

Rendering LOD Bias
Set the distance before models are switched to lower quality versions.

Mirror Quality
Set the quality of reflections.

Allow Refractions
Enable distorsion/waviness of things in/under water.

Smooth particles and shores
Smooths particles and shoreline textures when they intersect with other surfaces

Max Shadow Size
Resolution/detail of shadow maps.

Shadow Antialiasing
Reduces jaggies on shadows.

Shadow Blurring
Smooths out blockiness of shadows. Makes a big difference.

Shadow Trilinear Dithering
Uses dithering(looks like a stippling kinda effect) to smooth between shadow cascades(think of them like mip maps but for shadows). Doesn't look very good, so I don't recommend it.

Shadow Trilinear Span
Applies an adjustable amount of trilinear filtering to transitions between shadow cascades. Looks much better than the dithering, but too high blurs shadows a bit.

Shadow Smoothing
Adjusts softness of shadow edges. Around default seems the best.

Render Crumbs
Crumbs are basically grass/bushes.

Allow far crumbs
Draw crumbs far away, or not.

Crumbs Variety
Higher number of different crumbs.

Crumbs cast shadows
Doesn't seem to work..

Crumbs density bias
Lowers/raises crumb density.

Crumnbs distance bias
Lowers/raises distance to render crumbs.

Bloom
Enables/Disables/sets quality of light bleeding/glowing effect.

Zoom Blur
Not completely sure. Some blur effect.
Thought it might be related to zooming in with middle mouse, but doesn't seem like it.

Light streaks
God rays?

Heat shimmer
obvious

Depth of field
Blurring to simulate objects out of focus

Gaussian blur
full screen blur for when you take damage I assume

Channel offset
a.k.a. chromatic abberation
Hard to explain in words, look it up. Pretty sure it's used extremely lightly in this game.

Particle density
Adjusts particle count.

Lens flare quality
obvious



GPU MEMORY
Adjusts the size of textures, and whether they they are compressed(could be useful).

Streaming buffer size
How much video memory to stream textures into. Higher amounts will result in less texture pop-in, but will use more video memory.

Level caching
Seems like higher settings pre load less of the level into memory making loading faster, possibly increasing loading/stuttering while playing(?) Not 100% sure.

Max Fps
obvious

[PersonalC0ffee]

I thank you very much for your time in writing that.

Not going to quote post cause it is so long.

You told me to list ones I wanted to know more about

Dynamic Decal

Also why do plant shadows look like such a mess, even at Ultra?

[dogen]

Originally posted by Qwerty557:

I thank you very much for your time in writing that.

Not going to quote post cause it is so long.

You told me to list ones I wanted to know more about

Dynamic Decal

Also why do plant shadows look like such a mess, even at Ultra?

Decals are images that are drawn on top of a texture. Stuff like bullet holes. Not sure what this game uses them for.

Do you mean shadows from trees? Are they too blurry for you or too pixelated?

[PersonalC0ffee]

Originally posted by dogen:

Originally posted by Qwerty557:

I thank you very much for your time in writing that.

Not going to quote post cause it is so long.

You told me to list ones I wanted to know more about

Dynamic Decal

Also why do plant shadows look like such a mess, even at Ultra?

Decals are images that are drawn on top of a texture. Stuff like bullet holes. Not sure what this game uses them for.

Do you mean shadows from trees? Are they too blurry for you or too pixelated?

Pixely and yes the trees.

[dogen]

Well, I assume it's because shadows are just really expensive to render at high detail. I wonder if there's a console command to set shadow resolution to some ridiculous size.

Anyway, try reducing shadow anti aliasing, seems to reduce the pixelation, though the shadows start to look a bit more blobby.

[PersonalC0ffee]

Originally posted by dogen:

Well, I assume it's because shadows are just really expensive to render at high detail. I wonder if there's a console command to set shadow resolution to some ridiculous size.

Anyway, try reducing shadow anti aliasing, seems to reduce the pixelation, though the shadows start to look a bit more blobby.

Rarther have pixely if that's the case.