Turn off Z-Prepass and Volume Rendering Quality

[Frost]

I'm sure it's known or has been discussed, but these two options can really slam performance, and whether or not they should or should not be enabled by default is debatable.

Myself, my build is as follows:

~ i7-2700k @ 4.5GHz
~ ASUS ROG Strix GTX1080 @ 1950MHz

With either one of these options enabled I drop from 70FPS down to 50.

(However, that's just for me, I'm pretty CPU bound since I haven't upgraded.)

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Use an FPS monitoring tool or a mod like Kaldaien's Special K for MHW in order to see what kind of performance hits you're taking for each option in the Graphics Settings.

In the best case scenario, you can disable a thing here or there and then upscale the resolution to better anti-aliase the quality of the game. I went from using 1080p to using 1440p.

You don't have to turn Volumetric Rendering off entirely, but I personally dislike fog effects in games when they muck with visuals. Low or Medium should work, but test out each option to see what is best for you and take note of the performance cost for each.

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Kaldaien replied below:

Publicado originalmente por Kaldaien:

Turning Z-Prepass off increases your GPU runtime.

If you don't fill the Z-landscape with depth prior to pixel shading, you spend time pixel shading objects that aren't even visible when the entire frame finishes drawing. Early-Z does a quick pre-pass that fills ther GPU's depthbuffer and does no shading. With the depth buffer filled, now the GPU can more efficiently shade only objects that are visible.

If turning this OFF helps performance, you are SEVERELY CPU limited. For everyone else, you need to leave Z-Prepass on or you're going to lose 5+ FPS.

[Frost]

Publicado originalmente por Kaldaien:

Publicado originalmente por Zod the Defiler:

Doesnt it say that disabling z-prepass increases cpu runtime in the options screen?

GPU runtime.

If you don't fill the Z-landscape with depth prior to pixel shading, you spend time pixel shading objects that aren't even visible when the entire frame finishes drawing. Early-Z does a quick pre-pass that fills ther GPU's depthbuffer and does no shading. With the depth buffer filled, now the GPU can more efficiently shade only objects that are visible.

If turning this OFF helps performance, you are SEVERELY CPU limited. For evertyone else, you need to leave it on or you're going to lose 5+ FPS.

Glad to see you Kaldaien. But yeah, I figured it was as you said to begin with. My CPU is rather old and I haven't been able to upgrade.

Though, knowing that not everyone is in my shoes, I simply recommend using your mod or another way to performance bench in order to figure out what they should do for their own performance.

I've updated the OP to highlight the main topics of this post and decrease potential questions; thanks for your response.

Cheers.