Graphics Settings Explained

[Atlink]

A quick reference guide on what each setting does in "Graphics" in the Options menu.

Framerate: Limits the framerate to the selected value.
Setting this value lower can allow more resources for higher settings.

Resolution: Rendering compared to the selected resolution. In other words, 100% will render at exactly the resolution you selected. If you are playing at 1920x1080 (1080p), this will keep the game locked at that resolution. Adjusting this value higher will render everyhing at a higher resolution (making everything that much sharper), but you will suffer a dramatic performance penalty. The inverse is true, as lowering the resolution will increase performance, but make the game look dramatically worse. If playing at 4K, this will enable a psuedo-8K mode at 200%.

Preset: Sets most values to what is selected.

Assets: Applies high resolution textures to the game. Very demanding for cards with low VRAM. 8 GB or higher is recommended. High Resolution Textures can be downloaded as free DLC via the Steam Store.

Model LOD (Level of Detail): Adjusts draw distance of foliage and enemies. The lower the setting, the closer you will need to be to an object before it is visible. Higher settings allow for a higher draw distance, but will be more taxing on hardware.

TRAM (Texture RAM): Limit for texture quality. Lowering this can help video cards with less VRAM.

Anisotropic Filtering: Assists with keeping textures looking crisp when viewed at an oblique angle. If you see visible "quality bands" when looking down a road, adjusting this higher will help. Can be taxing on certain hardware.

Geomapping: Applies a "rough" 3D map to the ground to create a more realistic, bumpy ground.

Lighting: Higher the quality, the higher the lighting effects will be in terms of reflection quality. May also affect general lighting, but seems to affect reflections moreso. This does not affect shadows.

Shadows: Lower settings will create softer shadows, higher will create sharper shadows. One of the few options that is heavier on your CPU than GPU.

Ambient Occlusion: Enhanced shadows for objects, such as tables, corners of rooms, etc. Creates a more realisic lighting scheme. Higher settings are more taxing on your GPU.

Anti-Aliasing: Smooths out jagged edges of polygons. FXAA is a simple, low performance hit, TAA provides a higher level of anti-aliasing, but is substantially more demanding. Lower resolutions (such as 1080p) may appear extremely blurry using this setting, but higher resolutions (2K and 4K) will benefit more, again with a high performance hit.

Motion blur: Self-explanitory. Seems to be used more during battles rather than during camera panning or cutscenes.

Filtering: Applies a full screen filter to further smooth out the image as well as improving HDR lighting. Lower resolutions may suffer from excessive blur.

NVIDIA HairWorks: Adds fur effects to monsters/animals in the world. Does not apply to characters. Some animals may appear fluffier with bouncier fur. This works on AMD graphics cards as well. Seemingly low performance hit, unless in an area with a lot of furry animals.

NVIDIA-VXAO: A very high quality ambient occlusion. Extremely demanding on the GPU.

NVIDIA TurfEffects: Similar to HairWorks, grass and trees appear more lush/dense. Can be taxing on older hardware.

NVIDIA ShadowLibs: Provides even higher quality shadow rendering. Use with High or Highest "Shadows" setting. If used with lower "Shadows" settings, shadows may shake and shudder.


I may be mistaken on some of these settings, so if something needs correcting, please let me know!

EDITS:
-Adjusted Assets VRAM size from 12 GB to 8 GB. This may be higher or lower, but I can not personally test this with my GTX 970 4GB card as this option is not available to me.
-Added HDR bloom note to Filtering.
-Rewrote Assets section as I was unaware that it was "DLC", and it didn't even show on my library page. Strange. Now it should make more sense.
-Added in alternate Lighting explanation to include a higher emphasis on reflection quality.

[Neo Cyrus]

Does Geomapping work for you guys? I don't see any tessellation anywhere when I have it enabled.

[GUNxOFxPATR1OTS]

Originally posted by Neo Cyrus:

Does Geomapping work for you guys? I don't see any tessellation anywhere when I have it enabled.

depends on the location. Check it at Golden Qei hotel there`s a sand beach

[Atlink]

Originally posted by Neo Cyrus:

Does Geomapping work for you guys? I don't see any tessellation anywhere when I have it enabled.

I've noticed that geomapping provides a very small graphical update, but I honestly couldn't tell unless I was staring at the ground, or I was in specific spots. Honestly, it doesn't seem like it's worth the perfornace hit.

[Neo Cyrus]

Originally posted by Atlink:

Originally posted by Neo Cyrus:

Does Geomapping work for you guys? I don't see any tessellation anywhere when I have it enabled.

I've noticed that geomapping provides a very small graphical update, but I honestly couldn't tell unless I was staring at the ground, or I was in specific spots. Honestly, it doesn't seem like it's worth the perfornace hit.

Yeah if you're on a performance budget, as nearly everyone always is, it's almost never worth enabling tessellation.

But the thing is it doesn't give me a performance hit, and I've looked around on the ground for changes or signs of it and I see none. That and when I enable the game's own on-screen display it shows it as off, and it did the same in the demo. So I'm not sure what's going on.

And while I'm at it, I'm just going to say I still don't know how to remove the 120 fps cap, setting a higher cap in the ini doesn't seem to do anything.

[Atlink]

Originally posted by Neo Cyrus:

Originally posted by Atlink:

I've noticed that geomapping provides a very small graphical update, but I honestly couldn't tell unless I was staring at the ground, or I was in specific spots. Honestly, it doesn't seem like it's worth the perfornace hit.

Yeah if you're on a performance budget, as nearly everyone always is, it's almost never worth enabling tessellation.

But the thing is it doesn't give me a performance hit, and I've looked around on the ground for changes or signs of it and I see none. That and when I enable the game's own on-screen display it shows it as off, and it did the same in the demo. So I'm not sure what's going on.

Reading other posts about this, it's apparently very apparent when looking in wireframe mode or solid textures, but it's very hard to see when in normal gameplay.

And most people are stuck using mid-range hardware at the moment, thanks to crypto-miners buying every video card out there and inflating prices to ridiculous levels. Even newer mid-range cards are extremely expensive compared to what they used to be.

[tanman500]

Originally posted by Atlink:

A quick reference guide on what each setting does in "Graphics" in the Options menu.
Filtering: Applies a full screen filter to further smooth out the image. Lower resolutions may suffer from excessive blur.

Filtering also controls the intensity of HDR bloom lighting. If you look at the spotlights in one of the bunkers with filtering set to low, it looks like there's no light at all inside there.

[Atlink]

Originally posted by iamtoxic500:

Originally posted by Atlink:

A quick reference guide on what each setting does in "Graphics" in the Options menu.
Filtering: Applies a full screen filter to further smooth out the image. Lower resolutions may suffer from excessive blur.

Filtering also controls the intensity of HDR bloom lighting. If you look at the spotlights in one of the bunkers with filtering set to low, it looks like there's no light at all inside there.

I did not know that. Thanks! Still makes my game look like someone smeared vaseline all over my screen though...

Originally posted by Spawk:

Originally posted by Atlink:

Assets: Applicable to graphics cards with 12 GB or more of video RAM (VRAM)

That's not necessarily how that works, as other settings factor into VRAM usage as well. Also, that would mean this option is basically only for Titan X cards and non-reference cards like the PowerColor R9 390 cards :P

I'll be honest, I'm only gleaning that information from a few YouTube videos that have mentioned that you need a really high amount of VRAM to even have the option to enable it (my GTX 970 with its 3.5 GB of VRAM simply can't do it (nor would I want it to). I know there's gotta be a limit, but it might not be 12 GB.

[TheSinisterDev]

Pretty helpful explaination! However I wanted to mention, about the assets, I did download the High Res texture pack and have been playing the game @1440p on High settings (Everything on High w/ geomapping and VXAO disabled. I can play on 1080p with VXAO)and have been getting very acceptable fps with my Strix 1070 OC. I was actually very surprised how little my fps changed after installing the texture pack , and the higher res textures really do look gorgeous!
After installing Kaldaien's Special K mod for the game and performing some mild tweaks,Im getting even better performance, with fps upwards of 80 in some areas and only dropping into 50's in most battles,or high 40's in some of the more epic battles Ive encountered.

Running at these settings does sometime push the limits of my GPU's Ram, reaching upwards of 7800mb out of my gpus 8gb of ram, and about 12gb of my system's Ram as well,but an 8GB card can seem to handle it. From what Ive been reading about in Kaldaien's thread on here, some people are experiences memory leak issues that SE is working on fixing. The people experiencing the memory leaks are experiencing lower fps than usual, stuttering, crashes and a number of other issues that may lead them to believe that their PC cant handle playing the game on some of the higher settings. Things should improve once that issue gets fixed. But for someone not experiencing memory leaks, Id say if you have a 1070 and are curious about the high res assets (and have the storage space available lol) , consider checking it out! They even look very nice on 1080p!

[Atlink]

Originally posted by sinisterdev85:

Id say if you have a 1070 and are curious about the high res assets (and have the storage space available lol) , consider checking it out! They even look very nice on 1080p!

I wish. I have a GTX 970 with "4" GB VRAM.

[TimeToGG]

Nice. but how to turn on TAA, i just see TXAA in option....

[UwU OwO]

VXAO is extremely taxing on today's hardware. VXAO and VXGI are both new tech that are being introduced into the gaming industry. Just like Tessellation when it was first introduced and back when a GTX 580 cannot handle Tessellation but 1 - 2 years later they release the GTX 680 which handles Tessellation ALOT better than GTX 580 as in about 90% increase in performance. Same goes to AMD. So far, FF15 and KCD are both new games that are utilizing these tech. If you wanna upgrade your GPU, better wait until either NVIDIA or AMD are able to utilize those tech properly because seems like VXAO and VXGI will start becoming common just like Tessellation.

[Ricky]

lighting is probably a bad translation or something, it should be called reflection. Lighting does not change lightmap resolution or lights to draw. might wanna change "Self-explanitory" part. Face water or your car for example and change the setting from average to low.

Filtering, another strange name, because its not filtering anything. it's actually the shaders quality and what shaders to be in use. like DoF, sun shafts and bloom.

[Atlink]

Originally posted by Ricky:

lighting is probably a bad translation or something, it should be called reflection. Lighting does not change lightmap resolution or lights to draw. might wanna change "Self-explanitory" part. Face water or your car for example and change the setting from average to low.

Filtering, another strange name, because its not filtering anything. it's actually the shaders quality and what shaders to be in use. like DoF, sun shafts and bloom.

Edited as such. I did notice that lighting didn't seem to make anything look different in terms of how the lights actually looked, but rather how everything reflected said light. I can see "Lighting" being correct in a really roundabout way, but "Reflections" would have made far more sense.

[Kirusei]

Pretty late to the party, but I would like to mention that the Filtering option also affects the quality of the photos that Prompto takes like adding depth of field to the photos when set to medium/high.

Also does anyone know if VXAO and Shadowlibs play well with modern AMD GPUs?

[alumlovescake]

Originally posted by Kirusei:

Pretty late to the party, but I would like to mention that the Filtering option also affects the quality of the photos that Prompto takes like adding depth of field to the photos when set to medium/high.

Also does anyone know if VXAO and Shadowlibs play well with modern AMD GPUs?

I don't know about AMD but they don't exactly play well on modern Nvidia