Engine.ini tweaks - Increased Object Draw Distance, LOD & Shadow Quality

[brokebrains]

The 'Engine.ini' file can be found in your 'Documents\My Games\DRAGON QUEST XI\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor' folder.

Add the following lines:

[/script/engine.renderersettings]
r.ViewDistanceScale=5
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=-2
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.25

r.Shadow.MaxResolution=8192
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=16
r.Shadow.TexelsPerPixel=10
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.01

Distance/LOD may put a lot more load on your CPU depending on the scene.

Shadows will be on the GPU. If you just want to stop the pop-in without upping the resolution (and potentially tanking the framerate) use the RadiusThreshold line and ignore everything else.

Comparison screenshots:

DistanceScale: Before [i.imgur.com] / After [i.imgur.com]

LOD: Before [i.imgur.com] / After [i.imgur.com]

Shadows: Before [i.imgur.com] / After [i.imgur.com]

More shadows: Before [i.imgur.com] / After [i.imgur.com]

Performance impact is around 5-8fps with my aging 970, your mileage may vary. I've opted to just downsample and lock the game to 30fps. DistanceScale is probably the most taxing, the default is '1' so obviously that's a 5x increase, and it's probably overkill. Shadows will now be higher resolution (the actual resolution varies by map) and will no longer pop-in at close range on smaller objects like the wooden boxes as shown in the comparison above.

If anyone has found any useful tweaks/additions or better values than what I've posted above please feel free to share in here.

[Viper]

Will have very little effect on how the game looks so why would I do this.

[Lem]

This is good stuff. I have performance to spare on a 1060 GTX (6gb), so I'll have to give these tweaks a try.

[Marsson]

That added a needed bump to the shadows, I even put the distance scale to 10 and the grass renders in as far as the eye can see :) Running the game at 4k 30fps on a 1080 Ti, and it's looking pretty good.

[Honorable_D]

I'll probs bump up the DistanceScale by 1 or 2 as the grass pop-in circle around the character is very noticeable to me.

[aweigh]

What settings should I use to make the shadows draw (appear on-screen) from very far away BUT HAVE same quality as when you use "1" on the option?

I.e. I want to have the performance boost of using shadows '1' but with less of the close-range pop-in that happens on that setting by using whatever distance value from the '3' grouping.

[Snadzies]

Nice. I'll prolly play around with the distance scaling a bit later.

[Honorable_D]

Distance scale works great, set it to 3 and grass and stuff spawns out much farther and my performance hasn't gone down any.

[Joshua Halls]

Originally posted by aweigh:

What settings should I use to make the shadows draw (appear on-screen) from very far away BUT HAVE same quality as when you use "1" on the option?

I.e. I want to have the performance boost of using shadows '1' but with less of the close-range pop-in that happens on that setting by using whatever distance value from the '3' grouping.

3 is using distance field shadows I believe, it is an entirely different shadow system with some different controls.

[Dinjoralo]

Does anyone know what value the game has these set to by default? It would be nice to know, for some more precise tweaking.

The shadow settings don't seem to make a big impact to distance scaling. I'll tweak with them later.

[brokebrains]

Hard to know what the defaults are, but I imagine they're not too far off the default UE4 presets: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Performance/Scalability/ScalabilityReference

The only thing that worked for shadow distance was lowering r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold to 0.01. That got the shadows appearing on the boxes in the OP. After a certain point the distant shadows Joshua mentioned take over.

aweigh: try setting your shadows to '1' ingame and adding 'r.DistanceFieldShadowing 1' to the ini. Just a shot in the dark.

I added r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale in the OP, the LODBias fixed the characters but there were still a lot of enviromental models switching at point blank. Setting this to 0.1 cleared that up.

[aweigh]

Here are the settings I'm using, I'm using the "default values" for shadow grouping '3', except I changed the resolution of the shadow maps to '512', and added the shadow variables that you posted (that don't appear in that unreal documentation page).

I also went ahead and pasted the "default values" for the effects grouping '1' (want more performance), the foliage grouping '1' (same). Additionally I found variables that enable the Motion Blur and added those, along with the TAA values someone posted.

The game screenshot:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1505255259

The ini variables:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1505254592

I'm using a resolution of 1792x1008 and have ReShade's lumasharpen and Clarity shaders turned on.

Gotta say with these ini settings it looks pretty much as perfect as I think I can get it. The shadows also draw much farther than if I were just using the default ShadowQuality '1' variable. The real test for FPS will come in the big cities though, so I might lower resolution to 1536x936.

[Iyashi Relink]

I tried to copy that hopefully got it right - but if possible can you copy/paste it in plain text in case I maybe had any typos?

[aweigh]

[Core.System]
Paths=../../../Engine/Content
Paths=%GAMEDIR%Content
Paths=../../../Engine/Plugins/Runtime/CriWare/Content
Paths=../../../Engine/Plugins/2D/Paper2D/Content

[/script/engine.renderersettings]
r.TemporalAA.Upsampling=1
r.VirtualTexture=1
r.ViewDistanceScale=0.7
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=-2
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.1
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.PostProcessAAQuality=4
r.TemporalAASamples=16
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.45
r.TemporalAAFilterSize=0.5
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.5
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=0.5
r.TemporalAACatmullRom=1
r.LightFunctionQuality=1
r.ShadowQuality=5
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=4
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=512
r.Shadow.TexelsPerPixel=10
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.03
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=1.0
r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=1.0
r.DistanceFieldShadowing=1
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
r.DefaultFeature.MotionBlur=True
r.BlurGBuffer=0
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=2
r.AmbientOcclusionRadiusScale=1.5
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0
r.Upscale.Quality=3
r.SSR.Quality=3
r.Streaming.MipBias=0
r.MaxAnisotropy=8
r.Streaming.PoolSize=1000

[SystemSettings]
r.TemporalAA.Upsampling=1
r.VirtualTexture=1
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.PostProcessAAQuality=4
r.TemporalAASamples=16
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.45
r.TemporalAAFilterSize=0.5
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.5
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=0.5
r.TemporalAACatmullRom=1
r.MotionBlurQuality=4
r.MotionBlur.Amount=0.3
r.MotionBlur.Max=1
r.MotionBlur.Scale=1
r.MotionBlurSeparable=1
r.BlurGBuffer=0
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=2
r.AmbientOcclusionRadiusScale=1.5
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0
r.RenderTargetPoolMin=400
r.LensFlareQuality=2
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
r.EyeAdaptationQuality=2
r.BloomQuality=4
r.FastBlurThreshold=7
r.Upscale.Quality=3
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=1
r.SSR.Quality=3
r.Streaming.MipBias=0
r.MaxAnisotropy=8
r.Streaming.PoolSize=1000
r.DistanceFieldShadowing=1

[aweigh]

There's a few new ones in there that aren't in the previous post that I gleaned from other steam forum posts on other japanese games th at use UE4. So far the game's working beautifully and looks amazing with that Temporal AA and that Motion Blur; remember that you can use ReShade's lumpasharpen if you find the game looks too blurry from the Temporal AA.

Alternatively you can increase the variables that say TemporalAASharpen and Tonemap.Sharpen values raising both of those up to "1". (Currently I'm using 0.5 on those two).

You can decrease/increase the r.ShadowMapsResolutionSize down from 256 all the way up to 4096 and even up to 8k. Set to taste. I'm currently using above there a value of "512", which is a good one for better performance but without the shadows looking ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

For the generalized area draw-distance (objects/creatures appearing as you run along) it would be the r.ViewDistanceScale, currently I'm using there a value of "0.7", but you can raise that ♥♥♥♥ all the way up to "10". For reference the "default" game value is "1.0".

BTW, if you want to disable motion Blur completely just find r.MotionBlurQuality and set the variable to "0", and to disable the Temporal AA filtering set all of the variables with the words anti-aliasing in them to "0" as well.

Remember to get both instances of whatever variables you change! The majority (but not all) appear in both of the bracketed sections.

[Kickfister]

Originally posted by aweigh:

There's a few new ones in there that aren't in the previous post that I gleaned from other steam forum posts on other japanese games th at use UE4. So far the game's working beautifully and looks amazing with that Temporal AA and that Motion Blur; remember that you can use ReShade's lumpasharpen if you find the game looks too blurry from the Temporal AA.

Alternatively you can increase the variables that say TemporalAASharpen and Tonemap.Sharpen values raising both of those up to "1". (Currently I'm using 0.5 on those two).

You can decrease/increase the r.ShadowMapsResolutionSize down from 256 all the way up to 4096 and even up to 8k. Set to taste. I'm currently using above there a value of "512", which is a good one for better performance but without the shadows looking ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

For the generalized area draw-distance (objects/creatures appearing as you run along) it would be the r.ViewDistanceScale, currently I'm using there a value of "0.7", but you can raise that ♥♥♥♥ all the way up to "10". For reference the "default" game value is "1.0".

BTW, if you want to disable motion Blur completely just find r.MotionBlurQuality and set the variable to "0", and to disable the Temporal AA filtering set all of the variables with the words anti-aliasing in them to "0" as well.

Remember to get both instances of whatever variables you change! The majority (but not all) appear in both of the bracketed sections.

As far as I know, the bracketed sections are just a comment and don't have any effect on the variables being modified. Listing things twice shouldn't do anything.