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

[brokebrained]

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.

[Tawm]

Also, r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1 can be used alongside the standard FXAA to reduce the blur. Doesn't affect the text or UI like ReShade does. Better alternative to TAA when ghosting is still a problem.

[brokebrained]

The shadow changes I posted don't hit my frames that much at all - but like I said your mileage may vary a lot depending on hardware. That will be entirely on the GPU.

However the Distance/LOD changes can hammer the CPU, I became CPU-bottlenecked during the Gondolia festival as all those extra draw calls in a busy crowded scene were too much for my old i5 2500k. If your framerate is tanking in city areas it's likely on the CPU.

[Fairna]

I noticed ghosting with TemporalAA, anyone knows how to remove it?

[Kickfister]

Originally posted by Faris:

I noticed ghosting with TemporalAA, anyone knows how to remove it?

I've had no success, and most of the settings I've seen posted for it seem to be placebo to me. In fact, many of them didn't even exist in the version of unreal engine this game was built on (4.13, most likely). That said, using this:

r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.PostProcessAAQuality=6
r.TemporalAASamples=16
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.45
r.TemporalAAFilterSize=0.5
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.5
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=0.5

Paired with these motion blur settings:

r.MotionBlurQuality=4
r.MotionBlur.Amount=0.3
r.MotionBlur.Max=1
r.MotionBlur.Scale=1
r.MotionBlurSeparable=1

Worked the best. The motion blur doesn't eliminate the ghosting, but it disguises it. If you hate motion blur, you'll really hate these two things combined. Ultimately, I opted to just use FXAA and deal with jaggies, but I think both options are solid choices. I absolutely do not recommend TAA without motion blur, however.

I'm pretty sure "r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.45" does absolutely nothing (no value on that setting changed anything about the image for me), but it doesn't hurt to have it just in case.

EDIT: Wanna add that I don't personally think the ghosting will be solved with ini tweaks. From the research I've done, it seems a more substantial mod that modifies shaders would be required. Can't remember where I read that so I can't provide a link unfortunately.

[texhnolyze]

Originally posted by Faris:

I noticed ghosting with TemporalAA, anyone knows how to remove it?

Originally posted by Tawm:

Also, r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1 can be used alongside the standard FXAA to reduce the blur. Doesn't affect the text or UI like ReShade does. Better alternative to TAA when ghosting is still a problem.

Try this.
https://www.resetera.com/posts/12329022/

[Locke]

Originally posted by Oopy Doopy:

Originally posted by Faris:

I noticed ghosting with TemporalAA, anyone knows how to remove it?

I've had no success, and most of the settings I've seen posted for it seem to be placebo to me. In fact, many of them didn't even exist in the version of unreal engine this game was built on (4.13, most likely). That said, using this:

The game was in production on 4.13 yes, and its official release on PS4 is 4.13, that said, programmers still incorporate plenty of features from more uptodate revisions when doing so.

Thats whats happened in places I've worked in the past. Start on 1 version of unreal, can't do a full upgrade, but require features from newer versions so those specific things are implimented. no doubts that this happened with DQXI.

[Fairna]

Originally posted by texhnolyze:

Originally posted by Faris:

I noticed ghosting with TemporalAA, anyone knows how to remove it?

Originally posted by Tawm:

Also, r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1 can be used alongside the standard FXAA to reduce the blur. Doesn't affect the text or UI like ReShade does. Better alternative to TAA when ghosting is still a problem.

Try this.
https://www.resetera.com/posts/12329022/

Thanks! reducing TemporalAA Sharpness helped too! now ghosting is barely visible.

[SleepSmasher]

Originally posted by Oopy Doopy:

Originally posted by Faris:

I noticed ghosting with TemporalAA, anyone knows how to remove it?

I've had no success, and most of the settings I've seen posted for it seem to be placebo to me. In fact, many of them didn't even exist in the version of unreal engine this game was built on (4.13, most likely). That said, using this:

r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.PostProcessAAQuality=6
r.TemporalAASamples=16
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.45
r.TemporalAAFilterSize=0.5
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.5
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=0.5

Paired with these motion blur settings:

r.MotionBlurQuality=4
r.MotionBlur.Amount=0.3
r.MotionBlur.Max=1
r.MotionBlur.Scale=1
r.MotionBlurSeparable=1

Worked the best. The motion blur doesn't eliminate the ghosting, but it disguises it. If you hate motion blur, you'll really hate these two things combined. Ultimately, I opted to just use FXAA and deal with jaggies, but I think both options are solid choices. I absolutely do not recommend TAA without motion blur, however.

I'm pretty sure "r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.45" does absolutely nothing (no value on that setting changed anything about the image for me), but it doesn't hurt to have it just in case.

EDIT: Wanna add that I don't personally think the ghosting will be solved with ini tweaks. From the research I've done, it seems a more substantial mod that modifies shaders would be required. Can't remember where I read that so I can't provide a link unfortunately.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, a legit quality post on Steam forums. Colour me surprised.

Completely agree, most of the TAA settings feel like placebo to me and only motion blur is able to kinda hide the ghosting, but not much. Still, I like it better than the horrible FXAA and shimmering all over the place.

[tomahawk]

Thanks for the post

[bullet in ur f. face]

please i need to increase FoV, is there a command working to change fov game to the value we want ?

[Kickfister]

Originally posted by Dan_Tsukasa:

Originally posted by Oopy Doopy:

I've had no success, and most of the settings I've seen posted for it seem to be placebo to me. In fact, many of them didn't even exist in the version of unreal engine this game was built on (4.13, most likely). That said, using this:

The game was in production on 4.13 yes, and its official release on PS4 is 4.13, that said, programmers still incorporate plenty of features from more uptodate revisions when doing so.

Thats whats happened in places I've worked in the past. Start on 1 version of unreal, can't do a full upgrade, but require features from newer versions so those specific things are implimented. no doubts that this happened with DQXI.

Interesting insight, thanks!

[NairBoT]

I read through all this, thanks for tips.

I kept it simple. This is whats in my Engine.ini

[/script/engine.renderersettings]
r.ViewDistanceScale=3
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=-2
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.25
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.01


My hardware, i7 and GTX 970.

[brokebrained]

After progressing further in the game the only thing I'm using are the Distance and LOD settings.

DistanceScale=3 seems more than adequate to render out grass as far as the eye can see, 2.5 is probably all you need. Anything beyond that is just throwing away frames.

The shadow stuff is finicky and not worth the trade off. What works well in one area with minimal framedrop will absolutely tank performance somewhere else. 8k resolution is obviously overkill but if you go lower the difference in clarity is barely noticeable.

RadiusThreshold is noticeable but can also be a killer in crowded city scenes with lots of small objects. The default on high settings is 0.03 for reference.

[MONZUN]

Originally posted by brokebrains:

However the Distance/LOD changes can hammer the CPU, I became CPU-bottlenecked during the Gondolia festival as all those extra draw calls in a busy crowded scene were too much for my old i5 2500k. If your framerate is tanking in city areas it's likely on the CPU.

uhm quick question. you said in the first post you limit your framerate to 30fps and now you say its tanking in city areas. so its dropping below 30fps for you ?

how much below 30fps in the gondolia festival and whats your 2500k clock ?

[Havoc]

Thanks for the info! I've used that and a list of cvars I dumped (https://pastebin.com/GXh7MN2W) to tweak the game as best I could, with improved texture streaming, LODs, shadows, AA, and some other small tweaks.

I posted my config here for anyone who wants a look, runs well for me with a GTX 1080 @ 1440p: https://pastebin.com/FSRNsZhL (edit: updated with some settings to increase grass distances, and now with slightly better performance, make sure to edit the r.Streaming.PoolSize line with half of your VRAM in MB!)

Also while messing with those cvars I ended up making a mini-console mod for the game, works great for changing cvars at runtime: https://i.imgur.com/cksoNTC.png
If there's any interest I could upload it somewhere, only requires VS2017 redist to be installed.