Population Quality

[nbean16]

Has anyone done much testing with the population quality setting? For whatever reason (maybe it freed up just enough on the cpu) I have huge performance gains just by going to medium from ultra. Like 10-15fps with ray tracing on. Doesnt really make sense, but just wondering if anyone else has seen this.

[nbean16]

Just me?

[Kashra Fall]

If it lowers the amount of NPC's the game has to generate, this would make a lot of sense.

[Ryan]

I think it reduces the image quality of the none interactive npcs that the game generates to populate the areas, I can confirm that lowering this setting helped my fps quite a bit AND it seems it has helped the random fps stuttering issues I was having in busy areas like Hogsmeade.

[Freelancer]

If you're CPU limited (e.g your GPU is much faster than your CPU, or a game is very CPU-dependent), then lowering the population quality does have benefits. Less NPCs = less AI calculations done by the CPU = more frames in general.

Downside is it makes the world feel more "dead" imo since there are a lot less characters/NPCs going about.

[BimboGooch]

The thing controls the detail of characters that are not main characters. So in areas with a lot of people, thats less polygons and such being rendered.
Think of like the yakuza games, where the main characters look like gods, while non main look like ps3 characters.

this helps a ton, which is why you get big gains.

[nbean16]

Yeah its just crazy its one of the only settings that has helped my stuttering. I was even able to up the ray tracing from medium to high and still showed large improvements. The fact that it seems to affect my fps more than even ray tracing is bizarre. But offloading some of the strain on my i9 10850k makes some sense.