Ride 4: Improve; draw distance, shadows, visuals & reduce ghosting

Playing Ride 4 the last few weeks I have noticed quite some texture popin during gameplay.
Especially trees, other foliage, buildings, and rider/bike texture popin from the AI.

This guide will help you solve that and also improve the visuals, making the overal image appear sharper and more detailed.

NOTE: This will decrease performance a bit so if you're already struggling to have a smooth Ride 4 experience I would not follow this guide.

Introduction

I've spent quite some time explorering with an "Unreal Engine 4 Unlocker" tool sending a lot of different commands ingame in the console to see what changes but in the end I've narrowed it down to what actually matters and made this guide so you can hopefully have a better Ride 4 experience.

Because Ride 4 contains quite a couple of street/road courses with high viewing distance, a lot of trees/foliage, I started exploring what was possible.

There are A LOT of possible graphical commands to use in a UE4 game, changing TAA sharpness, draw distance, texture sharpness, shadow quality/sharpness etc. etc. etc.
For example over sharpening of TAA might look good on one circuit but might introduce flickering and issues on another circuit so that's why I've narrowed it down to the following.

I hope this works for you as well and if it doesnt, you run into issues or have any adjustments/ideas please comment!

Let me be so rude and or shameless to share my Ride 4 fan trailer here as well, sorry! haha

https://youtu.be/pS4HhVjkTqg



My system specs:
GTX 1070
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 @ 4,2 ghz
16gb DDR4/3200mhz
game on SSD
aoc 27g2g4 (144hz g-sync compatible)

Prepare to edit game files

Before you are about to begin this guide you should exit Ride 4 and disable "Steam Cloud" from the games properties.
It happened to me numerous times that I had to re-edit the files because it got reset, seems like Steam Cloud synchronization was the problem.

(1) Right Click "Ride 4" in your game library
(2) Updates
(3) Untick "Steam Cloud"

Just be sure to re-enable Steam Cloud when you, for whatever reason, are deleting the game or reinstalling windows to have your progress backed up.

General Performance Tweaks

Ingame stuttering or inconsistent frame timing could happen due to a number of things but here are a few tweaks

Ingame

These are my ingame settings.
I recommend also disabling "Windowed Mode" and "v-sync".
"Frame rate limits" has a couple of options but either way I recommend not using "Dynamic" but rather manually selecting your monitors refresh rate as FPS limit.

(60fps - 60hz etc.)

Ride 4 - Steam Launch Options

Adding "-USEALLAVAILABLECORES" (without the quotes) to your Ride 4's launch options might just make the game a little bit more balanced.

1) Open Steam
2) Right Click on Ride 4, "Properties"
3) General
4) Set Launch Options
5) -USEALLAVAILABLECORES
6) click OK

GPU Driver settings

Force x16 anisotropic filtering in your GPU driver settings will improve the rendering distance of textures that are further away.
When you force it in the GPU driver you won't have to worry about the ingame setting because the GPU driver will always overule any ingame setting.

Futhermore I litterelly read in almost every guide that you should use "Maximum Power" for the gpu power settings to give better performance/fps: this is very (VERY) untrue.
All it does is set the gpu to it's maximum power limit all the time, generating more heat and thus decreasing the life span of your GPU and increasing your power usage and energy bill.
Just leave it on the default setting.

The argument people use for choosing maximum power is that the time the gpu takes to switch to full power will cause lag or stutters when it changes but this is not true because the gpu will receive this command even before the image is eventually shown on your monitor, so please: just leave it on the default "optimised" setting, or what it is called in your langauge.

Disable Fullscreen Optimizations

1) Open Steam
2) Right Click on Ride 4, "Properties"
3) Click "Local Files" Tab.
4) Click "Browse Local Files".
5) Go to: ride4\Binaries\Win64
6) Right Click "ride4-Win64-Shipping"
7) Click "Properties".
8) Click "Campatability".
9) Check the box "Disable Fullscreen Optimizations" then click apply.

Editing .ini files

Now we're going to edit the game .ini files to enhance the draw distance and overal visual fidelity.

Close Ride 4

1)

Go to this directory:

C:\Users \*username* \AppData\Local\ride4\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor

If you cant find it enable "view hidden folders" in windows explorer or press "windows key + r" and in the just opened prompt paste this:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\ride4\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor

2)

Open "Engine.ini" in Windows Notepad (Or "Engine" if you don't see the extension ini).

3)

Add a empty line to the bottom and then add these lines

[/script/engine.renderersettings]
r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM=1
r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=2
r.TemporalAA.Upsampling=1
r.MaxAnisotropy=16
r.ViewDistanceScale=5
r.motionblurquality=0
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0
foliage.LODDistanceScale=50
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=0
r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=2
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=8
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=2
r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=4096
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.05
r.EmitterSpawnRateScale=2
r.SSR.Quality=4
r.MaterialQualityLevel=1
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1

personally I hate motion blur in racing games so I fully disabled it with the line "r.motionblurquality=0" so if you also want to disable motion blur add the aformentioned line to the list.

New additions regarding ghosting and shadow distance

As many of you probably know TAA in UE4 creates a ghosting effect in racing games (Ride 4, Assetto Corsa, etc.).

I have found some commands to add to the "engine.ini" to fix the ghosting during gameplay.
The reason I say during gameplay is because it totally removes the ghosting during gameplay, but it still appears in replays.
I have not found a way to fix it in both gameplay and replay so if you never watch replays and are still bothered by the ghosting when playing use the following:

To fix the ghosting add this line to the "engine.ini" as I've described before.

r.TemporalAA.Upsampling=1


I have also added this line making the game have a bit sharper overal image but it's just personal preference:

r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1

4)

Save the file
Right click on engine.ini, properties and enable "read-only" so the game can't undo these changes.

5)

Next open "GameUserSettings.ini" go to the bottom and change all numbers to 5 making it like this:

[ScalabilityGroups]
sg.ResolutionQuality=100.000000
sg.ViewDistanceQuality=5
sg.AntiAliasingQuality=5
sg.ShadowQuality=5
sg.PostProcessQuality=5
sg.TextureQuality=5
sg.EffectsQuality=5
sg.FoliageQuality=5
sg.ShadingQuality=5

(from what I've read about the Ue4 changing these values to 5 enables "cinematic textures" option thus enabling the option to change the aforementioned graphical enhancements)

6)

Save the file and also make it read-only like the previous file.


These changes will disable texture pop in from buildings, trees, grass, other bikes and riders.
Also it will enhance the shadow resolution and makes the shadow draw distance a little better.

For me bumping the shadow resolution to 4096 didn't have a large performance impact, but if it does for you, you can change "4096" to "2048" in these lines:

r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=4096
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=4096

7)

If you followed along your two .ini files shoud look like this:

Update: Fix ghosting & increase high res shadow distance

If you just followed this guide for the first time, I added this to previous chapter of this guide so you can skip this.

As many of you probably know TAA in UE4 creates a ghosting effect in racing games (Ride 4, Assetto Corsa, etc.).

I have found some commands to add to the "engine.ini" to fix the ghosting during gameplay.
The reason I say during gameplay is because it totally removes the ghosting during gameplay, but it still appears in replays.
I have not found a way to fix it in both gameplay and replay so if you never watch replays and are still bothered by the ghosting when playing use the following:

(If you have already followed this guide, then you may need to disable "read only" for the "engine.ini" before you can make changes.)

To fix the ghosting and increase high res shadow distance add these lines to the "engine.ini" as I've described before.

r.TemporalAA.Upsampling=1
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=2

I'd recommend to change r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=5 to r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=2 to have a smoother transition in shadows with the increased high res distance.

I have also added this line making the game have a bit sharper overal image to compensate for the TAA upsampling but it's just personal preference:

r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1

Shadow distance example

It might not seem like a lot but riding through it makes a huge difference (look at the tree shadows in the distance).

Explaining the changes

Here's a short explanation of the changes we've just made.
More detailed explanations can be found here[docs.unrealengine.com]

r.Streaming.MipBias=-0.5

Changing this to minus 0.5 alows the game to load higher res textures (grass, road, kerbs etc).

r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM=1

Automatically limits the poolsize for streaming texture to the VRAM that's available

r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=2

Don't stream any mips. All mips are always loaded.

r.ViewDistanceScale=5

Increases view distance of objects

r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0

Scale factor for the distance used in computing discrete LOD for static meshes.

foliage.LODDistanceScale=10

Distance scale for foliage (higher res textures of foliage at distance)

r.AmbientOcclusionMaxQuality=-100

Increase ambient occlusion effect.

r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=0

Increase biker model (player&ai) texture quality

r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=4096 r.Shadow.MaxResolution=4096

Increase shadow resolution and fade resolution.

r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=1

Increase smoothness of the shadow transition (low res to high res).

r.Shadow.DistanceScale=2

Increase high res shadow distance

r.TemporalAA.Upsampling=1

Upscales the TAA to remove the ghosting during gameplay (still visible, and maybe worse, in replays because of the upsampling).

r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1

Bit sharper overal image.

[Voodoochile]

Want to add here that "r.ViewDistanceScale=5" Absolutely destroys fps on certain tracks like Utah for no apparent visual benefit vs even "r.ViewDistanceScale=1". Comparison below, thanks to Steam member "Ant", who resolved my issue with FPS drops.
Note: Not to be confused with "ViewDistanceQuality", which I do believe has impact on visuals and doesn't cause FPS issues at least on my system.

https://youtu.be/eMpJcp1GkCY?si=eiybJZFTbVSpfdGm

[我的惊世骇俗]

ok

[LosPollos]

seems like i fixed it by unchecking the fullscreen optimisation

[LosPollos]

any idea how to fix the rubberbanding? i get it if i watch the back the first time in a race often or just like randomly 5 sec after start

[Süleyman]

a

[不会再为爱而冲锋]

good

[david]

This guide is SO NICE!!!! To be honest I didn't realize how much it improves on visual effect, but what I really wanna say is it improves the smooth when steeling in the game. Before this, the game always give me a delay reaction when steeling but it's all smooth now and I can drive with best route and easily get a medal which is so hard before. I'm so exciting writing this and thank you so much.

[Scorpidoo]

Really nice guide, like how you took the time to explain the your thoughts behind the changes.
Yes i bombared you with rewards xD Nice work ^^

[559]

I tried the same settings and the terrain goes haywire. They are doing some other faux rendering techniques for the dirt in mxgp I guess.

[Highthorn]

@559: As long as MXGP is made on the same engine and has the same files as mentioned above I guess it should work.