Optimal Graphics Settings

In case you are a newbie to video graphics settings i'd like to share some thoughts on the issue and also the settings that work the best for myself with my hardware setup.

Reading material

Firstly if you want a general understanding of graphics settings, NVidia has made an excellent guide which fits most modern games, a MUST read before you start tweaking: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/battlefield-3-tweak-guide#1

To summarize the guide:

The greatest FPS impactors are

• Screen Resolution - if you don't mind playing 1080p on a 1440p monitor, your FPS will benefit greatly, if not, you should look at which other settings have the least impact.
  
• AntiAlias (the smooth edge magic) - Has a great cost on FPS and is more important for low resolution than high resolution monitors.
  
• Ambient Occlusion - Makes the shadows nicer looking, but at high cost. It varies from each GFX Card and on NVidia the cost is mostly lower than on AMD
  
• Shadows
  
• Shader Detail
  
• Advanced Blending ( HEAVY !!! ) ( NB: Is only activated if you enable Shader Detail )

Everything else should be cranked up to max and mostly cost RAM rather than actual processing power. So if you have tons of RAM on your graphics card (eg. 3GB) and/or you system (eg. 16GB), then simply max out all the other settings.

Some things i've noticed

Spectators

Lowering the croud (Crew, People, Spectators..) to OFF will hide them - but they are still there to hit ! - So if you disable them, make sure you stay on the track and don't cut corners the places where you find spectators.

Suggestion: Set spectators to Lowest option - it will cost 0 performance and will help you avoid the penalties.

Optimal Anti-Alias settings

CMAA (same as SMAA)

Is a low cost, high quality, morphological post process filter which find edges and smooth them.
The benefit of this method is AA in almost the same quality level as 4xMSAA but at lower cost than 2xMSAA.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/conservative-morphological-anti-aliasing-cmaa

Originally posted by Intel:

The technique was originally developed by Filip Strugar at Intel for use in GRID2 by Codemasters®, to offer a high performance alternative to traditional multi sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) while addressing artistic concerns with existing post-processing antialiasing techniques. The sample allows CMAA to be compared with several popular post processing techniques together with hardware MSAA in a real time rendered scene as well as to an existing image.

AMD EQAA

Originally posted by AMD:

Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) is a new anti-aliasing technology available from the AMD
HD 6900 series of graphics cards onwards. This new Anti-Aliasing (AA) technology offers
advanced smoothing of aliased edges without requiring additional video memory, and with a
minimal performance cost.

Nvidia CSAA

Nvidia has an equivalent mode called CSAA, the numbering of each mode is not directly compatible

Originally posted by http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/10:

Test Results

* ordered by performancecost

Method	Framecount	Avg fps	Min fps	Max fps	Cost %
No AA	14706	78	64	105	0%
CMAA	14170	75	61	102	4%
2x MSAA	13027	69	58	93	11%
2f4x EQAA	12481	66	55	90	15%
4x MSAA	11435	61	50	84	22%
4f8x EQAA	10070	54	44	74	32%
8x MSAA	8311	44	34	66	43%
4f16x EQAA	7289	39	31	57	50%
8f16x EQAA	6438	34	27	51	56%

Recomendation

Pick CMAA or SMAA unless you have a strong enough GPU to handle 4x MSAA or more

Best settings for AMD 7970 @ 1Ghz + i7 3770K

Here are my settings that yield Minimum & Avarage of 60 FPS

- I play on a 27" monitor at 2560x1440 at native resolution.

- I've finally settled for CMAA Anti Alias which looks almost as good as 4x MSAA, but cost almost nothing in performance. On some maps in sunshine weather conditions, I can easily enable 4x MSAA eg: Greece, Monte Carlo - which is nice for screenshots :)

- VSYNC is ON, the reason for this is twofold : 1. Since i get 60+ FPS, there's no reason to produce more frames than what i can 'eat' .. 2. Producing more frames than 60 cost more WATT / Cycles on the GFX card and CPU which i rather want to spend on game recording !

- Weather is High for the most of the time, In snow and rain i sometimes lower this to LOW because it makes it easier to see what's going on, the performance difference is small.

- I've chosen LOW SHADER DETAIL, because it's performance hogging and looks terrible on high. OFF looks pretty bad too, so LOW was the optimal setting for me.

- Anisotropic Filtering is free to max out, so always do so, it makes your bonet look better and the road will be more sharp looking in the horizon.

Setting	Value	Notes
Night Lightning	High	Lower if you need perf
Shadows	High	Lower if you need perf
Advanced Fog	ON
Particles	High
Weather	High*	Low in Night + Snow
Crowd	High
Cloth	High
Ambient Occlusion	Medium
Advanced Ambient Occlusion	On
Mirrors	High
Ground Cover	High	Low/off if you need perf
Vehicle Details	Ultra
Track	Medium
Trees	Ultra	Looks much better in replays
Objects	Ultra
Vehicle Reflections	High
Water	Ultra
Skidmarks	Off	Change if you like
Texture Details	Ultra
Shader Detail	Low
Anisotropic Filtering	Ultra
Smoke Shadows	On
Advanced Blending	Off

Which all looks like this

Best settings for Nvidia GTX 1070

Everything on ULTRA, 4x MSAA or even 8x if you like that better.

But disable Advanced Blending, it makes the FPS dip to 40 when driving though dense forest.

Oh man i love this new GPU :-D

[Funk]

DeadSpace47 knows things - The same thing happening to him is happening to me : casually speeding at 150kmph through a forest just to get a 0.5 sec of heavy load in the middle of a corner.

I tried lowering everything and it still does that.
I do not remember this game dropping frames the way it does now (havent played it for a few months now).
Some of these corners are in very hard stages like col de turini. I know these stages used to lag a bit (my memory cannot fail me) but the lag spikes were not as bad as this (dropping 50-60 frames even for half a sec).
I just thank god that shit happens in just a handful of stages and those'r high altitude stages, mainly turini stages.

[DeadSpace47]

While driving, at random parts of the rally, l will get FPS spikes that when l turn, makes me turn extremely to the side and crash. l do have everything on low, but it can happen and it ruins my experience. Otherwise, the game runs stable without the sudden spikes that can happen randomly. It is like those spikes where you move to the next area, it loads the area and you get 0.5-1 second of spikes.

[OptimisticHuman]

Just mentioning that your monitor won't display extra frames if your fps is higher than the refresh rate. If your monitor displays at 75Hz, your won't be able to see 144fps on your screen :)

[RaccFoxx]

Thanks for making this, I play on a decent gaming laptop but wanted to optimize and have an idea on what to do specifically.

[Need for Speed - Most Wanted]

my system is good enough to run it at low at 100fps but i still play on lowest at about 150 because it feels as if you were going slower. for instance, doing 180kmh feels like doing 150 to me. the lowest the fps the faster the game feels, which actualy makes me slower.

[jonnysonny]

which is %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\DiRT Rally\hardwaresettings\

[jonnysonny]

you could mention where the graphic config is stored..

[MADPixeL]

Hello!
I have a 4GB nvidia gtx 1050ti OC, a six-core AMD 6300 microprocessor and the game installed on a solid disk. all running on windows 10 pro 64-bit.
I would like to know what kind of configuration you recommend to me to have a good performance. At the moment, I have the game in HIGH quality and it runs quite well, except for some graphic details (the texture of the trees being completed as I go along the way, for example)

[invision2212]

using the 1070 settings on my 1080 i can hit 60 fps@4K with 8xAA with lowest frame of 58 running at 1.9ghz and a Ryzen 5 @3.9ghz all 6 cores

[BlueAuran]

Silliest guide ever in some ways, here you want to maximize your chances for online? THEN MAX YOUR FPS OBVIOUSLY, that means turning EVERYTHING down to minimum (sliding to the left) and getting your highest FPS, period, it's what every pro gamer does to get max fps so they can win in online, if you are playing pve it works also obviously, yet humans are the ones who create the robots in game obviously, so if you can out-think them with a team, or etc. That helps also.