TDU 2 - Settings For Max FPS with most detail

Thought I would make a guide to show which settings give highest FPS as the TDU 2 engine can be the cause of bad FPS due to lack of optimisation.

If you put everything up full, maxed out, FPS will be awful (regardless of computer specs) ie around 25-35 FPS
If you put everything on lowest, the game looks terrible and you are missing out.

If you follow this guide you will get the best looking it can be, whilst getting the most FPS you can ie 60 FPS, no drops.

This works well for dual/quad core (with and without hyperthread) and was tested on the mid range nvidia 750ti and radeon 7750. It should be helpful for lower spec gpus also.

Video Settings

Resolution: 1920x1080 (or whatever you want)

Refresh rate: 60 Hz (or whatever you want)

VSync: Yes (off while testing, on when gaming)

Anti-aliasing: 4x (adjust if needed)

Environment quality: Medium (anything higher kills fps)

Car and opponent quality: Very high (keep at max)

Texture filtering quality: Very high (keep at max)

FX quality: Very high (keep at max)

Why this works...

If you ramp a game's details all up full and you get poor performance no matter what spec pc, that highlights limits in the game engine itself regarding optimisation limitations.

Specifically, in TDU2, we experience this in areas with lots of buildings eg towns/cities.
This is why all details maxed out gives 2 sets of fps, 1 out driving in open areas then a much lower fps in builtup areas.

A note on HyperThreading

You can run TDU 2 with HyperThreading on, but the problem is that the game engine was designed with dual and quad core in mind.

What this means is that if you have HyperThreading enabled on a quad core, unfortunately the TDU 2 game engine spreads the load badly causing bottlenecking issues.

You won't notice it most of the time, especially just driving around. But if you try to do the main game cups eg A7 cup at night, then pick the City Loop race, you will see the issue.

Without HyperThread (Quad Core - 4 cores, 4 threads)
Core 0: 54% (this is actually 1st core)
Core 1: 57% (2nd core)
Core 2: 52% (3rd core)
Core 3: 48% (4th core)

And the load is spread nice and evenly.


With HyperThreading (Quad Core - 4 cores, 8 threads)
Core 0: 73% (this is actually 1st core, 1st thread)
Core 1: 0% (1st core, 2nd thread)
Core 2: 60% (2nd core, 3rd thread)
Core 3: 0% (2nd core, 4th thread)
Core 4: 34% (3rd core, 5th thread)
Core 5: 0% (3rd core, 6th thread)
Core 6: 0% (4th core, 7th thread)
Core 7: 98% (4th core, 8th thread)

As you can see the load is not being evenly spread and at its worst, the last thread is hitting 100% and causing performance to suffer.

The best solution for getting the most performance in TDU 2 is to actually turn off hyperthreading.
This can be done in the BIOS.

Although you can try to do this in Windows eg msconfig/task manager set cpu affinity), the in Windows way doesn't actually solve it for these reasons:
Msconfig - just allows you to enable/disable each whole core (including its hyperthread) eg if you try and pick just 2 cores, the msconfig way will give you the first core and then its virtual core - so not 2 actual logical cores.

Task manager set cpu affinity - just allows for avoiding using each cores hyperthread which does not actually turn off hyperthreading meaning you dont get the benefits turning off hyperthreading can give you.

For games/software that either dont use it, or use it incorrectly, the benefit of turning off hyperthreading is as follows:
The CPU has an L1, L2 and L3 cache. This is very fast access to cpu cycles and with hyperthreading off, each core gets full use of the caches. With hyperthreading enabled, the cache is divided in half. The actual cores get a half and the virtual cores (eg the hyperthreads) get a half.
This works great for software/games that are hyperthread capable eg video rendering/encoding (it can even yield up to 30% improvements), but for software/games that aren't hyperthread capable, having hyperthreading enabled just gives each real core half the L3 cache, whereas disabling hyperthreading in the bios will give each real core all of the L3 cache, thus maximising performance.

If you would like to verify this for yourself, you can using MSI Afterburner with it's OSD and rivatuner.

[Buzz]

who have FPS problem turn off the microphone from settings when launch the game. after you can turn on back. For me solve the low fps problem

[daw]

Actually it seems for me turning off the internet connection has the biggest impact on fps.

[daw]

Turning vsync off in game and turning on adaptive sync in nvidia settings helped a lot in my case. Went from 30 fps dips to 50 fps minimum with high environment on i7 4770. Had the 100% on one core but didn't want to turn off hyper threading.

[WHY ARE YOU GEY?]

These settings worked well for me! Thanks!

[Chrüterchraft]

il run fine on my pc with max settings, maybe the problem you're having is something releated to new hardware compatibility

[Caramelised Onions]

Awesome I'll try lowering the enrivonment details. Wondering what was causing the drops.

[Amiibola]

Ok, looks like i had Crimsom forcing AF at max to the game, maybe is something from when i tinkered with the Retail version. Gave the AF control back to the game and everything went back to normal... mostly.

[Amiibola]

My settings are the same as the ones you recommend in your guide, but with no AA at all (i'm very wary of performance so i usually don't use AA)

[wellen1981]

AA is heavy on demands in cities eg 2x is min and 4x is the max i use. Alsowhat are all your settings and are you on ibiza or hawaii as ibiza is less demanding ;o)

[Amiibola]

I've been playing the game for ages with the Retail version and learnt too soon that having Detail settings over Medium is overkill. Sadly, this is happening with the Steam version on Medium settings and i don't understand why. In fact, the Steam version is giving me a plethora of bugs that i never suffered in the Retail version.