Image quality and performance / NVIDIA Gameworks

Image quality modes

 Let's have a peek at the best and worst image quality differences and the performance effect of them.

Low Quality

Highest Quality

If you'd like to have a look at the uncompressed raw images to compare in detail, you can download them here so that you may compare them locally in full size (Ultra HD) on your PC and monitor:

• Low (3840x2160 / 14MB)
• Average  (3840x2160 / 14MB)
• High (3840x2160 / 14MB)
• Highest (3840x2160 / 14MB)

So, this game offers multiple preset quality settings modes. Differences in low and medium quality modes are mostly based on settings like shadows and number of ambient effects, from there onwards with the high and highest quality modes, texture quality.  We'll look at performance differences with the help of some benchmarks. Pretty much any modern age graphics card can run very 'average' settings quite easily, which we'll use today.

The highest quality preset is obviously the best-looking mode available, above you can see a GeForce GTX 1060 at work. If you look at Quad HD (2560x1440) you'll scale from say 40 FPS on High quality, towards 70 FPS in the low-quality mode.

Gameworks effects

Ever since the benchmark version as released there has been a lot of chatter. Yes, this is an NVIDIA gameworks and thus NVIDIA optimized title. However you'll be interested in learning this, certain NVIDIA gameworks features can also be enabled on Radeon graphics cards, behold:

Above you can see we can enable Hairworks and TurfEffects, we tested the two enabled/disabled modes on a Radeon RX 580 and GeForce GTX 1060. 

Above you can see the Radeon RX 580, the performance hit is quite substantial really, you are looking at an overhead of 15 maybe 20%. Whether or now you find that acceptable is totally up to you. The creatures look fuzzier with hair etc. 

For Nvidia however, the performance curve seems to be roughly the same, however, is smaller at 2560x1440.