General Lee
Member
My personal findings and recommended settings with a GTX 970 and 2500K overclocked and running 2560x1440 res:
AA:
FXAA seems to work ok, but MFAA might be worth considering if you hate jaggies and have the performance. I'd say aliasing is one of the biggest issues in terms of the overall image quality, and FXAA doesn't remove all of it.
Ambient Occlusion:
SSAO has a high performance impact but does bring more depth to the image compared to Tile AO or off. Tile AO is cheap, but didn't seem to make much of a difference. I feel SSAO has such a highly variable impact it might be better left to Tile AO.
Shadows:
I think Static only is probably the best in terms of visuals vs. performance. All shadows I assume only adds some shadows to dynamic objects like bodies, cars etc. It had a high cost and low impact at least in the scene I tested, which was a typical city combat scenario.
Shadow Quality:
There's a noticeable softening of shadows from lowest to highest, but performance difference was next to nothing in the scene I tested.
Texture Detail:
With this on max I had VRAM usage somewhere between 2500-3500 MB depending on settings and scene. I haven't seen any evidence of the game running out of VRAM yet, so I'd leave this at maximum with a 4GB card.
Anisotropic Filtering:
AF makes the biggest difference in cinematic scenes where you're looking at the textures like ground/walls at an oblique angle. You can see the difference best in the main menu screen. In the isometric combat view the biggest difference is between bi/trilinear and anisotropic. I'd say it's worth it to keep it at least 2xAF on all systems, but 16x won't make much of a difference in either quality or performance in the isometric view.
Depth of Field:
It seems like Bokeh is either broken or extremely demanding. It totally tanked my performance to sub 30 fps. Simple DOF seems to be the way to go if you like the effect.
Draw Distance:
I didn't see this have much of an effect in the isometric view, but it might have a bigger impact in cinematic scenes.
Out of the toggleable settings I only noticed Screen Space Reflections is likely to have a larger impact, especially during rainy missions where it adds reflections to puddles. The rest are up to preference, though SSS I didn't see having any noticeable impact.
AA:
FXAA seems to work ok, but MFAA might be worth considering if you hate jaggies and have the performance. I'd say aliasing is one of the biggest issues in terms of the overall image quality, and FXAA doesn't remove all of it.
Ambient Occlusion:
SSAO has a high performance impact but does bring more depth to the image compared to Tile AO or off. Tile AO is cheap, but didn't seem to make much of a difference. I feel SSAO has such a highly variable impact it might be better left to Tile AO.
Shadows:
I think Static only is probably the best in terms of visuals vs. performance. All shadows I assume only adds some shadows to dynamic objects like bodies, cars etc. It had a high cost and low impact at least in the scene I tested, which was a typical city combat scenario.
Shadow Quality:
There's a noticeable softening of shadows from lowest to highest, but performance difference was next to nothing in the scene I tested.
Texture Detail:
With this on max I had VRAM usage somewhere between 2500-3500 MB depending on settings and scene. I haven't seen any evidence of the game running out of VRAM yet, so I'd leave this at maximum with a 4GB card.
Anisotropic Filtering:
AF makes the biggest difference in cinematic scenes where you're looking at the textures like ground/walls at an oblique angle. You can see the difference best in the main menu screen. In the isometric combat view the biggest difference is between bi/trilinear and anisotropic. I'd say it's worth it to keep it at least 2xAF on all systems, but 16x won't make much of a difference in either quality or performance in the isometric view.
Depth of Field:
It seems like Bokeh is either broken or extremely demanding. It totally tanked my performance to sub 30 fps. Simple DOF seems to be the way to go if you like the effect.
Draw Distance:
I didn't see this have much of an effect in the isometric view, but it might have a bigger impact in cinematic scenes.
Out of the toggleable settings I only noticed Screen Space Reflections is likely to have a larger impact, especially during rainy missions where it adds reflections to puddles. The rest are up to preference, though SSS I didn't see having any noticeable impact.
