Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and this is our black ops 3 optimization guys this is a graphics optimization guide that aims to help you in increasing FPS and eliminating some of the more impactful settings when it comes to framerate but potentially not as impactful visually so we're trying to make the trade-off of where can we sacrifice some visual fidelity in exchange for a faster frame rate output which for multiplayer is the thing that you want the most of course so first of all this was published on the website probably about a week ago now we published it the day after black ops 3 launched well this is the video version of that if you need more information this video will only go so deep with the detail of options that you can tweak check the link in the description below for the full guide on graphics optimization within black ops 3 but let's just dive into things quickly here first of all major note black ops 3 just put out an optimization patch and that changes our FPS metrics quite a bit so these metrics were presenting on this video are the original metrics from the day one launch that means that in general you should actually see increased performance over what we had here but the overall Delta that is the percent difference between settings sayin off vs. on or high versus low that Delta value separating the settings the settings levels should be about the same even with the optimization patch so these steps will still help you in increasing the FPS the first item to look at is mesh quality and we have all these settings defined in the article but mesh quality is one of the ones that may confuse a few people meshes in games are sort of in the same line as objects and textures and all of that in that they help create the environment that you're looking at and in some of our examples we've shown mesh quality is most apparent when looking at things like vehicles and complex models within the environment and bikes are an example if you look at sort of the background prefab bikes mesh quality is what dictates how smooth the model appears and the level of detail within the models there might be some items on that model that are present at higher qualities but not present at lower ones like more circular lights or things of that nature the next setting is texture filtering which is basically anisotropic filtering if you're familiar with that it's just sort of renamed here so anisotropic filtering is filtration of the textures it does a filter pass on the texture that basically aids in how that texture appears to you when it's applied to surfaces at different angles the best example and the one that I use the most is take a road if you have a road with a dotted line like a white dotted line as you'd find in real life and you're standing as I am and the road is at this kind of angle to you a perpendicular angle effectively you're viewing the texture that applies to that road at a non oblique angle you are not looking at it 90 degrees head-on so what does that mean well as the road gets further from you and approaches it's a vanishing point out on the horizon somewhere as it approaches the vanishing point the texture without any kind of anisotropic or texture filtering will look like it's still applying in squares it'll look like he gets more blurry and distorted as the road distances itself so texture filtering basically smoothes this out and sort of makes a more trapezoidal application of textures as it gets farther away from you and this normally has effectively zero impact on performance there's a small impact in black ops 3 but you'll see in the article that it's really not a big deal and you can kind of just leave it on to the max but that is what texture filtering does the next one is subsurface scattering and this is the base layer of what creates deep scattering going forward as graphics advanced in the next year or two but subsurface scattering is a technology that takes skin especially face skin and things like that within black ops and it changes the way that light cascades and propagates through that skin layer some games even now have blood mapping in the face so what subsurface scattering does is it effectively smooths out sort of the cheats with in black ops 3 and so here's I have the forehead and things like that and makes those wrinkles and imperfections in the skin look a little bit more real by manipulating the way that light interacts with those very tiny and fine imperfections so this changes how the light cascades under the surface within the skin and that changes where the light is brighter or dimmer or what-have-you when it comes to skin graphics the final option we're talking about in black ops 3 before just jumping into the benchmarks is order independent transparency and within black ops three order independent transparency is required for volumetric lighting and that means that volumetric lighting has a dependency on oh I T which is what I'm abbreviating it to because it's very hard to say order independent transparency over and over so volumetric lighting is dependent on oh i T being on if it's off then volumetric lighting must be off this makes benchmarking interesting as you see in the article Oh IT changes the way that layers of semi or fully transparent objects textures particle effects interact with each other so the the best example here if you go and I think it's the metro level I forget the name of it but it is it is a metro environment and you go there you can see in the background or in the distance that there's a sheet of glass at the border of the level that is occluding the pillars for a bridge in the background now this glass is transparent so even though it's including it in that it is physically in front of the pillars it is not occluding vision to that pillar so you can still see it the pillar also has a fog in front of it fog is semi-transparent you can see through it to some degree the same is true for the glass that is semi-transparent so oh I T takes these multiple layers of semi-transparent items and figures out which one gets drawn first and which one occludes the other and that way you don't have sort of weird flickering or inaccurate looking transparent effects within the game so that is what oh I T does and it does have a pretty big visual impact if you're really looking for it but if you're not looking for it is one of those items you can turn off and benefit greatly in terms of fps without necessarily having a huge impact to your gaming experience benchmarking black ops is interesting because the performance varies greatly from single player to multiplayer to freerunning there's a huge performance disparity depending on what you're playing and a single player a lot of that is because they're using higher quality models more Poly's higher quality textures and more objects and all of this environment art it's very cinematic and has a pretty movie-like feel to it but that means that you're taking a bigger hit to FPS so we saw up before the optimization patch remind you we saw FPS hit so about 37 to 38 percent from multiplayer to single-player we did all these tests you're seeing here in multiplayer and as because we sort of assumed that going forward multiplayer will probably be more popular of the two modes single-player is important but we only have so much time so we benchmark multiplayer and that means some technologies like subsurface scattering you don't see the full effect of because with in multiplayer never gonna get that close and that much detail and that high poly face animations and drawings I'm like in single-player where it's actually a pretty big focus so you will see more impact of subsurface scattering and single-player you can find RAM and vram benchmarks on the website we saw a memory consumption of about 15 point 2 gigabytes commit with a working set of six point seven gigabytes that means physical memory consumed six point seven and then virtual memory plus physical 15 point 2 gigabytes you can find the rest of that on the site via rams basically whatever is made available to the game through the video card the first critical item to FPS to turn down is order independent transparency we saw performance gains of about 13 percent by disabling oh I T completely which also disables volumetric lighting so that doesn't mean the benchmark is imperfect because we're now changing to settings not just one this will change the transparency layering fog interaction with the environment and players but will greatly boost fps and that's where oh I T comes in the most oh i T layers objects and textures with transparencies in a way that establishes the correct distance relative to the camera in our screenshot that we've shown on the site you can see this the best with the bridge and the pylon example that I've already given and if you disable it you lose that transparency layering but you gain about 13% fps oh it's totally off anti-aliasing is the next critical item which is really no surprise by moving to no anti-aliasing from filmic SMA 82x which is the default setting that we encountered for our setup we saw an improvement of 10.3% fps and that's pretty big contrast to fxaa which some folks will complain is a little bit blurry fxaa reduces FPS about 1.5 percent but it adds some level of anti-aliasing without getting the huge hit to performance AAA isn't necessarily that important to multiplayer gaming so this is one of the first places I would go to increase your FPS and if you're wondering what these options are black ops 3 offers a lot of anti-aliasing settings including the less familiar filmic SMA which is also present in previous Cod games filmic anti-aliasing tends to create a more cinematic experience it uses multi sampled temporal filtration which is t2x so it takes two samples two taps per pixel and applies that temporally which means over time so you're checking one frame to the next sampling pixels in each frame and then determining how the antia scene changes the edges and the color of the graphics and things like that it reduces the marching pixels effect in large part and that is a big hit to FPS so that's what I'd look at first for anti-aliasing is changing that high importance moving down from critical to high is the texture quality you can see examples of texture quality in our screenshots and this game has a massive impact on texture resolution when you change the quality there's actually it goes from legible for very small signage to completely illegible just a blob of color and this one is potentially rated as a critical change in terms of FPS for users of GPUs with smaller frame buffers but in general it's about a high importance texture quality corresponds with resolution of in-game textures and lo is so hideous that we'd really urge you to avoid going down too low we'd push you more towards medium as a tolerable and hardware setting that still grants you an extra five percent performance over extra especially with a smaller frame buffer because extra does consume a huge amount of video memory and you can see that Delta comparison in our chart where it's a couple gigabytes Delta for extra on texture resolution ambient occlusion is of medium impact fps and the screenshots we've demonstrated will show what ambient occlusion actually does for the most part a Oh will embolden points of contact between bordering services darkened shadows were necessary and dictate the proliferation of light reflection from some materials disabling AO increases fps by about five point nine percent which is certainly noticeable but not as much as the previous settings and going from extra to medium it gives a three percent FPS gamut gain if you don't want to completely disable it this is the first place to look after exhausting the previous settings if you really need more FPS if you're on a lower end hardware setup volumetric lighting is the last setting we're talking about here the rest you got to go to the article to get more information volumetric lighting has about a four point seven percent performance range from none too high giving us another few FPS if absolutely desperate for a few frames we'd suggest running volumetric lighting on at least medium as it does somewhat noticeably benefit the games overall aesthetic and visuals and volumetric lighting produces sort of a fill of light that radiates everywhere just like we've got fill lights when we film these videos where you have sort of one light that fills the room or the environment with a less intense light that provides some atmospheric glow that's what volumetric lighting does so I would recommend leaving it on to some level and this is particularly noticeable with transparent textures and smoker cloud or fog effects after that check out shadow map quality then texture filtering and mesh quality and the rest in the article if you're really running out of places to try and gain a few fps so that is the black ops 3 graphics optimization guide we really like doing these they're a lot of fun to learn about game graphics and hopefully it gives you some good information even if you're not playing black ops 3 it still teaches what the settings do and as always if you like this kind of content the best thing you can do for us is spread the word share it tell folks about it and then hit that patreon link in the post roll video if you want to support us directly and creating more stuff like this so check back this week for some battlefront content and a couple of other cool videos are working on I'll see you all next time