Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box today we're looking at forts of horizon for again following on from steve's big GPU benchmark of again that i think hopefully went up on the channel yesterday i'm pretty sure it did steve's used to be pretty reliable to gain those things out on time especially when it's internet is actually working actually a quick note on yesterday's video Microsoft released a patch for 4-2 horizon for today that some people have told us improves performance on Maxwell cards as you might have seen GPUs likely 980ti didn't perform particularly well in our testing but that might have been fixed in today's patch so we're looking into that at the moon anyway I've been playing a bit of horizon as well I've got to say it's a graphically beautiful game one of the most visually stunning racing games I've seen plus the expensive open worlds always something I'll have in racing games I haven't played a lot just yet I'm still finishing up shadow of the Tomb Raider but I'm so glad this game is on PC rather than just as a pure Xbox exclusive and I've talked about the game though today's view is a graphics settings benchmark and optimization guide for fought to horizon for what that means is I've benchmarked nearly every setting in the game so I can show you the exact visual quality differences between each of the settings as well as how they perform the idea is to discover the best balance of visuals and performance to give you guys a set of settings that is optimal for this game at least in our opinion the performance numbers will also hopefully save you guys a bit of time benchmarking on your setup you can simply take the performance differences shown here find the best settings for tweaking and apply those to your game to squeeze more out of your hardware a few quick notes before we get into it firstly the graphs coming up are in percentage games not raw FPS because it better illustrates how the setting tweaks apply to your setup secondly we benchmarked with a variety of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD high-end and mid-range and averaged out the results so what you see here should apply to roughly every GPU give or take a few percentage points although our Comment where there may be larger differences for lower end GPUs thirdly we did still test using our core i7 8700 K test rig overclocked to four point gigahertz so we were entirely GPU bound in this game and lastly all captured words you see here is from an RT X xx atti running the game at 4k and the captured food for the most part isn't where we benchmark the majority of the tests were performed using the in game benchmark aside from a few tests that required actual gameplay we also recommend watching this video at youtube's maximum 4k quality or you can download a source quality file from our patreon page it's a little bit easy to see the differences when you're viewing at the maximum quality so let's start with the presets the game has five of them and then you can also push up a variety of settings above the ultra preset so we've added a sixth maximum preset here which has everything cranked up as high as it can go however there's very little visual difference between maximum and ultra so we recommend just sticking to ultra judy with 37 percent performance uplift you get from shifting to ultra the differences between ultra and high aren't massive but it's clear that enforcer horizon for ultra does provide a quality upgrade whereas the ultra preset in many other games is almost indistinguishable from high here ultra provides better card geometry improved textures better lighting especially at night and sharper cleaner reflections high is very close to medium visually in fact I found it very hard to split the two while low takes everything down a notch in terms of geometry textures and lighting very low is the potato preset which looks terrible with shadows turned off entirely when looking at the performance breakdown I have a couple of recommendations for those that don't want to tweak anything further and just want to use a nice simple preset my choice would be ultra due to the noticeable quality improvement over high Ultra is an especially good choice because the Steve showed Ultra gives you around 60fps at 1080p with the card like a GTX 10 63 gigabyte or rx 570 while at 1440p the gtx 1070 pushes above 60fps if you want to reduce quality to gain a ton of performance I'd recommend skipping high and going from medium the jump from high to medium provides a 6 percent performance improvement for nearly no quality difference medium is also a decent 32 percent faster than ultra which brings some of the lower end cards into play it's also a good choice for high refresh gamers as which talking about a difference between say 90 and roughly 120 FPS es though personally I would still take the higher visual quality of ultra let's move now to checking out the wealth of other graphics options in Forza horizon 4 for a bit of fine tuning some of these settings have more impact than others so we'll breeze through some of the more straightforward ones also just quietly it's a massive Android's happening this aims for quite a full restart to change even something basic like anisotropic filtering requires a restart that's pretty ridiculous I'm hoping anyway let's get down to the list of settings starting with anisotropic filtering usually this setting has labels like 2x + 16 X but here we have just ultra high and medium there are subtle differences to the clarity of textures in all three modes especially Road textures which are a prime candidate to be cleaned up with AF Ultra gives the best coyote while with medium everything is a bit blurry my advice with all games is to run anisotropic filtering at the highest possible setting and that's especially important for racing games you only gain one point two percent switching from ultra to medium which simply isn't worth it stick in an ultra unless you have a low-end card that struggles with AF in which case I turn it all the way down night shadows only come into play at night who would have thought anyway it has the basic effect of your car's headlights producing shadows when it shines on other cars or scenery it's quite a noticeable change one that greatly improves the realism of the game's lighting systems at night in the benchmark which is half during the day and half at night you gain two percent - minimum frame rates from disabling night shadows considering the large visual difference it makes I'd leave them enabled shadow quality is an interesting one for - horizon 4 uses a shadow system that increases in resolution and crispness the more you turn up the shadow setting while also providing some distance based shadow softness there are large differences between each mode particularly in the shadowy forest areas of the game extreme provides the sharper shadows with a large draw distance Ultra keeps closer shadows as sharp as extreme while reducing shadow resolution for further away shadows high and low both reduced shadow resolution in successive steps while off looks like crap so don't use that mode interestingly car shadows are independent of environment shadows and it's only environment shadows that are affected by this setting in terms of performance shadows have very little impact relative to the quality difference turning from extreme to low only improves frame rates by 1% which isn't nearly enough to justify the quality loss turning them off only gives a three percent improvement 2 which makes that setting completely worthless my advice here is to use the extreme option motion blur is always a contentious option among gamers but I think for racing games it does add to the presentation considering the high speeds you are moving at most of the time there are two separate options for motion blur one controls the quality of the technique the other the shutter speed there's no performance difference between these short and long shutter speeds but short looks better so we used it for all testing in terms of quality Ultra and high are both pretty similar is when you move down to normal and low that the sampling quality for the blur reduces quite a bit low in particular looks pretty bad aside from turning off motion blur entirely which gives you a 5 percent boost to performance compared to ultra would recommend using high as it gives nearly the same visual quality as ultra while giving a 2 percent performance boost low isn't really worth it as it only gives an extra one percentage point for our large quality drop environment extra quality is the main texture control for the game this dictates the clarity of textures for close and far objects as is usually the case the higher the better for this setting especially on high resolution displays where higher quality textures are more noticeable Ultra definitely gives the sharpest textures and choosing a lower texture quality will only give you a 2% performance boost at best so it's not worth it the only reason I'd lower the texture quality is if your card is running out of VRAM but provided you have 4 gigabytes or so you should be fine for ultra textures at 1080p static geometry quality appears to do nothing visually or in terms of performance so let's move on from this one I set it to ultra high think this will get fixed in an update to the game I should note as well that this wasn't fixed in today's October 1st patch the primary effect of the dynamic geometry setting is modifying how the crowd looks at races in terms of overall population quality and draw distance Xtreme has the highest population highest quality crowds and that falls with each setting down to low where the crowd is pretty sparse despite the visual difference I don't think the crowd population matters all that much as you're mostly focused on the cars and scenery while the people standing on the sides of the road aren't exactly the highest-quality simulations anyway we're looking at performance you can gain a handy three percent from turning it down from high or ultra to just medium crowds are a little less dense but in motion it's hard to notice and I think it's worth it for the performance improvement multisample anti-aliasing or MSA is always a big hitting effect in terms of performance it's the biggest enforcer horizon for looking at this side-by-side comparison here at 4k you definitely want to be using at least two times MSAA to smooth out edges and provide a cleaner presentation but I don't think four times is required at this resolution a DX is basically no different to 4x and consuming the large performance hit it's definitely not worth using speaking of that performance hit you can see the differences it's here shifting from 8 X to 2x will give you a huge 14 percent performance improvement for very similar visual quality moving from 4 X 2 8 X is the biggest loss in performance while moving from 2 X 2 off isn't worth it considering how bad off looks in comparison to 2 X I'd consider using 4 X on lower resolution displays but my advice for most users is 2 X you can add FXAA to msaa for even more anti-aliasing but in my opinion FXAA does nothing in conjunction with higher levels of MSAA while it only serves to blur the image at low levels of msaa and keep FXAA disabled if you're using MSAA otherwise if you don't want to take the performance hit from msaa unable FXAA as it has basically no impact to performance SS ao or screen space ambient occlusion impacts shadowing and the overall depth of the game world if the setting you want to keep enables and increasing it does have a noticeable effect on the level of shadowing and overall realism Ultra gives the best results over high and medium while off makes the world look a bit flat looking at the performance breakdown I see no reason to switch from ultra to high or especially medium reducing the setting only improves performance by 1% yet Ultra looks noticeably better than high medium is a useless setting as it looks worse than high for no performance improvement if you are struggling for framerate I'd consider turning off SSAO to gain 5% but most users should try to keep it on flection quality is important in this game as there are so many reflective surfaces particularly your own vehicle I couldn't tell the difference between the extreme and ultra modes but switching to high reduces a reflection resolution and draw distance the further you turn it down the more the resolution and draw distance is impacted looking at the performance breakdown Ultra is the slightly better option to use compared to extreme moving to high does give a 1.5 percent improvement to performance but that comes at the expense of a slight reduction to visual quality medium again doesn't seem worth touching as it reduces quality for no performance improvement low and very low are settings you should only consider on slower pcs my preference is to use ultra consume the small quality gain over high for a small performance loss the high is also a decent choice depending on your hardware I'm going to smash through the next two because they only have a big impact for those that use the cockpit view windshield reflection qualities should be kept on ultra there's only a 1% difference between ultra and off while each step up increases the reflection resolution mirror qualities should also be kept on the maximum extreme mode which is virtually identical in performance to high for an improvement to reflection draw distance low cuts the draw distance massively for a 2% improvement world's car level of detail is a highly influential setting both on visual quality and performance as it determines the quality of the cars basically the most important thing in the game there's not a huge difference from extreme to ultra but moving down to high immediately gives you a lower fidelity car model and low models for other carts medium reduces the quality of other cars further while low steps everything down or overall when looking at the performance breakdown yeah turning this setting from ultra to high does give a large 5% bump to performance hopefully the cars in this game are so well designed and from such a large part of what you see that you should keep this setting on ultra so you can enjoy them in their full glory if you're not hitting the frame rate you want though turning it down to high isn't a massive quality loss for the 5 percent gain in performance deformable terrain quality is the one setting that was too difficult to benchmark and recommend keeping it on ultra though screen space reflections or SSI is one of these settings that adds significant realism to the lighting system in particular reflections from surfaces like water the difference between ultra and high isn't that large you get slightly reduced draw distance with high but it's hard to spot most of the time there's a very slight difference between high and medium then shifting to low reduces draw distance and resolution further turning SSR off is a significant change and looks pretty unnatural if you ask me with SSR you get the largest performance improvement simply switching from ultra to high which I feel is absolutely worth doing for the 5 percent performance gain so I'd recommend using high here SSR off is around the same performance as medium for much worse visuals so I definitely opted use at least medium SSI here if not low if you need to up your performance lens effects is one of those settings where I couldn't really tell the difference between the three main modes off pretty clearly disables things like water droplets on the screen but I couldn't notice any difference between the medium and ultra lens effects modes turning it off may be your preference from a visual standpoint if you don't like lens effects but if you do I'd suggest using the medium mode as it gives a good three percent more performance than ultra shader quality has an incredibly subtle difference to the way the game's lighting interacts with surfaces I think it might also control bloom as well to a small degree overall though it's not a mode that has a large impact strangely there's a two percent performance improvement going from ultra to high despite barely any change to visual so I'd recommend using high you can gain a bit more shifting to low but high is ever so slightly superior which is why it's my choice the final setting in the game is for particle effects this one changes the amount of particles for things like rain snow dust confetti so on pretty easy choice here for which salient to use there's no performance difference between any of them to go with high alright we're at the point now where we've gone through basically every quality setting in the game and giving you all our thoughts on which ones are the best in terms of balance between quality and performance he's everything to summarize for you so if you want to use our optimal settings simply head into for Sarai's and for settings and use the exact settings you see on the screen now these custom settings compare favorably to ultra in terms of performance but deliver high visual quality in fact in our benchmark runs our custom configure formed a fraction better but in general you'll get ultra preset performance which I feel this is a pretty great place to be at considering the large number of cards that can play this game using ultra settings at 1080p however in terms of visual quality we sacrificed a few things to see gains in other areas crowd density lens effects and shadow quality were all cut but it's that nearly no impact of visual quality meanwhile we managed to improve shadow quality SSAO and reflections which all have a much high impact to visuals particularly in the open-world section of the game overall we end up with subtle improvements to quality for know performance loss and that's a win I reckon that's it for this graphics optimization guide for 4 - horizon 4 hopefully you now know how every setting performs so you can get the most out of this game if such a stunning and fun game if you into racing I think you need to grab this one anyway as always links to download a source quality version for this video are available for our patrons links to that in the description below definitely worth signing up for that and also to get access to our discord chat subscribe for more videos like this one as we'll be tackling Assassin's Creed Odyssey next and our catch you later