Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box in today's video we are exploring just'cause force graphics options on PC to provide you guys with an optimal set of settings that provides the perfect balance between visuals and performance as Steve showed in his big GPU benchmark of the game this title really runs like crap especially on mid tier and all the hardware so hopefully there's a few things we can tweak to get the game running better with that much lost to visual quality I think it's fair to say the game isn't the most visually attractive one released this year and it certainly doesn't provide visuals that match the performance you get while the lighting system and destructibility is impressive in some areas the game is quite lacking as far as models characters textures and a few other effects are concerned it is a massive open world game with varied environments but I feel perhaps too much time was spent making the world huge rather than focusing on these areas along with you know general engine optimization on top of that there are a few frustrations with the PC version such as a terrible menu system especially for the graphics options which requires you to scroll down the list to hit apply and then back every time you enter the graphics menu yet you can't use your Mouse's scroll wheel or escape or backspace for this so yeah not great there and driving cars using keyboard controls also feels rather awful I think that needs a bit of tweaking I reckon but perhaps the biggest omission our graphics presets just calls for has 13 different graphics options but there are no presets to nicely tie everything together for people that you just want to play the game with minimal fuss a lot of the settings there a simple yes/no toggle but still a small selection of presets is pretty standard in PC games that said at least it runs about 60 FPS and had arbitrary resolutions and you can change graphics settings without restarting the game which is always nice before I get into the comparisons there's some standard housekeeping to go over everything was tested using a variety of high end and mid-range graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA so the numbers you see here should be representative of performance across most systems however we were using our core i7 8700 K test rig with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory so for the entirety of our testing we work GPU bound all the captures you see in this video were taken using an NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 20 80 TI at 4k and we recommend watching this video at 4k for maximum quality it's a bit easy to spot the differences in each setting at youtube's highest quality mode or you can download a source quality file from our patreon page anyway let's get into it first up is anisotropic level which refers to of course anisotropic filtering this is one of the most straightforward settings in most games and governs how clear textures are at weird angles and if you're playing the game with the maximum texture quality setting we always recommend leaving anisotropic filtering on the maximum 16x setting as well you can see in this shot that as the road curves up through the heels having a higher AF level shows clearer road textures further into the distance the choice of which scene to use even easier when comparing the performance difference between 16x and 1x despite a large difference to visual quality you'll gain almost nothing in terms of frame rate from choosing a lowest setting for this reason 16x is an easy choice anti-aliasing is next up and we have three choices here temporal SMA a FXAA without any temporal components and no anti-aliasing so there's only two very basic post-processing anti-aliasing methods available here and to be honest neither really any good their temporal SMA a mode in particular is absolute garbage it's barely any better at removing shimmering and jagged edges than FXAA yet introduces horrible ghosting effects in motion due to the temporal component this is a fast-paced game so I wouldn't even consider using temporal smh due to the artifacting FXAA is also a bad choice because it too doesn't do a great job of removing jagged edges while no AAA is of course also bad so really there's no good anti-aliasing option in this tile which is very disappointing in terms of performance temporal SMA a causes a surprisingly high performance here turning it down to FX a will lead to 5% higher frame rates and I reckon FXAA looks slightly better as well due to the lack of those ghosting effects there's not much more performance to be gained from disabling anti-aliasing entirely it's a real toss-up between FX a and no AAA here depending on how you like your games to texture quality is a simple affair you want to keep it on the highest possible setting unless you run out of graphics memory for example on a super low-end GPU very high textures give noticeably sharper shadows than the other three settings while understandably low is the worst considering there is basically no performance difference between all four modes again the choice to use very high is simple for most people water quality is an interesting setting because the water effects in Just Cause four aren't amazing on the high settings in fact so the most part that look pretty terrible and one area that's received you know a bit of a downgrade compared to just call us three there is very little difference between the very high high and medium modes while low flattens out the water considerably and looks pretty bad the main difference I spotted between the top three modes is the wake you leave while swimming medium disables this effect while it's still present on the highest settings not that this effect looks good when enabled though when you look at the performance difference there's really not much point adjusting the setting you'll only start to gain a significant amount moving to low which looks pretty bad and I'd only recommend that setting for those with low end GPUs for everyone else I think very high is the way to go here ocean tessellation surprise surprise only affects how the water surface looks in the oceans specifically I didn't spot any changes to the water in the games rivers which have fewer waves the visual difference is basically non-existent between the two settings but curiously disabling ocean tessellation actually leads to a performance reduction my suspicion here is just corn spore uses a slightly different ocean simulation depending on whether you have tessellation on or off with tessellation providing better performance one factor is another simple setting it governs how many minor objects are in view and at what distance therapy it doesn't seem to affect the foliage system in any significant way rather the main changes in the village and city areas with items on buildings and so forth disappearing on lower settings there really isn't much difference between the four modes here and when you look at the performance difference this makes sense it's only when you move down to medium or low that you are getting around a two to three percent performance improvement honestly I think a lot of people could play on medium rather than very high without being able to spot me changes but the framerate improvement probably isn't worth slightly more noticeable pop in as you flying around just cause fours shadow system has four main tight of shadows we have very nice shadows which are the shadows closest to you including your personal shadow there's moderate shadows for things reasonably close to the camera but more than a few meters away there's far shadows when you have you know your expansive view with large draw distances and there's also cloud shadows cloud shadows are a bit strange in that they are updated at 1 to 2 FPS compared to the real-time updating for other shadows such as foliage and that makes those cloud shadows look a bit weird if you look closely each of the 4 shadow mode simply governs the quality of the 4 shadow types with very high having the sharpest most realistic shadows and then each successive setting noticeably coming down on shadow sharpness and overall quality however there is no change to shadow draw distance so there's nowhere to increase the point at which very near and moderate shadows are swapped out the draw distance for the highest quality shadows is very short so this kind of point is super noticeable as you move through the world and in general there's quite a bit of pop into the shadow system in terms of performance there's no significant difference between the four modes despite the noticeable quality to change at best you're looking at a 2 percent improvement to average frame rates opting for low instead of very high and that's simply not worth it when looking at the visual change I'd keep the setting on very high unless you have a low-end rig ssao or screen space ambient occlusion is the most performance taxing setting in the game and also has a pretty significant impact on how the game looks especially in the dense forest and jungle areas of the map SSAO adds a significant amount of shadowing and depth to the game world generally speaking if you have the GPU horsepower to run the setting you want to keep it enabled however the performance improvement from turning SSAO off isn't massive we're talking about a 15 percent improvement to average frame rates which is by far the highest performance uplift of any setting normally I'd complain about such a huge performance hit from a single setting but realistically this game uses a lot of SSAO so it does seem somewhat warranted that said if you're on a performance constraint PC this is the first setting aren't disabled you will lose the key effect of visual quality but you also gain so much performance motion blur is one of those settings a lot of people choose to disable anyway but in the case of Just Cause 4 you should definitely disable it because the motion blur implementation is pretty rubbish it seems to use some sort of low quality sampling that just straight-up looks bad turn it off and save your eyes the trouble you also pick up about 2% to average performance in the process and nearly 5% to 1% loads which is decent for an effect you won't want to use anyway edge fade is a cosmetic setting that basically turns on or off a vignette around the screen it has no impact on performance and it's a personal preference as to whether you want it on or off personally I'll leave it off global illumination is similar to SSAO in that it does have a noticeable impact on how the lighting system works in just cause for when you enable the setting the world's lighting becomes more realistic and more accurate again particularly in dense forest areas and in the cities this is because the setting governs where the light can bounce off surfaces onto other surfaces or not disabling global illumination improves performance by 4% and it's probably one of the first effects I've disabled if I needed more performance along with SSAO I think it's a more subtle effect than SSAO so it's a prime candidate to switch off on mid-range Hardware screen space reflections are a common effect used in games and in Just Cause for its most noticeable along the many water surfaces around the map with SSR on there are reflections on the water and with SSR off there are not so pretty simple one here and honestly I think the water looks pretty bad and flat without SSR on at least worse than it does to begin with I disable the SSR leads to about a 4% improvement to performance however unlike global illumination I think this setting has a big influence on how the game world looks I try and keep it enabled unless you are searching for a lot more performance final setting in the game is bokeh depth of field and this is one that has a rather subtle effect on the presentation but is visible at all times basically distant objects will be very very slightly blurred and there's no blur with the setting off in most scenes is really hard to spot the difference while the setting comes with a two percent performance so I'd recommend disabling it for extra performance and that's all the settings in just calls for there are basically only a handful that have a significant effect on visual quality and performance most settings either do nothing to improve performance and a significant cost of visuals or provide such minor improvements you may as well disable them the big ones are SSAO and global illumination whatever combination of those settings you choose will likely influence how the game looks and run for you those with high-end systems should have both enabled if you're after a bit of extra performance I'd recommend disabling global illumination and then mid-range or entry level gamers should have both disables on a mid-range card you're looking at up to a 25% performance improvement in the most intensive areas of the map simply from disabling those two settings most other settings are leaf on the maximum available with a few exceptions I recommend turning off both motion blur and bokeh depth of field and I'll set the anti-aliasing mode to FXAA because it looks better and performs better than temporal SMA if you are really hunting for the last few drops of performance the only other things that make a significant difference are screen space reflections and all of water quality shadow quarry and LOD factor but only when set to their lowest setting so here are our three main Hardware unboxed recommended settings profiles side by side along with every setting at its maximum we have both SSAO and global illumination enabled just ssao enabled and neither enabled we also have motion blur and depth of field off fxaa is used and every other setting is that maximum our baseline recommendation improves performance by 13 percent then disabling global illumination brings that up to 18 percent and then disabling SSAO as well we'll deliver you a 40 percent performance improvement this is a best-case scenario figures in the jungle area of the map where performance tends to be the worst I still think there's a fair bit of work that could be done to improve popping for objects and shadows plus there are plenty of real glitches I experienced throughout the game so I guess it's now up to avalanche to get their act together and improve this engine considering the state the game launched in technically and visually you'd have to think this engine is pretty much on its last legs and will need a significant overhaul for any future games I'm not gonna harp on any more about its visuals or performance I think Steve did a great job of tearing this game a new one in his video and I agree it looks pretty mediocre and runs about as well as an ostrich with no legs and unfortunately a lot of the tweaks we recommend to get the game running better do make the game look even worse anyway that's it for this video let us know what you think of just calls for in the comments below not sure if I should commit to playing this one yet myself considering the mixed reviews online yes consider subscribing for more game optimization videos in 2019 and we also have a patreon page where you can get access to our exclusive discord chat and monthly live streams I'll catch you in the next one you