Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron Boxter yesterday you hopefully would have seen steve's big benchmark video looking at how Resident Evil 2 performs with a large number of GPUs the general consensus seems to be that the game runs very well on mid-range hardware with something like the GTX 1060 or rx 570 offering above 60fps at 1080p max settings the gtx 1070 being good enough for 1440p and the 1080 TI almost hitting 60fps at 4k but there's also a lot of quality settings in the game and in many cases it's not necessary to run on the maximum settings to get the best mix of performance and visuals this is a stunning game in general that uses a wide variety of effects to deliver a fantastic presentation however some settings are particularly performance intensive so in this video I'll be going through every setting in Resident Evil 2 to show you how it impacts both visual quality and performance I'll be making a few recommendations along the way for settings to turn down or tweak and then at the end we'll compare maximum settings with our custom settings profile the goal is to gain as much performance with as little reduction to visuals either to allow those with lower end cards to hit 60fps others with faster cards to start pushing up to a hundred plus fps a few bits of standard housekeeping before we get into it all testing was done on my core I $9.99 hundred K test rig with 16 gigabytes of RAM and a variety of modern GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA with results average all footage was captured at 4k using an RT X 2080 and we recommend watching this video at 4k because it can be hard to spot the differences in some settings at lower quality levels on YouTube we also have a full source quality file of this video at 100 megabits available to download for our patreon certain evil 2 seems like one of those games that was designed with PC in mind we're getting a great selection of preset C in conjunction with fairly basic visual representations of each setting along with bars that indicate the visual and performance impact for people unfamiliar with the settings this is a great sort of menu to have the main annoyed straight out here is the VRAM usage indicator which can quickly - well over 8 gigabytes depending on the configuration you set when the amount of rear am the game thinks it will be using exceeds the amount of RAM you have warnings will start to pop up I'm mostly concerned about these warnings scaring off gamers from trying higher quality settings because as far as I can tell exceeding the vram limit has no real performance impact I happily gamed on an 8 gigabyte card with the game saying it required more than 13 gigabytes of vram on the max settings so the warnings are a bit aggressive it's really only with low-end cards those with 4 gigabytes of vram or lower that it can have an effect the other setting which may not be obvious as to which mode is better is the DirectX option Steve covered this in his view yesterday the game runs universally better in the DirectX 11 mode so there's no reason at all to use DirectX 12 unless you enjoy I guess lower frame rates for no difference in visuals so for presets we have four different options I'll be going through plus a recommended mode that I won't cover the four main presets are max graphics priority balanced and performance priority in a lot of scenarios there are only very minor differences between Max and bounced with small reductions to volumetric lighting quality and shadows it's only when you get down to the performance priority mode that more features begin to be disabled or toned down including screen spaced reflections and ambient occlusion it's also worth mentioning there are still settings that can be turned down below what is set using the performance priority mode this lowest mode has even further reduced visuals but remarkably still looks quite decent considering the changes my advice here is pretty straightforward when looking at performance most gamers should use the bounced mode it delivers 31% more performance on average straightaway with nearly a 50% uplift in 1% lower performance all for almost imperceptible changes in visual quality throughout many areas I tested if you really want slightly better visuals even then I would choose the graphics priority mode over max settings simply because I could not tell a difference between the two rendering mode is a setting our only touch on low-end systems using the interlaced mode here rather than normal results in noticeable shimmering and artifacts as it's essentially using a really crappy temporal rake instruction in motion it's even more noticeable than in these static scenes the benefits using interlaced rendering is a 50% gain to performance however again I'd make other tweaks before turning this mode on anti-aliasing is in my opinion the most disappointing quality option in the game there are five modes here SMA a TA a fxaa and a combination of both taa and fxaa plus of course no anti-aliasing none of these options are particularly amazing both taa and ta plus FXAA are extremely soft due to a mediocre taa implementation the detail loss is so severe I'd call this a blur filter more of an anti-aliasing SMA a preserves the most detail but you do get some shimmering lesser than FX a and off however had the re engines taa being half decent I think a combination of taa and SMA like is used in some other games would have struck a great balance between detail and Jaggi reduction but as is you have to either put up with a super soft taa or not completely adequate SMA aside from super sampling through the resolution slider my choice here would be SMA and I've used it across the rest of testing as ta is simply too blurry to spot some detail changes booking your performance there's no significant difference between SMA and the two taa options using FX a or no AAA delivers a three to four percent performance improvement but since SMA is visually superior it gets my recommendation here texture quality is a pretty crazy setting in Resident Evil 2 because there are so many options there are three base texture modes we get high medium and low but then there's also numerous vram amounts listed beside these modes presumably these VM numbers are an indicator of how much we ramp the game will use for textures with 8 gigabytes allocating up to 8 gigabytes 2 gigabytes allocating up to 2 gig and so on on an 8 gig card like the RT X 2080 there was no performance difference between any of the texture modes so whether I set the game to 8 gigabytes or 0.25 gigabytes there was no difference to either average or 1% low performance at best I saw a 1 to 2 percent improvement using medium or low textures but of course the 8 high modes margins were so small they were negligible and this was the 8-gigabyte mode apparently using more than 13 gigabytes of vram as I mentioned before it's really only with rear am constrained cards like the GTX 1063 gigabyte of this setting makes any real difference for gamers with 6 gigabytes or more VM I'd recommend using the high mode at 8 gig though if you find there is stuttering it could be worth turning down the vram amount medium so virtually no loss to quality and could be an option for those with 3 around limited GPUs while low is really potato quality and I wouldn't recommend it here texture filter quality is a standard setting fan in most games here we have anisotropic filtering ranging from 2x to 16x plus both bilinear and trilinear modes for low-end GPUs you'll notice for these ground textures that the higher the mode the further into the distance you'll see clearer textures with a non anisotropic modes being particularly blurry across the mid-range GPUs and up I saw at most a 1.5 percent improvement switching from 16x and isotropic to trilinear which is a typical gain however trilinear looks pretty mediocre I'd recommend sticking to 16 times here on everything but low-end GPUs mesh quality is another one of those settings that only has a significant impact with low-end cards if you have a mid-range GPU or up you shouldn't spot any difference in performance between any of the four modes I also didn't spot any significant changes to visuals aside from a minor loss in detail to some models at the lowest setting I'd keep this on max where possible the shadows in Resident Evil 2 are some of the game's best effects particularly the shadows cast from the direct beam of your torch it's the dynamic nature of these shadows in dark environments that adds to the atmosphere in a big way as for shadow quality the only major change I could spot between the 5 modes was in the resolution of shadows in various scenes where the cast from your torch or other light sources there are only slight differences between high and max shadows with some slight losses to resolution moving too high then when shifting down to medium the resolution downgrade becomes a bit more noticeable the biggest changes in the move to low shadows where the poor resolution really starts to show then we have the min shadow mode which has very earliest and quite ugly shadows looking at the performance differences you can group things into three brackets at the top max is the most intense then high and medium both deliver roughly three percent more performance while low and minimum deliver a five percent performance uplift my recommendation here is to use the higher mode you'll get roughly three percent more performance on average than max with only a very small change to shadow quality and it's a good compromise to make shadow cash appears to be a setting that allows you to trade performance for vram utilization with no noticeable change to visuals turning the cash off lowest VRAM usage in slightly at the expense of a four percent reduction to performance for almost every game are leaving the setting on makes the most sense it's only on vram constricted cards we're swapping out information to system memory all the time causes a larger than four percent performance if that you might consider turning the cash off contact shadows is an extension of the shadow system with this feature enabled items in the scene can shadow themselves from an incident light source rather than just shadow the environment around them in adds depth and realism to the lighting system and depending on the area can be noticeable in a subtle way this is one of the more performance intensive individual settings disabling contact shadows improves performance by 4 percent on average for those with powerful systems I'd recommend leaving this setting enabled for the added visuals but for those with more entry-level GPUs is something I'd switch off to gain additional performance next up is screen space reflections a typical effect used in many games Resident Evil 2 makes extensive use of SSR for both water and shiny interior surfaces however the implementation in my opinion isn't great there's a lot of grain and noise to reflections in some circumstances indicative of I guess a low sampling count surprisingly it looks kind of like raytrace reflections with the level of noise but obviously with a more computationally simple technique to make matters worse your character often excuse the reflection so you get noticeable I guess a seam between areas with and without SSR I feel like another reflection technique probably would have been better here visually in any case there's quite a substantial difference between SSR on and off across the game world it's a simple case of either there are reflections of their art but the world looks much more realistic with the effect enabled despite the low sample count in some areas however SSR also has a huge performance impact you'll gain more than 11% to your framerate on average with the effect disabled for those with beefy GPUs I'd still recommend keeping SSR on for the visual improvement it makes but on performance constraint systems it's an easy setting to turn off and even easier setting to turn down is subsurface scattering this is an effect that makes a subtle difference to how character models are rendered in particular skin surfaces in close-up cutscenes but the effect isn't all that noticeable in my opinion and the effect comes with a decent performance hit not just in cutscenes but also in general play disabling subsurface scattering needs to a 4% improvement which I would recommend doing volumetric lighting is the most demanding setting in the game it also helps establish a foggy atmosphere that I feel is crucial to the experience that's not to say the atmosphere is terrible with the effect disabled just that having volumetric lighting adds a lot to this game in particular unlike a game such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey each of the three volumetric lighting modes impacts the sampling count of the effect with high having the densest haze and the highest sampling count that said there's no significant difference between high and medium in my opinion it's only when you switch to low that you get a slight loss in quality disabling the effect entirely also has a huge impact on the visuals and I wouldn't recommend this mode unless you're running on low-end hardware in terms of performance which in volumetric lighting from high to medium is the first and most obvious setting to change in the game this provides a 12% uplift average frame rates and a 25% improvement to 1% low so the game will also feel substantially smoother with this small change if you're hunting for a bit more performance I set this setting too low particle lighting quality changes where the particles interact with light sources or not with this setting enabled you'll see range shimmer beneath street lamps for example this effect has a minor impact on performance disabling it gives an extra 1 to 2% so I really only recommend disabling it if you're searching for extra frames ambient occlusion is an interesting one there are 4 modes plus an off state split between three techniques the most taxing setting is HB AO plus then there's H Dao and then there's two SSAO modes with one mode limiting SSAO to certain locations each of the three modes renders ambient occlusion in a different way giving a different effects which one you like may be a personal preference however I think ssao looks best to my eye and SSAO is the least taxing method delivering an 8% performance uplift over HBO Plus while HBO plus and H Dao are equivalent in their performance this is an easy choice to make unset the game to use SSAO and enjoy the extra frames now we're moving into more cosmetic and personal preference settings starting with bloom again this is something I feel adds to the atmosphere considerably so I'd leave it enabled however if you don't like the effect I want around three percent more performance it can be disabled lens flare is a purely cosmetic feature there is no difference in performance between the two modes motion blur usually comes down to personal preference on this I'm playing at super high frame rates I like to leave their setting enabled most of the time however you will gain four to five percent more performance with a disabled due to the re engine's decent motion blur implementation depth of field is another effect that has no impact on performance which is the same with lens distortion and film noise personally I'd turn lens distortion off film noise is subtle enough that you'll barely notice it whether it's enabled or not while I'd leave depth of field enabled so as for our overall recommendation I've essentially built two profiles here one I'll call hub graphics for those with beefy systems that want this game working great and a hub performance mode that is more geared towards maximum frame rates the hub graphics mode has most settings maximized with a few exceptions I've told anti-aliasing from FXAA + ta to just SMA for a sharper presentation I've also turned shadows to high subsurface scattering is disabled volumetric lighting is on medium and ambient occlusion is said to SSAO this fairly modest set of changes delivers a 31% performance improvement over maximum settings for effectively no change to visual quality in fact with the change to anti-aliasing I'd say this preset actually looks better than the max preset which uses taa + FX AAA our custom hub graphics mode performs around the same mark as the bells preset but with noticeable changes our preset has better texture filtering sharper shadows higher mesh quality and full ssao which come at little to no performance cost aside from those free bonuses the main change is swapping a subscript the scattering for increased volumetric lighting quality which I feel has a larger visual impact in general gameplay our hub performance preset is really geared towards maximizing frame rates delivering and over 80 percent boost compared to max settings and that tends to be higher on more entry-level cards as VRAM usage also declines this preset is the same as hub graphics except for several things disabled contact shadows screen space reflections bloom and motion blur are all turned off while particle lighting and volumetric lighting are set to low again this preset performs slightly worse than the performance priority mode however the performance priority mode has several things set to their lowest values including shadows mesh quality and ambient occlusion with that custom Hub preset we're still using high shadows maximum texture filtering SSAO and SMA which all improved visuals with only minor performance hits here's a brief summary of the two presets in case you want to use them maybe pause here because in a second or so I'll be moving right along in general I think it's quite difficult to make Resident Evil to look bad even with the lowest possible settings selected the game still looks good and runs even better than it already does having such a large difference in performance between maximum and minimum quality settings also allows a wide variety of PC games with all sorts of configurations to enjoy this game so it's both a fantastic looking game and one that scales well which points to a very high core the effort on the PC version without collection of optimal settings we're looking at a 30 percent performance uplift compared to maximum settings for no noticeable quality loss this brings GP used like the rx 580 and the GTX 1060 into calculations for high quality 1440p 60fps experiences which is a great result for mid-range GPUs and that's credit's a Capcom for their work on this title that's it for this investigation into Resident Evil 2 if you missed Steve's big GPU benchmark please go back and watch that it's definitely worth it as always you can subscribe for more graphics optimization videos looking at the schedule I guess the next game getting this treatment will likely be I think it's Metro Exodus so stay tuned for that consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our discord community and I'll catch you in the next one