Optimal Graphics Settings

Overview

In case you are a newbie to video graphics settings i’d like to share some thoughts on the issue and also the settings that work the best for myself with my hardware setup.

Reading material

Firstly if you want a general understanding of graphics settings, NVidia has made an excellent guide which fits most modern games, a MUST read before you start tweaking: [link]

To summarize the guide:

The greatest FPS impactors are

• Screen Resolution – if you don’t mind playing 1080p on a 1440p monitor, your FPS will benefit greatly, if not, you should look at which other settings have the least impact.
• AntiAlias (the smooth edge magic) – Has a great cost on FPS and is more important for low resolution than high resolution monitors.
• Ambient Occlusion – Makes the shadows nicer looking, but at high cost. It varies from each GFX Card and on NVidia the cost is mostly lower than on AMD
• Shadows
• Shader Detail
• Advanced Blending ( HEAVY !!! ) ( NB: Is only activated if you enable Shader Detail )

Everything else should be cranked up to max and mostly cost RAM rather than actual processing power. So if you have tons of RAM on your graphics card (eg. 3GB) and/or you system (eg. 16GB), then simply max out all the other settings.

Some things i’ve noticed

Lowering the croud (Crew, People, Spectators..) to OFF will hide them – but they are still there to hit ! – So if you disable them, make sure you stay on the track and don’t cut corners the places where you find spectators.

Suggestion: Set spectators to Lowest option – it will cost 0 performance and will help you avoid the penalties.

Optimal Anti-Alias settings

Is a low cost, high quality, morphological post process filter which find edges and smooth them.
The benefit of this method is AA in almost the same quality level as 4xMSAA but at lower cost than 2xMSAA.

[link]

Originally posted by Intel:

The technique was originally developed by Filip Strugar at Intel for use in GRID2 by Codemasters®, to offer a high performance alternative to traditional multi sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) while addressing artistic concerns with existing post-processing antialiasing techniques. The sample allows CMAA to be compared with several popular post processing techniques together with hardware MSAA in a real time rendered scene as well as to an existing image.

Originally posted by AMD:

Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) is a new anti-aliasing technology available from the AMD
HD 6900 series of graphics cards onwards. This new Anti-Aliasing (AA) technology offers
advanced smoothing of aliased edges without requiring additional video memory, and with a
minimal performance cost.

Nvidia has an equivalent mode called CSAA, the numbering of each mode is not directly compatible

Originally posted by http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/10:

* ordered by performancecost

Pick CMAA or SMAA unless you have a strong enough GPU to handle 4x MSAA or more

Best settings for AMD 7970 @ 1Ghz + i7 3770K

Here are my settings that yield Minimum & Avarage of 60 FPS

– I play on a 27″ monitor at 2560×1440 at native resolution.

– I’ve finally settled for CMAA Anti Alias which looks almost as good as 4x MSAA, but cost almost nothing in performance. On some maps in sunshine weather conditions, I can easily enable 4x MSAA eg: Greece, Monte Carlo – which is nice for screenshots 🙂

– VSYNC is ON, the reason for this is twofold : 1. Since i get 60+ FPS, there’s no reason to produce more frames than what i can ‘eat’ .. 2. Producing more frames than 60 cost more WATT / Cycles on the GFX card and CPU which i rather want to spend on game recording !

– Weather is High for the most of the time, In snow and rain i sometimes lower this to LOW because it makes it easier to see what’s going on, the performance difference is small.

– I’ve chosen LOW SHADER DETAIL, because it’s performance hogging and looks terrible on high. OFF looks pretty bad too, so LOW was the optimal setting for me.

– Anisotropic Filtering is free to max out, so always do so, it makes your bonet look better and the road will be more sharp looking in the horizon.

Which all looks like this

Best settings for Nvidia GTX 1070

Everything on ULTRA, 4x MSAA or even 8x if you like that better.

But disable Advanced Blending, it makes the FPS dip to 40 when driving though dense forest.

Oh man i love this new GPU 😀