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  1. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of Fallout 4 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. The Fallout 4 is the next title in a series of a very popular post-apocalyptic RPG's developed by Bethesda Game Studios. The game key was generously provided by Gamesplanet. We are going to look at the technical quality of the PC version of the game. System Requirements Minimum CPU: Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz RAM: 8 GB HDD: 30 GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti or AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB of VRAM OS: Windows 7, 64bit Recommended CPU: Intel Core i7-4790 3.6 GHz or AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz RAM: 8 GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 290X, 3GB (Nvidia), 4GB (AMD) of VRAM The system requirements for Fallout 4 are a little bit on the demanding side. A quad core CPU is a must and the GPUs are from the older mainstream range. Recommended specs are even more demanding with high-end CPUs and GPUs. All the tests were done on a system with a Core i7-2700k clocked to 4.6GHz, 32 GB RAM and AMD R9 390 with 8GB of VRAM, Catalyst 15.11 Beta graphics drivers and version 1.1.30.0.0 of the game. Testing was done at 1920x1200, and because there is no built-in benchmarking tool, a test run consisted of one minute of playing the game in one of the larger cities and included a short fight with a pack of ghouls. This resulted in very consistent frame rate measurements so only two measurements were averaged for each effect. Graphics settings Most of the graphics settings have to be set in the launcher. This is rather inconvenient because there are very few graphical options directly in the game. Other that that the launcher offers a fairly standard arsenal of graphical settings and a few presets. The game has also auto detection system that sets options during the first launch of the game. A nice addition are the Windowed and Windowed borderless toggles. Field of View and wide screen setups Field of view is locked in low 80's by default and there is no direct option to change it from the game. Players have to edit configuration files to set a comfortable field of view. Same applies for ultra-wide and surround resolutions as these are not directly supported. Again, configuration files needs to be edited and even that can hide some of the GUI elements, thus rendering the game unplayable. For easy configuration file editing and tweaking a special configuration utility can be used. Overall performance and image quality Fallout 4 offers four image quality presets - Low, Medium, High and Ultra. There is only a 3% difference in performance between Low and Medium. High preset has a more significant performance drop of 33% and Ultra costs almost 40% of Low's framerate. The framerate is limited to 60 FPS by default, unlocking it via editing .ini files will unfortunately cause problems, as the game logic and physics are tied to the framerate. I've experienced severe framerate drops in major cities where the game's framerate seemingly randomly falls from 100 FPS to sub 30 FPS. The game also loads very slowly on mechanical hard-drives. The loading times were around 30-40 seconds, after moving the game on SSD loading times dropped significantly to only few seconds. During my testing I've found only one effect (Shadow Distance) to have significant performance impact on the game. Even the dreaded over-tessellated god-rays effect led only to a 4% drop in FPS. The rest of the effects have negligible or non-existent performance cost so I'm not going to include all the graphs here. Feel free to browse through the measurements though. Visual quality on the Low preset is nothing special, shadows are visibly low resolution and cut not far from camera, vegetation is shown only very close to the player and textures are not very sharp. Medium preset improves shadow resolution and cutoff distance of vegetation. High preset further improves vegetation cutoff distance and increases cutoff for shadows and the scene seems to be less flat. Ultra preset further increases render distance. Overall the game doesn't look particularly impressive visually and the renamed Gamebryo engine very clearly shows its age. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Texture Quality Texture quality controls the texture resolution and can be set in three steps - Medium, High and Ultra. Visual difference between High and Ultra is very small and performance impact wasn't clearly measurable. The textures are not very sharp to begin with so there is definitely room for improvement. Full resolution screenshots: Medium, High, Ultra. Shadow Distance Shadow Distance setting controls cutoff distance of the shadows and is the most demanding effect in the game. High setting causes almost 30% framerate drop, Ultra costs another 2% on top of that. Full resolution screenshots: Medium, High, Ultra. Anti-aliasing The game offers only two anti-aliasing methods and these are only post process filters FXAA and TXAA. Both have major visual impact and horribly blurs the whole scene, vegetation lose its definition, broken lines are kept broken, textures are slightly blurred as well. At least these effects has only 3% performance impact. Full resolution screenshots: No AA, FXAA, TXAA. Controls The game doesn't offer very large controls options. Mouse sensitivity can be set and the keys can be remapped but there are major problems with controls in Fallout 4. First of all there are multiple actions on one key that doesn't make sense and will cause trouble. Melee attack shares button with a Throw grenade function for example. There is also a system of favorites weapons and items, but slots are locked to the number keys and cannot be remapped. Scroll wheel also cannot be remapped (to navigating favorites for example) and controls camera distance which I find fairly useless. There is a mouse acceleration turned on by default and can be turned off only by editing an .ini files. Pip-Boy and GUI navigation is nothing short of a disaster. I was expecting it to be bad as horrible controls are Bethesda's trademark but this is a whole new level of awful. Nothing is consistent after more that 20 hours of playing I still have to think really hard about what key is doing what in the menus. For example, exiting or going back a menu is sometimes Tab, sometimes it's E and sometimes it is Esc. Worst is the settlement building option which suddenly has you using the arrow keys and the game doesn't even hint that Shift WSAD can be also used. Alternative GUI mod cannot arrive soon enough. On top of that tutorial is almost non-existent and fairly important game mechanics are never explained like VATS or how to assign settlers to jobs. Audio Fallout 4 offers fairly standard audio options with many volume sliders. The game supports surround sound setups up to 7.1 and audio sound fairly good with one exception though. Voices have very low volume outside of cutscenes and very often are inaudible when speaking character is more than few meters away. Conclusion Fallout 4 suffers from heavy consolitidis. The underlying game is fun and the world is rich but visually the game looks unimpressive and old, almost like modded Fallout 3. Performance is not terrible overall but there are framerate drops suggesting optimization issues, almost none of the graphics settings has any meaningful performance impact on the game. Keyboard and mouse controls are awful and should be redesigned from the ground up. Many of core PC features like FoV, widescreen support or unlocked framerate are absent and has to be edited in via configuration files. Another six month of polishing would greatly benefited the game, but obviously Bethesda is counting on modders to fix the game for free and that is not a good sign. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of Fallout 4 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed our article and want to us create more articles, more often, please consider donating to PCGamingWiki's Patreon campaign: Click here to view the article
  2. System Requirements Minimum CPU: Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz RAM: 8 GB HDD: 30 GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti or AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB of VRAM OS: Windows 7, 64bit Recommended CPU: Intel Core i7-4790 3.6 GHz or AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz RAM: 8 GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 290X, 3GB (Nvidia), 4GB (AMD) of VRAM The system requirements for Fallout 4 are a little bit on the demanding side. A quad core CPU is a must and the GPUs are from the older mainstream range. Recommended specs are even more demanding with high-end CPUs and GPUs. All the tests were done on a system with a Core i7-2700k clocked to 4.6GHz, 32 GB RAM and AMD R9 390 with 8GB of VRAM, Catalyst 15.11 Beta graphics drivers and version 1.1.30.0.0 of the game. Testing was done at 1920x1200, and because there is no built-in benchmarking tool, a test run consisted of one minute of playing the game in one of the larger cities and included a short fight with a pack of ghouls. This resulted in very consistent frame rate measurements so only two measurements were averaged for each effect. Graphics settings Most of the graphics settings have to be set in the launcher. This is rather inconvenient because there are very few graphical options directly in the game. Other that that the launcher offers a fairly standard arsenal of graphical settings and a few presets. The game has also auto detection system that sets options during the first launch of the game. A nice addition are the Windowed and Windowed borderless toggles. Field of View and wide screen setups Field of view is locked in low 80's by default and there is no direct option to change it from the game. Players have to edit configuration files to set a comfortable field of view. Same applies for ultra-wide and surround resolutions as these are not directly supported. Again, configuration files needs to be edited and even that can hide some of the GUI elements, thus rendering the game unplayable. For easy configuration file editing and tweaking a special configuration utility can be used. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_81/gallery_13_81_63759.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_81/gallery_13_81_58722.jpg|864|540|Default FoV|Custom FoV of 110[/compimg] Overall performance and image quality Fallout 4 offers four image quality presets - Low, Medium, High and Ultra. There is only a 3% difference in performance between Low and Medium. High preset has a more significant performance drop of 33% and Ultra costs almost 40% of Low's framerate. The framerate is limited to 60 FPS by default, unlocking it via editing .ini files will unfortunately cause problems, as the game logic and physics are tied to the framerate. I've experienced severe framerate drops in major cities where the game's framerate seemingly randomly falls from 100+ FPS to sub 30 FPS. The game also loads very slowly on mechanical hard-drives. The loading times were around 30-40 seconds, after moving the game on SSD loading times dropped significantly to only few seconds. During my testing I've found only one effect (Shadow Distance) to have significant performance impact on the game. Even the dreaded over-tessellated god-rays effect led only to a 4% drop in FPS. The rest of the effects have negligible or non-existent performance cost so I'm not going to include all the graphs here. Feel free to browse through the measurements though. Visual quality on the Low preset is nothing special, shadows are visibly low resolution and cut not far from camera, vegetation is shown only very close to the player and textures are not very sharp. Medium preset improves shadow resolution and cutoff distance of vegetation. High preset further improves vegetation cutoff distance and increases cutoff for shadows and the scene seems to be less flat. Ultra preset further increases render distance. Overall the game doesn't look particularly impressive visually and the renamed Gamebryo engine very clearly shows its age. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_81/gallery_13_81_185184.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_81/gallery_13_81_250146.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg] Texture Quality Texture quality controls the texture resolution and can be set in three steps - Medium, High and Ultra. Visual difference between High and Ultra is very small and performance impact wasn't clearly measurable. The textures are not very sharp to begin with so there is definitely room for improvement. Full resolution screenshots: Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_81/gallery_13_81_19291.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_81/gallery_13_81_225899.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg] Shadow Distance Shadow Distance setting controls cutoff distance of the shadows and is the most demanding effect in the game. High setting causes almost 30% framerate drop, Ultra costs another 2% on top of that. Full resolution screenshots: Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_81/gallery_13_81_58376.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_81/gallery_13_81_3546.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg] Anti-aliasing The game offers only two anti-aliasing methods and these are only post process filters FXAA and TXAA. Both have major visual impact and horribly blurs the whole scene, vegetation lose its definition, broken lines are kept broken, textures are slightly blurred as well. At least these effects has only 3% performance impact. Full resolution screenshots: No AA, FXAA, TXAA. Controls The game doesn't offer very large controls options. Mouse sensitivity can be set and the keys can be remapped but there are major problems with controls in Fallout 4. First of all there are multiple actions on one key that doesn't make sense and will cause trouble. Melee attack shares button with a Throw grenade function for example. There is also a system of favorites weapons and items, but slots are locked to the number keys and cannot be remapped. Scroll wheel also cannot be remapped (to navigating favorites for example) and controls camera distance which I find fairly useless. There is a mouse acceleration turned on by default and can be turned off only by editing an .ini files. Pip-Boy and GUI navigation is nothing short of a disaster. I was expecting it to be bad as horrible controls are Bethesda's trademark but this is a whole new level of awful. Nothing is consistent after more that 20 hours of playing I still have to think really hard about what key is doing what in the menus. For example, exiting or going back a menu is sometimes Tab, sometimes it's E and sometimes it is Esc. Worst is the settlement building option which suddenly has you using the arrow keys and the game doesn't even hint that Shift+WSAD can be also used. Alternative GUI mod cannot arrive soon enough. On top of that tutorial is almost non-existent and fairly important game mechanics are never explained like VATS or how to assign settlers to jobs. Audio Fallout 4 offers fairly standard audio options with many volume sliders. The game supports surround sound setups up to 7.1 and audio sound fairly good with one exception though. Voices have very low volume outside of cutscenes and very often are inaudible when speaking character is more than few meters away. Conclusion Fallout 4 suffers from heavy consolitidis. The underlying game is fun and the world is rich but visually the game looks unimpressive and old, almost like modded Fallout 3. Performance is not terrible overall but there are framerate drops suggesting optimization issues, almost none of the graphics settings has any meaningful performance impact on the game. Keyboard and mouse controls are awful and should be redesigned from the ground up. Many of core PC features like FoV, widescreen support or unlocked framerate are absent and has to be edited in via configuration files. Another six month of polishing would greatly benefited the game, but obviously Bethesda is counting on modders to fix the game for free and that is not a good sign. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of Fallout 4 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed our article and want to us create more articles, more often, please consider donating to PCGamingWiki's Patreon campaign: [h2][/h2]
  3. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of The Witcher 3 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. The Witcher 3 is a continuation of a popular RPG from a Polish developer studio CD Projekt Red. We are going to look at the technical aspects of the game, test the performance impact of the effects and look at overall quality of the PC version. System Requirements Minimum CPU: Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz or AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940 RAM: 6 GB HDD: 40 GB GPU: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660 or AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870 OS: 64-bit Windows 7 or Windows 8 Recommended CPU: Intel CPU Core i7 3770 3,4 GHz or AMD CPU AMD FX-8350 4 GHz RAM: 8 GB GPU: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 770 or AMD GPU Radeon R9 290 System requirements for The Witcher 3 are on the more demanding side. A newer quad core CPU is a minimum required processor and the GPUs are also not of the budget kind. Recommended hardware is pretty much the current lower high-end. Let's hope the visuals justify these high demands. All the tests have been done on a system with a Core i7-2700k clocked to 4.5GHz, 32 GB RAM and HD 6870 with 1GB of VRAM. The Witcher 3 was on version 1.02, Catalyst version 15.4 Beta. Testing was done at 1280x800, as no benchmarking tool is available in the game, a test run was a one minute ride through one village to the countryside. Results were very consistent between each run (difference was rarely more than half a frame per second), so only two measurements were averaged for each effect. Graphics settings The Witcher 3 offers two graphics settings menus - Graphics and Post Processing. The main Graphics settings menu offers a fairly standard set of visual options and sliders. A frame rate limiter is present, but can be switched off in this menu. Three display modes are available, borderless fullscreen is the default option. Apart from the Nvidia HairWorks setting, every other option can be set to four different levels - Low, Medium, High and Ultra. HairWorks only offers the options Off, Geralt and On. Four presets are available for less demanding users. The post processing menu features toggles for a few special effects, Ambient Occlusion and Anti-aliasing. There are also three further presets for easy setup. Every setting is applied in realtime and no restart is required making tweaking fairly painless. Field of view and wide screen setups The Witcher 3 does not offer a field of view slider. The default field of view on my screen seemed OK, but I would definitely like to increase it by a few degrees. The only major issue appears when using the Witcher Senses mechanic because the field of view gets narrower, which I found to be very disorienting. Hopefully there will be a mod for this in the future, but for now you can use a Cheat Engine configuration file, as always with caution. of the tweaked field of view. The game appears to keep vertical field of view locked regardless of the aspect ratio of the screen, so gamers with ultra-wide or surround setups (both are supported) will get a correctly wider field of view. Only cutscenes appear to be pillar-boxed on setups with very wide aspect ratios. The in-game HUD also has issues on these setups. The game offers HUD scaling slider in the menu, but that usually isn't enough, so manual tweaks are required. To change this, navigate to the %USERPROFILE%\Documents\The Witcher 3\ folder and open a file called "user.settings" in text editor. Locate the line "UIHorizontalScale 1" and change its value. After saving the file, set its properties to Read Only. Overall performance and image quality The Witcher 3 offers four graphics quality presets and three presets for post processing filters. Post processing filters do not have a very significant impact on the performance, at only around 14% going from Low to High. The graphics presets are a completely different story though. Choosing the Medium preset caused an 11% performance drop, which while noticeable is not huge. The high settings hurt performance a lot more - choosing the High preset caused the frame rate to drop about 64% from Low. The Ultra preset causes an even bigger performance drop - 84% from Low and 63% from High. Please note though, that testing was performed on a system with an AMD GPU, so the HairWorks effect had a more significant impact. Visual quality on the Low preset is average at best, textures are muddy, vegetation is sparse and trees switch from 3D models to low resolution sprites not very far from the camera. On the Ultra preset the game looks a lot better, though it's nothing really special. I'd even say that last year's open world title, Far Cry 4, looks nicer in some places and definitely runs significantly better faster than The Witcher 3. Furthermore, there is the downgrade issue where supposedly developers got rid of many special effects to get the game running on consoles and didn't attempt to implement them in the PC version. The game is not performing very well even on high end hardware so I wonder if they also left out some optimizations. Full resolution screenshots: Scene 1: Low, Medium, High, Ultra, Ultra High post process. Scene 2: Low, Medium, High, Ultra, Ultra High post process. Controls The Witcher 3 offers some tweaks for mouse and controllers. There are two sliders for mouse sensitivity, one for camera movement and another for menus. There is also a Hardware Cursor setting that toggles mouse raw input. These are awesome features to have, other developers take note! There are also toggles for inverting axes and sliders for controller sensitivity. The key bindings menu is pure disappointment. A quarter of the actions cannot be rebound at all and thus block many keys, and that includes movement, which is locked to WSAD. This is completely unnecessary, and just prevents players from leaving the menu until all important actions are bound to any keys. Since version 1.04 this issue has been fixed and all actions can be assigned to a custom keys. The in-game GUI and menus can be easily navigated by a mouse or a controller, a few additional bindings would be welcome however. Camera movement in the game feels awesome and precise when controlling with mouse thanks to the raw input feature. Character movement on the other hand felt cumbersome and very inaccurate in tight spots or on a horse. Combat is nice and precise, and I have a feeling it takes a few hints from the Dark Souls series, but I haven't played previous Witcher titles so I can't really tell, if it's better or not. Audio The Witcher 3 audio options offers just a few volume sliders and nothing more. The game supports surround sound systems very well and the positional audio uses all channels nicely. Performance analysis In this section we are going to look at how each effect impacts frame rate and how does each setting looks on screenshots. Be sure to check full resolution uncompressed PNGs linked in each section - these are linked in each section for better comparisons as the images in the sliders are compressed. Be sure to check our gallery for additional images and graphs. Shadow Quality Shadow Quality setting controls the resolution of shadows and at what distance shadows are shown. The difference in visual quality is very apparent in direct comparison as the shadows are sharper and more detailed. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Performance impact of Medium and High settings are on the low side (up to 10%), but the Ultra preset is very taxing and causes almost a 70% frame rate drop. Water Quality This options should control amount of tessellation on water surfaces and waves. Personally, I haven't noticed a major visual difference. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Performance impact of Water Quality is negligible on Medium (3%), moderate on High (15%) and quite high on Ultra setting (40%). Foliage Visibility Range This option controls how many trees are rendered in the scene and how many real 3D models of trees are used. The scene is much richer on higher settings as more trees on the horizon are shown and grass is rendered much farther from the camera. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Performance impact is moderate on the Medium and High settings, at 11% and 15% respectively. The Ultra setting causes a 40% drop in performance. Nvidia HairWorks This setting replaces default hair with physics-based hair. As this is Nvidia technology, AMD cards perform with it terribly. There are options to turn the effect completely off, use it only on the main character, or use it everywhere. Grass Density This setting controls how rich the grass is. Visual impact is not very major, as not many grass models are added. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Performance impact is negligible, up to 6% on the Ultra setting level. Ambient Occlusion Ambient Occlusion adds subtle shadows around objects and in corners. The Witcher 3 supports only two methods - SSAO and HBAO . Visual impact is very noticeable, there are shadows everywhere and objects are more defined. Full resolution screenshots: None, SSAO, HBAO. Usually, this is a very demanding effect, but performance impact isn't major, at only 8% for SSAO and 10% for HBAO . Texture Quality This option controls texture resolution, on Low settings textures are very blurry and barely recognizable (especially in cut scenes), higher settings makes them sharper and crisper. I haven't noticed any difference when comparing High and Ultra settings in 1920x1200 resolution, so the game is probably ready for using higher 2k and 4k resolutions. Full resolution screenshots: Scene 1: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Scene 2: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Performance impact is highly dependent on available VRAM and in my case there wasn't major dip in performance. If you are experiencing stutter especially when rotating camera, consider lowering the texture quality. Terrain Quality This setting should control amount of tessellation applied to terrain, but I haven't noticed any visual difference. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Performance impact was also negligible, up to 4% on Ultra. Detail Level This setting is a mystery for me, I haven't observed any visual difference and there is almost no performance drop. Number of Background Characters This setting controls how many people are in the cities and villages. I suspect performance depends on the CPU rather than the GPU with this setting, on my system there was almost no performance drop. Anti-aliasing and other post processing effects The Witcher 3 supports only one anti-aliasing method. It is some sort of post process AA filter that blurs whole scene and kills details on textures. Maybe that is why there is also a Sharpening filter that repairs the scene a bit. There is also a Chromatic Aberration filter, that blurs everything but center of the image. Why would anyone use these blur filters is a mystery to me. Performance impact of each filter is very small, turning on every filter will result in a 14% performance drop. Conclusion I've been looking forward to this game, unfortunately the final product feels rather unpolished. There is a lack of features like proper anti-aliasing methods or a field of view slider. Character movement controls are cumbersome, very restrictive keyboard bindings do not help either. In-game menus are easily navigable and the game supports raw mouse input, so at least there's that. Performance is not great and the game has problems keeping a decent frame rate even on high-end hardware. Stable 60 FPS@1920x1200 on Ultra is only attainable on a GTX Titan X, barely. That wouldn't be such an issue, if the game looked like it did in the first trailers. It doesn't look particularly bad, but there is very much to be desired. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of The Witcher 3 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this report and want to see more articles from us, more often, please consider donating to PCGamingWiki's Patreon campaign: Click here to view the article
  4. System Requirements Minimum CPU: Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz or AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940 RAM: 6 GB HDD: 40 GB GPU: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660 or AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870 OS: 64-bit Windows 7 or Windows 8 Recommended CPU: Intel CPU Core i7 3770 3,4 GHz or AMD CPU AMD FX-8350 4 GHz RAM: 8 GB GPU: Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 770 or AMD GPU Radeon R9 290 System requirements for The Witcher 3 are on the more demanding side. A newer quad core CPU is a minimum required processor and the GPUs are also not of the budget kind. Recommended hardware is pretty much the current lower high-end. Let's hope the visuals justify these high demands. All the tests have been done on a system with a Core i7-2700k clocked to 4.5GHz, 32 GB RAM and HD 6870 with 1GB of VRAM. The Witcher 3 was on version 1.02, Catalyst version 15.4 Beta. Testing was done at 1280x800, as no benchmarking tool is available in the game, a test run was a one minute ride through one village to the countryside. Results were very consistent between each run (difference was rarely more than half a frame per second), so only two measurements were averaged for each effect. Graphics settings The Witcher 3 offers two graphics settings menus - Graphics and Post Processing. The main Graphics settings menu offers a fairly standard set of visual options and sliders. A frame rate limiter is present, but can be switched off in this menu. Three display modes are available, borderless fullscreen is the default option. Apart from the Nvidia HairWorks setting, every other option can be set to four different levels - Low, Medium, High and Ultra. HairWorks only offers the options Off, Geralt and On. Four presets are available for less demanding users. The post processing menu features toggles for a few special effects, Ambient Occlusion and Anti-aliasing. There are also three further presets for easy setup. Every setting is applied in realtime and no restart is required making tweaking fairly painless. Field of view and wide screen setups The Witcher 3 does not offer a field of view slider. The default field of view on my screen seemed OK, but I would definitely like to increase it by a few degrees. The only major issue appears when using the Witcher Senses mechanic because the field of view gets narrower, which I found to be very disorienting. Hopefully there will be a mod for this in the future, but for now you can use a Cheat Engine configuration file, as always with caution. of the tweaked field of view. The game appears to keep vertical field of view locked regardless of the aspect ratio of the screen, so gamers with ultra-wide or surround setups (both are supported) will get a correctly wider field of view. Only cutscenes appear to be pillar-boxed on setups with very wide aspect ratios. The in-game HUD also has issues on these setups. The game offers HUD scaling slider in the menu, but that usually isn't enough, so manual tweaks are required. To change this, navigate to the %USERPROFILE%\Documents\The Witcher 3\ folder and open a file called "user.settings" in text editor. Locate the line "UIHorizontalScale 1" and change its value. After saving the file, set its properties to Read Only. Overall performance and image quality The Witcher 3 offers four graphics quality presets and three presets for post processing filters. Post processing filters do not have a very significant impact on the performance, at only around 14% going from Low to High. The graphics presets are a completely different story though. Choosing the Medium preset caused an 11% performance drop, which while noticeable is not huge. The high settings hurt performance a lot more - choosing the High preset caused the frame rate to drop about 64% from Low. The Ultra preset causes an even bigger performance drop - 84% from Low and 63% from High. Please note though, that testing was performed on a system with an AMD GPU, so the HairWorks effect had a more significant impact. Visual quality on the Low preset is average at best, textures are muddy, vegetation is sparse and trees switch from 3D models to low resolution sprites not very far from the camera. On the Ultra preset the game looks a lot better, though it's nothing really special. I'd even say that last year's open world title, Far Cry 4, looks nicer in some places and definitely runs significantly better faster than The Witcher 3. Furthermore, there is the downgrade issue where supposedly developers got rid of many special effects to get the game running on consoles and didn't attempt to implement them in the PC version. The game is not performing very well even on high end hardware so I wonder if they also left out some optimizations. Full resolution screenshots: Scene 1: Low, Medium, High, Ultra, Ultra + High post process. Scene 2: Low, Medium, High, Ultra, Ultra + High post process. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_79867.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_13274.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg] [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_9489.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_124907.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg] Controls The Witcher 3 offers some tweaks for mouse and controllers. There are two sliders for mouse sensitivity, one for camera movement and another for menus. There is also a Hardware Cursor setting that toggles mouse raw input. These are awesome features to have, other developers take note! There are also toggles for inverting axes and sliders for controller sensitivity. The key bindings menu is pure disappointment. A quarter of the actions cannot be rebound at all and thus block many keys, and that includes movement, which is locked to WSAD. This is completely unnecessary, and just prevents players from leaving the menu until all important actions are bound to any keys. Since version 1.04 this issue has been fixed and all actions can be assigned to a custom keys. The in-game GUI and menus can be easily navigated by a mouse or a controller, a few additional bindings would be welcome however. Camera movement in the game feels awesome and precise when controlling with mouse thanks to the raw input feature. Character movement on the other hand felt cumbersome and very inaccurate in tight spots or on a horse. Combat is nice and precise, and I have a feeling it takes a few hints from the Dark Souls series, but I haven't played previous Witcher titles so I can't really tell, if it's better or not. Audio The Witcher 3 audio options offers just a few volume sliders and nothing more. The game supports surround sound systems very well and the positional audio uses all channels nicely. Performance analysis In this section we are going to look at how each effect impacts frame rate and how does each setting looks on screenshots. Be sure to check full resolution uncompressed PNGs linked in each section - these are linked in each section for better comparisons as the images in the sliders are compressed. Be sure to check our gallery for additional images and graphs. Shadow Quality Shadow Quality setting controls the resolution of shadows and at what distance shadows are shown. The difference in visual quality is very apparent in direct comparison as the shadows are sharper and more detailed. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_162751.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_68294.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact of Medium and High settings are on the low side (up to 10%), but the Ultra preset is very taxing and causes almost a 70% frame rate drop. Water Quality This options should control amount of tessellation on water surfaces and waves. Personally, I haven't noticed a major visual difference. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_74421.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_91095.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact of Water Quality is negligible on Medium (3%), moderate on High (15%) and quite high on Ultra setting (40%). Foliage Visibility Range This option controls how many trees are rendered in the scene and how many real 3D models of trees are used. The scene is much richer on higher settings as more trees on the horizon are shown and grass is rendered much farther from the camera. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_192259.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_103856.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact is moderate on the Medium and High settings, at 11% and 15% respectively. The Ultra setting causes a 40% drop in performance. Nvidia HairWorks This setting replaces default hair with physics-based hair. As this is Nvidia technology, AMD cards perform with it terribly. There are options to turn the effect completely off, use it only on the main character, or use it everywhere. Grass Density This setting controls how rich the grass is. Visual impact is not very major, as not many grass models are added. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_26445.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_113669.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact is negligible, up to 6% on the Ultra setting level. Ambient Occlusion Ambient Occlusion adds subtle shadows around objects and in corners. The Witcher 3 supports only two methods - SSAO and HBAO+. Visual impact is very noticeable, there are shadows everywhere and objects are more defined. Full resolution screenshots: None, SSAO, HBAO+. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_193760.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_184673.jpg|864|540|Off|HBAO+[/compimg] Usually, this is a very demanding effect, but performance impact isn't major, at only 8% for SSAO and 10% for HBAO+. Texture Quality This option controls texture resolution, on Low settings textures are very blurry and barely recognizable (especially in cut scenes), higher settings makes them sharper and crisper. I haven't noticed any difference when comparing High and Ultra settings in 1920x1200 resolution, so the game is probably ready for using higher 2k and 4k resolutions. Full resolution screenshots: Scene 1: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Scene 2: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_162627.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_194083.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg] [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_10474.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_59009.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact is highly dependent on available VRAM and in my case there wasn't major dip in performance. If you are experiencing stutter especially when rotating camera, consider lowering the texture quality. Terrain Quality This setting should control amount of tessellation applied to terrain, but I haven't noticed any visual difference. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_145010.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_76/gallery_13_76_133428.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact was also negligible, up to 4% on Ultra. Detail Level This setting is a mystery for me, I haven't observed any visual difference and there is almost no performance drop. Number of Background Characters This setting controls how many people are in the cities and villages. I suspect performance depends on the CPU rather than the GPU with this setting, on my system there was almost no performance drop. Anti-aliasing and other post processing effects The Witcher 3 supports only one anti-aliasing method. It is some sort of post process AA filter that blurs whole scene and kills details on textures. Maybe that is why there is also a Sharpening filter that repairs the scene a bit. There is also a Chromatic Aberration filter, that blurs everything but center of the image. Why would anyone use these blur filters is a mystery to me. Performance impact of each filter is very small, turning on every filter will result in a 14% performance drop. Conclusion I've been looking forward to this game, unfortunately the final product feels rather unpolished. There is a lack of features like proper anti-aliasing methods or a field of view slider. Character movement controls are cumbersome, very restrictive keyboard bindings do not help either. In-game menus are easily navigable and the game supports raw mouse input, so at least there's that. Performance is not great and the game has problems keeping a decent frame rate even on high-end hardware. Stable 60 FPS@1920x1200 on Ultra is only attainable on a GTX Titan X, barely. That wouldn't be such an issue, if the game looked like it did in the first trailers. It doesn't look particularly bad, but there is very much to be desired. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of The Witcher 3 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this report and want to see more articles from us, more often, please consider donating to PCGamingWiki's Patreon campaign:
  5. System Requirements Minimum CPU: Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz or Phenom II X2 545 RAM: 3 GB RAM HDD: 10 GB GPU: GeForce GTS 250 or Radeon HD 4830 OS: Win7 64-bit, Win8/8.1 64-bit Recommended CPU: Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz or Phenom II X4 955 RAM: 4 GB RAM GPU: GeForce GTX 560 or Radeon HD 6950 System requirements seems to be very reasonable, minimum required CPU is a just dual core and a rather old one. Similar story with required GPU, which is very old mainstream. Recommended specs are little bit more demanding, as a quad core and a newer GPU is needed, but again nothing anywhere close to the current high-end hardware. All the tests have been done on system with Core i7-2700k clocked to 4.5GHz, 32 GB RAM and HD 6870 with 1GB of VRAM, Killing Floor 2 version was 1003, Catalyst version 15.3 Beta. Testing was done in a 1650x1050 resolution, the game doesn't offer benchmark tool, so test run was me playing the first round in a solo mode on the Burning Paris map and killing all zombies which took about one minute. Each effect was tested three times and results were averaged to eliminate inconsistencies between each run. Graphics settings Graphics settings menu offers wide variety of effects and setting to tweak. Some of the effects require restarting the game, so set them before you enter an online match. These effects are: Environment Detail, FX, Realtime Reflections and Shadow Quality. Other effects can be adjusted on the fly with immediate effect, but I've restarted the game after each change for benchmarks just to be sure. Killing Floor 2 supports any resolution, some more exotic ones can be accessed by switching Aspect Ratio to Any. The game supports Borderless, Windowed and Fullscreen modes, and Variable Framerate can be turned on for high refresh rate displays. I've encountered slight problem when lowering resolutions, but restarting game fixed it. Field of View Field of View slider is hidden under Game Settings options menu. It doesn't say exact degree of field of view, there is percentage adjustment instead with 100% - 125% range. Killing Floor 2 apparently uses vertical implementation of field of view. This implementation works much better on a variety of aspect ratios, ultra wide monitors and AMD Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround setups. Bellow you can see two comparisons, upper one is the game's field of view on ordinary 16:10 aspect ratio screen, lower one is field of view behavior on ultra wide screen. Even when slider is set to 125% on both cases, ultra wide screen properly offers more visibility. Surprisingly there was no measurable impact on framerate. Full resolution screenshots: 16:10@100%, 16:10@125%, 21:9@100%, 21:9@125%. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_44906.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_74028.jpg|864|540|Field of View 100%|Field of View 125%[/compimg] [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_56240.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_51931.jpg|864|365|Field of View 100%|Field of View 125%[/compimg] Overall performance and image quality Killing Floor 2 offers four image quality presets - Low, Medium, High and Ultra. On the Low preset the game performed very well and the framerate rarely fell under 100 FPS. Switching to the Medium setting framerate dropped 30%, same drop was when the High setting was used. The Ultra preset offers the best image quality, but with severe framerate impact of 40% from High and more than 70% from Low setting. The game's performance scales very well with each preset. Performance also scales fairly well although not linearly. Doubling the resolution from 1280x800 to 2560x1600 results in 62% framerate drop. Image quality even on the Low settings is very good. Lighting is dynamic, some textures are blurry and there are only basic reflections. On the other hand, the Ultra setting have textures very sharp even on 1600p, environment has more objects and realtime reflections are also present and very apparent. Below are comparisons from three currently available maps. Full resolution screenshots: Paris Low, Paris Medium, Paris High, Paris Ultra; Outpost Low, Outpost Medium, Outpost High, Outpost Ultra; Lab Low, Lab Medium, Lab High, Lab Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_55749.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_194.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg] [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_119284.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_82884.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg] [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_138354.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_97229.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg] Controls Controls settings menu in the Killing Floor 2 offers basic mouse sensitivity settings, there is no mouse acceleration or smoothing toggle, but I haven't felt any additional mouse processing and aiming seems to be very precise. Keyboard binding menu offers basic key binds, only one key per action can be set. There was an issue with Caps Lock key, the key was binded to the Voice Chat by default and cannot be binded to anything else unless Voice Chat action is binded to other key first. Controllers are also supported, but buttons cannot be reassigned. Audio Killing Floor 2 Audio Options menu offers three volume sliders for Game, Music and Voice Chat volume. The game supports surround sound setups and positional audio worked flawlessly on my 7.1 system. The audio quality is exceptionally good, the everything sounds very authentic. Killing Floor 2 is probably taking distance of the sound source and applying some filters on it for added realism. I was very surprised how good the game sounds. Performance analysis In this section we are going to look at how each effect impacts framerate and how does each setting looks on screenshots. Be sure to check full resolution uncompressed PNGs linked in each section. There are full resolution screenshots linked in each section for better comparisons as the images in the sliders are compressed. Be sure to check our gallery for additional screenshots and graphs. Ambient Occlusion Killing Floor 2 offers two ambient occlusion methods - SSAO and HBAO+. SSAO adds very subtle shadows to the corners and around some objects. HBAO+ is much more pronoun and these shadows are much more noticeable. Full resolution screenshots: AO Off, SSAO, HBAO+. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_70534.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_56358.jpg|864|540|Ambient Occlusion Off|Ambient Occlusion HBAO+[/compimg] Performance impact is around 10% for SSAO and almost 30% for HBAO+ from Off setting. As usual this is rather performance expensive effect, but not very noticeable with SSAO setting. Texture Resolution This setting affects quality of textures and can be adjusted in four levels. On Low setting some textures are very blurry and lacks any detail (glove on the screenshot for example), but other textures are surprisingly sharp and detailed even on Low. Larger quality boost comes with the High setting and the textures are obviously the sharpest at Ultra setting. Full resolution screenshots: scene 1 Low, Medium, High, Ultra; scene 2 Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_122217.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_87111.jpg|864|540|Texture Resolution Low|Texture Resolution Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact depends highly on amount of VRAM available, average framerate drop is only around 5% for each additional level. But heavy stuttering started to appear with High setting on my 1GB card. Shadow Quality Killing Floor 2 offers four levels of Shadow Quality settings. Each level increases resolution and view distance of the shadows. At Low setting some of the shadows are barely visible and the rest is very blurry. With each additional settings level, shadows are much nicer, sharper and farther visible. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_123292.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_3947.jpg|864|540|Shadow Quality Low|Shadow Quality Ultra[/compimg] As usual, shadows have substantial impact on the performance. Medium setting causes around 7% framerate drop, High setting costs 16% and the most expensive Ultra setting costs 20% of performance. Environment Detail This settings affects how many objects are in the game world. These objects have no impact on the gameplay, usually they are there just for decoration (chairs, garbage..). Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_89834.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_134774.jpg|864|540|Environment Detail Low|Environment Detail Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact wasn't measurable, This is probably due to the fast CPU in the test rig. I'd imagine this setting will have much more pronoun impact on dual cores and CPU with weak single core performance. Character Detail Character Detail setting affects model's level of detail. Polygon count is higher with each setting level, but it is not very noticeable directly in the game. Full resolution screenshots: Low, High, Ultra. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_118594.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_124938.jpg|864|540|Character Detail Low|Character Detail Ultra[/compimg] Performance impact of Character Detail was only 5% for High setting and 8% for Ultra setting. Texture Filtering Texture filtering offers few filtering methods, unfortunately I haven't noticed any difference. There should be massive reduction of blurring on a distant textures, but the textures looks exactly the same. Performance impact is negligible for all but Anisotropic 16x setting where it is 13%. Full resolution screenshots: Bilinear, Trilinear, Anisotropic 4x, Anisotropic 16x. Depth of Field Depth of field setting offers only Off and On options. If turned On, DoF just blurs the gun when aiming down the sights. I'd like to see more of the blurring dependant on distance from player, but otherwise I much prefer this implementation. Some games have DoF forced on everything that is little bit farther from the camera just to hide horrible low resolution models or billboards however Killing Floor 2 is using DoF correctly. Performance impact is around 7%. Full resolution screenshots: Off, SAT DOF. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_61774.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_118132.jpg|864|540|Depth of Field Off|Depth of Field On[/compimg] Anti-Aliasing Killing Floor 2 offers only FXAA as its anti-aliasing method. This is only post processing filter and not a proper anti aliasing method. Fortunately KF2 implementation is done fairly well and jaggies are moderately blurred without impacting sharpens of the textures. Performance impact is around 9%. Full resolution screenshots: Off, FXAA. Realtime Reflections and rest of the effects Realtime reflections adds reflections on some surfaces. This effects is very performance expensive, but it is well worth it as the game's world becomes much more realistic. This is the most demanding effect in the game, turning reflections On results in more than 40% framerate drop. Full resolution screenshots: scene 1 Off, On; scene 2 Off, On. Rest of the effects have negligible performance impact and I haven't noticed any visual difference. [compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_89210.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_75/gallery_13_75_109644.jpg|864|540|Realtime Reflections Off|Realtime Reflections On[/compimg] Conclusion PC version of Killing Floor 2 is very well done. The option menus are offering many setting to play with, controls are spot on and the sounds are awesome. Optimization is also very good as the game scales nicely and performs well. For a game, that is just entering Early Access, this is very polished product. Developers are actively pushing updates (I've downloaded two large updates just last week) and if first Killing Floor taught us anything, devs are not going to abandon Killing Floor 2 anytime soon. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of Killing Floor 2 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed our article and want to us create more articles, more often, please consider donating to PCGamingWiki's Patreon campaign:
  6. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of Killing Floor 2 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. Killing Floor 2 is a continuation of a very popular coop zombie shooter from Tripwire Interactive. The game is just entering Early Access and we are going to take a look at its performance and overall technical quality. System Requirements Minimum CPU: Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz or Phenom II X2 545 RAM: 3 GB RAM HDD: 10 GB GPU: GeForce GTS 250 or Radeon HD 4830 OS: Win7 64-bit, Win8/8.1 64-bit Recommended CPU: Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz or Phenom II X4 955 RAM: 4 GB RAM GPU: GeForce GTX 560 or Radeon HD 6950 System requirements seems to be very reasonable, minimum required CPU is a just dual core and a rather old one. Similar story with required GPU, which is very old mainstream. Recommended specs are little bit more demanding, as a quad core and a newer GPU is needed, but again nothing anywhere close to the current high-end hardware. All the tests have been done on system with Core i7-2700k clocked to 4.5GHz, 32 GB RAM and HD 6870 with 1GB of VRAM, Killing Floor 2 version was 1003, Catalyst version 15.3 Beta. Testing was done in a 1650x1050 resolution, the game doesn't offer benchmark tool, so test run was me playing the first round in a solo mode on the Burning Paris map and killing all zombies which took about one minute. Each effect was tested three times and results were averaged to eliminate inconsistencies between each run. Graphics settings Graphics settings menu offers wide variety of effects and setting to tweak. Some of the effects require restarting the game, so set them before you enter an online match. These effects are: Environment Detail, FX, Realtime Reflections and Shadow Quality. Other effects can be adjusted on the fly with immediate effect, but I've restarted the game after each change for benchmarks just to be sure. Killing Floor 2 supports any resolution, some more exotic ones can be accessed by switching Aspect Ratio to Any. The game supports Borderless, Windowed and Fullscreen modes, and Variable Framerate can be turned on for high refresh rate displays. I've encountered slight problem when lowering resolutions, but restarting game fixed it. Field of View Field of View slider is hidden under Game Settings options menu. It doesn't say exact degree of field of view, there is percentage adjustment instead with 100% - 125% range. Killing Floor 2 apparently uses vertical implementation of field of view. This implementation works much better on a variety of aspect ratios, ultra wide monitors and AMD Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround setups. Bellow you can see two comparisons, upper one is the game's field of view on ordinary 16:10 aspect ratio screen, lower one is field of view behavior on ultra wide screen. Even when slider is set to 125% on both cases, ultra wide screen properly offers more visibility. Surprisingly there was no measurable impact on framerate. Full resolution screenshots: 16:10@100%, 16:10@125%, 21:9@100%, 21:9@125%. Overall performance and image quality Killing Floor 2 offers four image quality presets - Low, Medium, High and Ultra. On the Low preset the game performed very well and the framerate rarely fell under 100 FPS. Switching to the Medium setting framerate dropped 30%, same drop was when the High setting was used. The Ultra preset offers the best image quality, but with severe framerate impact of 40% from High and more than 70% from Low setting. The game's performance scales very well with each preset. Performance also scales fairly well although not linearly. Doubling the resolution from 1280x800 to 2560x1600 results in 62% framerate drop. Image quality even on the Low settings is very good. Lighting is dynamic, some textures are blurry and there are only basic reflections. On the other hand, the Ultra setting have textures very sharp even on 1600p, environment has more objects and realtime reflections are also present and very apparent. Below are comparisons from three currently available maps. Full resolution screenshots: Paris Low, Paris Medium, Paris High, Paris Ultra; Outpost Low, Outpost Medium, Outpost High, Outpost Ultra; Lab Low, Lab Medium, Lab High, Lab Ultra. Controls Controls settings menu in the Killing Floor 2 offers basic mouse sensitivity settings, there is no mouse acceleration or smoothing toggle, but I haven't felt any additional mouse processing and aiming seems to be very precise. Keyboard binding menu offers basic key binds, only one key per action can be set. There was an issue with Caps Lock key, the key was binded to the Voice Chat by default and cannot be binded to anything else unless Voice Chat action is binded to other key first. Controllers are also supported, but buttons cannot be reassigned. Audio Killing Floor 2 Audio Options menu offers three volume sliders for Game, Music and Voice Chat volume. The game supports surround sound setups and positional audio worked flawlessly on my 7.1 system. The audio quality is exceptionally good, the everything sounds very authentic. Killing Floor 2 is probably taking distance of the sound source and applying some filters on it for added realism. I was very surprised how good the game sounds. Performance analysis In this section we are going to look at how each effect impacts framerate and how does each setting looks on screenshots. Be sure to check full resolution uncompressed PNGs linked in each section. There are full resolution screenshots linked in each section for better comparisons as the images in the sliders are compressed. Be sure to check our gallery for additional screenshots and graphs. Ambient Occlusion Killing Floor 2 offers two ambient occlusion methods - SSAO and HBAO . SSAO adds very subtle shadows to the corners and around some objects. HBAO is much more pronoun and these shadows are much more noticeable. Full resolution screenshots: AO Off, SSAO, HBAO. Performance impact is around 10% for SSAO and almost 30% for HBAO from Off setting. As usual this is rather performance expensive effect, but not very noticeable with SSAO setting. Texture Resolution This setting affects quality of textures and can be adjusted in four levels. On Low setting some textures are very blurry and lacks any detail (glove on the screenshot for example), but other textures are surprisingly sharp and detailed even on Low. Larger quality boost comes with the High setting and the textures are obviously the sharpest at Ultra setting. Full resolution screenshots: scene 1 Low, Medium, High, Ultra; scene 2 Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Performance impact depends highly on amount of VRAM available, average framerate drop is only around 5% for each additional level. But heavy stuttering started to appear with High setting on my 1GB card. Shadow Quality Killing Floor 2 offers four levels of Shadow Quality settings. Each level increases resolution and view distance of the shadows. At Low setting some of the shadows are barely visible and the rest is very blurry. With each additional settings level, shadows are much nicer, sharper and farther visible. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. As usual, shadows have substantial impact on the performance. Medium setting causes around 7% framerate drop, High setting costs 16% and the most expensive Ultra setting costs 20% of performance. Environment Detail This settings affects how many objects are in the game world. These objects have no impact on the gameplay, usually they are there just for decoration (chairs, garbage..). Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra. Performance impact wasn't measurable, This is probably due to the fast CPU in the test rig. I'd imagine this setting will have much more pronoun impact on dual cores and CPU with weak single core performance. Character Detail Character Detail setting affects model's level of detail. Polygon count is higher with each setting level, but it is not very noticeable directly in the game. Full resolution screenshots: Low, High, Ultra. Performance impact of Character Detail was only 5% for High setting and 8% for Ultra setting. Texture Filtering Texture filtering offers few filtering methods, unfortunately I haven't noticed any difference. There should be massive reduction of blurring on a distant textures, but the textures looks exactly the same. Performance impact is negligible for all but Anisotropic 16x setting where it is 13%. Full resolution screenshots: Bilinear, Trilinear, Anisotropic 4x, Anisotropic 16x. Depth of Field Depth of field setting offers only Off and On options. If turned On, DoF just blurs the gun when aiming down the sights. I'd like to see more of the blurring dependant on distance from player, but otherwise I much prefer this implementation. Some games have DoF forced on everything that is little bit farther from the camera just to hide horrible low resolution models or billboards however Killing Floor 2 is using DoF correctly. Performance impact is around 7%. Full resolution screenshots: Off, SAT DOF. Anti-Aliasing Killing Floor 2 offers only FXAA as its anti-aliasing method. This is only post processing filter and not a proper anti aliasing method. Fortunately KF2 implementation is done fairly well and jaggies are moderately blurred without impacting sharpens of the textures. Performance impact is around 9%. Full resolution screenshots: Off, FXAA. Realtime Reflections and rest of the effects Realtime reflections adds reflections on some surfaces. This effects is very performance expensive, but it is well worth it as the game's world becomes much more realistic. This is the most demanding effect in the game, turning reflections On results in more than 40% framerate drop. Full resolution screenshots: scene 1 Off, On; scene 2 Off, On. Rest of the effects have negligible performance impact and I haven't noticed any visual difference. Conclusion PC version of Killing Floor 2 is very well done. The option menus are offering many setting to play with, controls are spot on and the sounds are awesome. Optimization is also very good as the game scales nicely and performs well. For a game, that is just entering Early Access, this is very polished product. Developers are actively pushing updates (I've downloaded two large updates just last week) and if first Killing Floor taught us anything, devs are not going to abandon Killing Floor 2 anytime soon. PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of Killing Floor 2 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article. Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed our article and want to us create more articles, more often, please consider donating to PCGamingWiki's Patreon campaign: Click here to view the article
  7. I really don't have that option in my CCC and I've even updated it from 14.12 Omega to current 15.3 Beta just to try it.
  8. It definitely has enough contrast to differentiate, I just feel like 5 pixel wide border is a bit too much. This is just a personal preference though, keep the shadow if you like it more.
  9. Repost from IRC: I like the colors, but I'd prefer single pixel line border around tables instead of dark glow. Here is my mockup and with system requirements table with tabs idea:
  10. I don't have Enhance application settings option (AMD card) so I'm afraid I can't try that. But I've read about blurring problem with forced AA on the tech support forums for Pillars and that's why I've tested it.
  11. Thanks for spotting it, labels were indeed switched. It is fixed now.
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