Azoic's Game-Along | The Witcher 2 (PC) : Graphics Settings Comparison

[azoic]

Ubersampling: high quality rendering mode (If you lag when playing.. turn this off!)

Vertical sync: helps eliminate "screen tearing" during camera movements and blinking on very quick animations (e.g., bright explosions), but can cause somewhat slower rendering and short input lags.

Decals: enabling decals like dust or blood on characters can affect CPU performance.

[azoic]

Cinematic depth of field: provides movie-like depth of field in cutscenes and dialogue sequences. Extremely detailed but demands significant power. Should only be enabled on machines equipped with top-end graphics cards.

Depth of field – cutscenes: option only affects cutscenes and dialogue sequences, does not affect gameplay performance.

Dangling objects limit: limiter for physical animation of character components like Geralt's hair. Disabling this option places greater demands on the CPU.

[azoic]

Vignette: aesthetic option that produces a photographic vignette around the game screen. Does not affect performance.

Rain, Wet surfaces rain effect: modest impact on performance.

SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion): lighting effect that is important to the game but unfortunately places significant demands on the GPU.

Motion blur: blur effect on camera movement, demanding on the GPU.

[azoic]

Anti-aliasing: demanding effect that can significantly reduce performance, so it should be disabled on medium and low-end machines.

Blur effects: special blur and radial blur visual effects that are quite demanding on hardware but used rarely in the game.

Depth of field – gameplay: subtle visual effect. Option determines appearance of effect only during gameplay sequences and does not affect DoF in cutscenes.

[azoic]

Shadow quality: affects graphics performance. Consumes GPU power without affecting CPU performance.

Number of shadowed lights: set the maximum number of lights that cast shadows. Affects graphics performance. Consumes GPU power without affecting CPU performance.

LOD distance: distance scale for level of detail on meshes. Lower values improve game performance but result in reduced detail on models.

Bloom: effect greatly improves quality of game graphics without placing excess demands on GPU.

[azoic]

Texture downscaling: higher values result in lower texture quality.

Texture memory size: sets the amount of graphics card memory allocated to textures. Larger values will decrease the amount of streaming that occurs in game and will make the game run more smoothly, but they can also cause the graphics card to run out of memory and even result in game crashes. Choose a reasonable value based on the amount of memory available on your graphics card.

[AghiliDaMan]

What does decals high spec do?

Like whats the difference from medium?

[azoic]

@AghiliDaMan From what i gather.. decals is the amount of blood, dust on screen.

[dule84]

damn , this game looks amazing even on low settings D:

[azoic]

@dule84 it does! But you lose a lot textures on low settings.. especially little things like pillows etc they have some generic blurred texture instead of the nice details.. but still.. overall scene is lovely.. especially outdoors..

[Zetaphrem]

I've never had to do settings manually, what do you mean for things like "Number of Shadowed lights: Medium" What are the numbers for the medium range or high or low.

Or can I just put the words in and then the game turns them into numbers?

[azoic]

@Zetaphrem oh.. if you go under 'show advanced options' thats basically the options they give you.. its a drop down list and you can choose from there.

[Zetaphrem]

@azoic Sweet, awesome thanks, now I can actually play the game without uberlag.

[azoic]

I think mainly the major difference is the low settings as usual.. textures not sharp enough.. but other than that its all in the lighting and depth of field. Personally i am beginning to feel the DOF of the ultra settings might be a tad too much.. preferring the High or Medium setting for all the DOF stuffs. But the Light related stuffs defintely follow the Ultra settings if you can. Love the rays and ambience it brings to the table.