In general, it is not an easy task to find the optimal display settings for one's system. The game is running fast and smooth? Okay, but you might have much better graphics quality then. Or you have low fps? Then which display options to change for gaining more fps? To answer these question, one has to have good knowledge on what these options do in general and what they do explicitly in the game. With this "guide", I want to share my knowledge on the display settings in Warframe (PC version). It is not at all complete and may be even wrong at some places. So I encourage all players to share their observations for completing this guide.
I have tested with a notebook containing
- Intel Core i7-4510U
- nVidia GTX 850M (4GB)
- 8GB ram
- SSD
- Win 8.1
My recommendations for a comparable system:
- V-sync: OFF + FRAMERATE LIMITER
- PhysX: OFF
- Reflections: ON
- High dynamic range: OFF
- Geometry detail: HIGH
- Runtime tesselation: OFF
- Shadow quality: HIGH
- Character shadows: ON
- Particle quality: LOW
- Texture size: HIGH
- Anti Aliasing: SMAA
- Anisotropic filtering: ON
- Depth of field: OFF
- Motion blur: OFF
- Color correction: ON
- Bloom: ON
- Dynamic lighting: ON
- Weapon FX: OFF
- Weapon Swing: OFF
where the following options can be changed to trade quality for more fps:
- Shadow quality
- Character shadows
- Anti aliasing
- Reflections
- Bloom
VSYNC
This is an important option influencing greatly the smoothness of the game. First I want to explain how it works. I'll explain a simplified model, the actual implementation is a bit more complicated. But it explains the resulting effects. Let's assume you have a standard LCD display with a refresh rate of 60Hz. With V-sync off, the frames provided by the graphics card are not at all synchronized with the display refreshs. In particular, frames are sent to your display in the middle of a refresh most of the time. As a consequence, a single refresh of your display will contain two or even more different frames. This effect is called screen tearing and example screenshots can be found in this Wikipedia article.
If you activate V-sync, we have to distinguish between two cases. First assume that your graphics card could emit more than 60 frames per second. Then it waits for each refresh of your display and the frames are mapped 1:1 to the refreshs. In particular, the framerate is capped to 60. Note that this is the smoothest game experience you can get! Even if you deactivate V-sync and reach framerates of 120 and more, this will be not as smooth as with V-sync on since you will experience screen tearing.
Now assume your framerate is below 60. Then a given frame is copied to the screen until a new frame is rendered. As usual, the rendering might be completed in the middle of a refresh. The frame is then not sent to the screen in the middle of that refresh. Rather, it is delayed until the very next refresh. This delay leads to so-called micro stuttering and input lag.
If your game usually runs above 60 fps, I therefore highly recommend to switch on V-sync. If your framerate usually is below the refresh rate of your display, you have to decide between screen tearing (off) and frame delay (on). It is not possible to avoid both. NVidia (and others) is currently developing the so-called G-Sync. For that, you need a special display which has variable refresh rates and these refresh rates are synced with the framerates of the graphics card.
Concerning the option "Auto": With my system, this option simply sets V-sync to "on". I can't tell what "Auto" does exactly.
EDIT: Recently, I noticed input lag even if the graphics card operates at the 60fps refresh cap. If you also experience this and find that input lag annoying, I recommend to switch V-sync off and to use a framerate limiter at 60fps in addition.
PHYSX
If turned on, this activates physically correctly animated particles when using warframe abilities or when fallen enemies disappear. Comparison screenshots can be found in this article. Sometimes, these particles block line of sight and that's why you might consider to deactivate this feature.
LOCAL REFLECTIONS
This is a nice effect enabling smooth surfaces to reflect the environment. Here are two comparison screenshots.
In this scene, the framerates increased by ~31% when turning off the reflections. So this effect is rather computationally expensive. Some maps have more reflecting surfaces, some have less. Void missions for example have a relatively high amount of reflections. So you might deactivate them if you suffer from low framerates.
HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE
First I want to explain what I would expect from this feature (in a simplified form). Each pixel stores a brightness information in the form of a number between 0 and 1. Let's say 0 means complete darkness, i.e. the pixel is black, and 1 is super bright, i.e. the pixel is white. High dynamic range lighting extends this range to any number. But what does that mean? How can something be darker than black or brighter than white? Not at all a priori, but a new brightness offset is introduced which ought to mimic the pupil of the eye. When the offset is set to x, then the value x represents complete darkness (black) and the value x+1 represents pure brightness (white). So the standard offset is 0. Now assume we have a scene with dark spots and bright spots. Then the brightness offset is computed, for example, as the mean value over all brightness values of all visible pixels. When the brightness offset is adjusted to this mean value, the perceived brightness of each pixel adapts according to this new offset. The visual effect of this is the following: Assume you are in a dark cave and your pupils have adapted to the darkness. Now you look at the entrance of the cave and all you see is a bright spot without details. When you move towards the entrance, your pupils adapt to the brightness and, gradually, you see more and more details of the outside world, while the walls of the cavern get darker and darker.
So this is a very nice effect. You can see this very clearly in the showcase game "Half-Life 2: Lost Coast" which is freely available on Steam (there is also developer commentary which also explains this). But the important question is: How is this implemented in Warframe? As far as I have seen, not at all! However, some bright windows here and there seem to be even brighter with HDR on (when also "bloom" is activated), see for example the following screenshots:
In this scene, the framerate increased by ~21% when turning HDR off. All in all, I think HDR is just a bloom enhancer. But you do NOT need HDR technology to make bright spots even brighter (statically), and this should NOT eat 21% of the framerate.
So, in my opinion, HDR is poorly implemented in Warframe at the moment and I recommend turning it off. If you see spots where HDR really is implemented in the game, please tell us.
GEOMETRY DETAIL
All the models in a 3D-game are made up of meshes of triangles. If the mesh is finer (more triangles), the model has more detail, but this also means lower framerates in general. The fineness of meshes is controlled by this option. However, there are not much models where there's a difference between high and low. The following two screenshots show some infestation tendrils:
There is no substantial framerate change in this scene. I never noticed that the detail level of character models changed when changing geometry detail.
All in all, I think you can set this option to high without fearing much fps drain.
RUNTIME TESSELLATION
Runtime tessellation enables the graphics card to compute model meshes out of abstract data in runtime. In particular, the fineness of meshes can be varied dynamically. For example, if the player moves away from an object, the mesh is allowed to become coarser since you cannot see much details from far away. This can save some fps. On the other hand, if the player approaches an object, the mesh can be computed to be finer and finer, thus increasing the details considerably.
So runtime tessellation is a very good thing in general, potentially increasing both fps and graphics quality. The infestation tendrils on the screenshots in the "geometry detail" section show the above described behaviour (start from a distance and move towards the tendrils). Strangely, they also show this behaviour if "runtime tesselation" is deactivated in the display settings. So is this really runtime tessellation? If not, where can you see it in action?
EDIT: I now noticed some differences with the white tree plants in Orokin Void missions. The actual quality difference is however completely neglectable. On the other hand, I noticed an fps increase of 10% and more at some spots when turning runtime tessellation off. So, in my opinion, runtime tessellation doesn't seem to be implemented very well at the moment (like HDR). So maybe it's not a bad idea to turn it off until it gets improvements.
SHADOW QUALITY AND CHARACTER SHADOWS
Character shadows activates or deactivates the shadows below your player character, your kubrows or sentinels, other player characters including companions and enemy units. Shadow quality determines the smoothness of these character shadows but also of shadows coming from dynamic light sources (see the section on dynamic lighting for an example where the fps increased by ~7% when switching shadow quality from high to low). Here are 3 comparison screenshots:
Note that the other shadows in the screenshots do not change since they are in some sense "hard-coded" into the textures. In this scene, the framerate did not change when switching shadow quality from high to low. However, when turning off character shadows, the framerate increased by ~10%. That's not too much, but think of a large battle with a lot of enemy units and a lot of character shadows. If you experience huge fps loss in big battles, maybe turning off character shadows can help.
PARTICLE QUALITY
An example to which this option applies is smoke from fires or steam coming out of vents. Setting this to low turns smoke and steam off.
Switching from high to medium resulted in a fps gain of ~15%. Switching from high to low resulted in a fps gain of ~21%. Since smoke or steam often blocks line of sight, setting this option to low is maybe not a bad decision.
TEXTURE SIZE
Setting this from low to medium to high should increase the texture quality. I did several tests on this and did not notice any change in visual quality or fps. It seems as this option has no effect at all. Maybe this has something to do with the following: Go to display settings and change texture size. Then you will notice that the textures "morph" from low quality to higher quality. Maybe the texture size is adapted automatically in runtime?
ANTI ALIASING
Anti aliasing tries to smoothen jagged edges. It can be set to off, FXAA and SMAA:
One sees that FXAA blurs the textures. I therefore disrecommend it completely. SMAA is better in this regard and one can clearly see edges which are smoothened out. But there are also spots in this scene where SMAA does not improve picture quality. The fps gain from SMAA to off in this scene is ~10%. You should check for yourself and decide whether you want some edges smoothened or a bit more fps. It also depends on the size of your pixels.
ANISOTROPIC FILTERING
To understand what anisotropic filtering is, one first has to understand mip-mapping (which is always activated). A given texture can be looked at from different distances. The graphics card has to rescale this textures to the appropriate size. This cannot be done without quality loss. To cope with this, a texture is stored in different sizes and resolutions (called mip-maps). If it is seen from far, the lower res mip-maps are used. If it is very near, the higher res mip-maps are displayed.
Now if you turn on anisotropic filtering, several other mip-maps are used, namely mip-maps which show the texture at oblique angles. This increases the quality of textures seen at oblique angles considerably, for example textures on the floor:
The fps gain from on to off is only ~3%. So I highly recommend to turn it on. (Note: To see the difference between on and off, you have to recompile the textures by changing the texture size.)
MOTION BLUR AND DEPTH OF FIELD
Depth of field creates a focus effect when zooming/aiming with weapons:
If you like the effects, you can turn them on without fearing fps loss.
Addition from Egg_Chen: Depth of field also adds a distance fog which gives an impression of level depth. This is much more noticeable on some tilesets, and when environmental hazards are in play. It also allows the renderer to display things like heat haze around Sentinal exhausts, and distortion effects around some frame skills and weapon effects.
COLOR CORRECTION
This effect applies a color filter to the whole scene. It should be noted that the filter is variable and depends on the map. The differences can be seen very well if you travel to different planets and look at the interior of your space ship. The following four screenshots show the space ship with color correction off and with color correction on at 3 different locations:
There's no difference in fps when turning color correction on.
Some people don't like it, but I think the the whole scene looks much more realistic and vital with color correction on.
BLOOM
This is a very flashy lighting effect which I like very much. I think everyone knows what it does since it is almost omnipresent in Warframe. In the following scene, the fps increased by ~19% when turning it off.
The fps increased by ~37% when turning dynamic lighting off in this scene. So it is computationally quite demanding, but I nonetheless recommend to turn it one, because else some places are not displayed correctly. For example, the codex uses a lot of dynamic light sources and without it, a lot of entries are just black. Weapon FX also uses dynamic lighting.
WEAPON FX AND WEAPON SWING
Weapon FX adds special effects and dynamic lighting to your melee weapons.
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Maruitake
Edited by Maruitake
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