A lot of you most likely already know but for those of you who dont. I did a lot of testing last night with settings in the Advanced Graphic option tab and came to a conclusion that can give you a solid 10+FPS gain without any noticable change in picture quality.

After playing around with all of the settings I found that the "Shaders" option to be what makes or breaks performance. I was playing at all options set to "Ultra" with High resolution textures turned "On" getting average of 38-46 fps. Lowering the Shaders to "Extreme" instead of "Ultra" gave me a big boost in performance which helps the stuttering in game with 10+fps gain. I was using EVGA Precision software to monitor my performance.

I took 15 screenshots last night focusing on different objects such as walls, signs, ground, sky, weapon etc comparing the Shaders setting from "Ultra", to "Extreme" and found NO difference in picture quality what so ever. I even had my wife take a look and she also found no difference at all.

I am now running at 48-60 FPS outside at all times 48-50 when im in heavy action with multiple enemies, and jumps to over 60 when indoors even during action also.

I will post some comparison pics later when I get home from work. If you dont believe me, experiment yourself and post pics here for all to see.

All settings to Ultra with High Def Textures at 1920X1080= FPS 38-45 outside, 38 during action. 55 indoors.
All settings to Ultra, Shaders set to Extreme with High Def Textures at 1920x1080= FPS 48-60 outside, 48-50 heavy action. Indoors 60+ at all times.


Also I only noticed very very small difference using Ultra to Very High which would give you a good 15-20 FPS gain even when using V-sync.

I hope this helps some to get a good performance jump while not sacrificing picture. I do these comparisons because I usually must have all settings maxed just to be satisfied regardless of performance just because I have a "Graphic OCD" So getting these results, made me very happy!

I tried this too and you are right it does gain you fps however even though it may be hard to notice sometimes, you did lose some picture quality. Having shaders on ultra enables real time reflections on metal and marble surfces and cell uniforms etc and gives it a nice effect. That's probably the main reason it takes up so much fps because it renders the whole level with those reflective surfaces enabled and that takes alot of gpu power.

The new Ultra spec enables:
1. Object: Tessellation, Parallax Occlusion Mapping
2. Particles: Shadows, Particle Motion Blur
3. Post Processing: High Quality Motion Blur and DOF
4. Shading: Contact shadows, Realtime Local Reflections
5. Shadows: Realistic Shadows with Variable Penumbra
6. Water: DX11 version of ocean and water volume


For AMD/ATI users having Object on Ultra is what's the biggest fps hit. nV users get less performance hit since the game is currently more optimized for nV hardware.

Interesting. So which areas would be good to test for comparisons? Id like to test the specific areas that it would effect the most. I will then compare and post pics later.

Because if this is only noticeable in very few areas of the game, only by a small margin, it seems silly to have it to Ultra considering the drop.

Thank you for the information

Yeah I discuss some of this in my latest video- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAaHsipKmhA

I might set shaders to ultra again to get the juice effects, have to test first ...

except that DOF doesn't work while playing on ultra prost process(it works in cut scenes tho and it is awsome). WHY cant it work on ultra while playing :/

While I am risking sounding like a fanboy...the tessellation difference between ATI and Nvidia cards has little to do with optimisations or drivers. The architecture of current generation Nvidia cards can deliver almost twice the "raw tessellation power"...again just tessellation and not counting anything else.

A Nvidia 460 card is on pair with a 6970 in this regard (but again in real word scenarios the latter will stomp the first). The 580 has near twice the output of a 6970. This is just a theoretical best case scenario and in the "real world" the gap is not so wide but it does exist and can be used to explain the difference you are seeing when you enable tessellation.

So equal footing, more tessellation workload you apply on a card will result in Nvidia loosing less performance then its competitor.