Texture Quality - This is the detail and resolution of textures in the game. I believe the performance will depend a lot on system and vram memory.

 

Texture Filtering - This is basically antistropic filtering.

 

Lighting Quality - This affects visuals such as glare and bloom

 

Effects Quality - This affects visuals such as explosions and smoke trails

 

Post Processing - Not really sure what this affects because there are conflicting reports, but it is likely makes use of shaders and HDR

 

Mesh Quality - The most important setting because it affects depth of view and clarity

 

Terrain Quality - This is detail of the terrain and is probably related to polygon count, so this will be affected by memory and VRAM

 

Terrain Decoration - This affects visuals such as trash flying, basically eye candy

 

Anti Aliasing Deffered - This settings smooths out jagged lines

 

Anti Aliasing Post - This smooths out textures

 

Ambient Occlusion - One of my favorite settings because it adds light reflections and is really such beautiful eye candy especially on the Locker map, but it comes at a pretty hefty FPS cost

 

The test setup is,

8GB DDR3, Gigabyte Windforce GTX 780, 1920 x 1080 @ 144Hz, Core i5 3570k, Windows 7, and the Dish map standing on a high point overlooking the entire map, empty server.

 

The initial settings have resolution set at 130%, Weapon DOF off, Motion Blur Off

 

Low Graphics Setting - 149FPS

Medium Graphics Setting - 120FPS

High Graphics Setting - 90FPS

Ultra Graphics Setting - 66FPS

Custom Graphics Setting with everything set to Low or Off - 148-150FPS

 

What is weird is that the FPS was solid at standard settings, but once I introduced the custom setting, the FPS began to fluctuate.

 

The following chart is in FPS

 

Graphics Effect Medium High   Ultra

 

Texture Qual 140-149   139-140   138-140

 

Texture Filter 148-151   148-151   147-150

 

Light Qual   141-144   134-138   133-136

 

Effect Qual 147-149   148-150   153-155

 

Post Proc Q 145-150   125-127   127-128

 

Mesh Qual 144-146 142-144   137-144

 

Terrain Qual 148-152   147-149   147-150

 

Terrain Deco   148-153 147-149 145-150

 

Anti Aliasing Def 2X 118-119 4X 98-99

 

Anti Aliasing Post  Low  142-145 Med 139-140 High  139-139

 

Ambient Occlusion SSAO 143-145   HBAO 122-144

 

Resolution Scale 25% 188-190, had the same FPS up to 100% resolution at 186-187FPS, 125% 155-156, 150% 115-116, 175% 90-92, 200% 72FPS

 

Looking at the FPS numbers, there are some interesting trends, some solid FPS hits, and even one FPS hike! So, there could be some optimizations that my GPU has because there were some weird trends such as Texture Filtering staying roughly the same throughout all the settings, but the weird setting that I noticed was Effects Quality. As I increased Effects Quality, my FPS went up! At Ultra, the FPS increased 5 total FPS from the stock settings! I even ran this test at the end of the whole experiment and it was confirmed. So for now, this setting will forever be set to Ultra on my computer. The biggest FPS hogs were Light Quality at a modest 15FPS drop at Ultra, Post Process Qual at 21 FPS drop, Mesh Qual at 11 FPS drop, Anti Aliasing Deferred at 50 FPS drop, and the beautiful Ambient Occlusion at 26FPS drop. Another weird trend I noticed was that the FPS stayed the same between 25%-100% resolution scale, but then I noticed large drops in FPS the higher the percentage I went. So my system is going to stay at 100% resolution since it seems I'm not seeing any FPS difference the lower I go. I do want to test a few settings again when I get a chance on the same map and the server is full. I didn't test any of the settings together. For example, Texture Quality and Terrain Quality combined might severely impact FPS because of the huge VRAM hit.

 

I would recommend to limit the following settings as they have a large FPS hit,

 

Light Quality, Post Processing Quality, Anti-Aliasing Deferred, Anti-Aliasing Post, Ambient Occlusion HBAO (SSAO seems ok), keep resolution at 100% and under. It seems like the rest of the settings didn't really affect FPS all that much so I will be setting them to high, or Ultra.

 

I will add to this post because there are a shit ton of grammatical errors and I'm trying to hurry as the kiddo just woke up, but here are some numbers for everyone to ponder. I will come back and add what happens when VRAM usage settings get added together.

Hi everyone!

 

I thought I should mention that Field of View (FOV) also impacts performance to a great extent. The higher the FOV, the higher the impact on performance.