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Hitting Caps Lock during the "return to base" cutscenes will cause the game to finish loading almost instantly. This helps to keep performance more consistent and minimizes load times. I always recommend adding your entire Steam folder to your anti-virus exclusion list. There's probably no reason to ever go below 8x Anisotropic filtering except on very low-end GPUs. Going from the highest texture filtering option (16x Anisotropic) to the lowest (Bilinear) offered only a ~2% performance improvement and noticeably degrades the appearance of textures. "High Res Translucency" and "Subsurface Scattering" might only be used in specific situations I didn't test "Bloom" and "Dirty Lens" have no performance impact, they're purely for user preference. Disabling "High Res Translucency", "Bloom", "Dirty Lens", and "Subsurface Scattering" offered virtually no performance improvement during my testing, so you can safely leave them on. Reducing it to "Low" can increase performance significantly (25% or more) but this often results in very noticeable pop-in and should be avoided if possible.
#XCOM 2 PC EXCLUSIVE FULL#
Reducing it to "Medium" offers a small performance improvement with a noticeable reduction to the distance where objects are rendered with full detail models and textures. The effect of reducing "Draw Distance" varies depending on the map. Switching "Decals" from "All Decals" to "All Static" provides a 10-15% performance boost in base view. Switching "Depth of Field" from "Simple" to "Disabled" offered no performance improvement.
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Switching "Depth of Field" from "Bokeh" to "Simple" offered a ~10% performance improvement with little visual quality difference. Shadows from "Medium" to "Low" -> ~5% FPS improvement
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Shadows from "High" to "Medium" -> ~25% FPS improvement Shadows from "Maximum" to "High" -> No FPS improvement It improves the appearance of reflections and lighting. Other performance testing details:- Disabling "Screen Space Reflections" grants 5-10% performance boost by itself, depending on what other options are also enabled. It's likely a user preference thing, so try it yourself and see if you notice a difference. I haven't extensively tested the effect of "framerate smoothing" but from what I've read it doesn't seem like a very useful feature. Once you've found satisfactory settings you'll probably want to re-enable v-sync. This removes a lot of shadows from the game but will likely increase your FPS by >50% compared to "Static Shadows", let alone "Full Shadows". If adjusting these settings doesn't improve your performance enough, the nuclear option is setting Shadows to "Directional Only". "Screen Space Reflections" disabled (nicer reflections and lighting but a ~10% FPS penalty) "Simple" depth of field instead of "Bokeh" (action scene performance hog, little visual difference) "Medium" shadow quality (~25% performance boost) "Tile AO" (SSAO is one of the most demanding effects in any game) My recommended "sane" high-end settings:- "FXAA" (MSAA is often ineffective in XCOM 2 and has a severe performance cost) Because XCOM 2 is a relatively slow-paced game, a lower framerate may not be quite as egregious. Some people prefer 30 FPS with higher visual quality to 60 FPS with lesser visual quality others insist anything lower than 144 FPS is an attack on their human rights. What framerate is "acceptable" is a matter of user preference and often varies depending on the type of game being played. When asked to auto-detect appropriate settings for your hardware, XCOM 2 targets a 40 FPS minimum instead of the 60 FPS minimum most of us normally expect. This is what I'll address in the next section. It can be hard at first to tell which ones are important and which ones aren't. XCOM 2 is a PC-exclusive game though, and developers targeting PC often include optional "ultra high" settings which offer very small visual improvements at a high performance cost. Virtually all "AAA" games we get on PC are underpowered console ports and this has led to people growing accustomed to perfect performance at the highest settings.