ACC could greatly benefit from adaptive GFX settings

With the multitude of different daytime/weather combinations in ACC comes a wide span of GPU usage/FPS performance. I settled with these settings:




The result of a 15 AI race at 0:00 with heavy rain:

2019-04-08 12:37:54 - AC2-Win64-Shipping
Frames: 3361 - Time: 60000ms - Avg: 56.017 - Min: 43 - Max: 67

15 AI race at 12:00 in clear weather:
2019-04-08 12:40:11 - AC2-Win64-Shipping
Frames: 5089 - Time: 60000ms - Avg: 84.817 (+52 %) - Min: 76 (+ 77 %) - Max: 101 (+50 %)

The discrepancy is - of course - quite big. For my system that's not too much of an issue because my GPU is quite powerful and I use FreeSync. If you don't use FreeSync, you can't go down to 43 FPS because it will stutter, a lot. So without adaptive sync your refresh rate kinda becomes the reference for minimum acceptable FPS (if you want fluid gameplay). As a consequence, in GPU-easy scenarios you'll get unreasonybly high FPS (I know some guys love 200 FPS but IMO you really only need the refresh rate in FPS) and an "underperforming" image quality.

When I custom-taylor the GFX for clear weather, I can pretty much crank everything to "epic" (except mirror res.) and get this:

2019-04-08 12:46:38 - AC2-Win64-Shipping
Frames: 4305 - Time: 60000ms - Avg: 71.750 - Min: 63 - Max: 83

When I custom taylor the GFX for nighttime rain driving (couple of sliders to "mid"), I get this:

2019-04-08 12:50:19 - AC2-Win64-Shipping
Frames: 4233 - Time: 60000ms - Avg: 70.550 - Min: 53 - Max: 86

Curiously, the reduced settings in night time rain driving don't even make a big difference in visual quality. Stuff that looks great during daytime driving (shadows and foliage for example) doesn't stand out too much in a rainy night race.

I noticed that we can change almost all GFX settings on the fly during a session. So if the engine allows such instantaneous changes, it would be great if the user could specify the settings for different weather/daytime scenarios and the game swithes between the states, accordingly. Only downside I can see here is a notable transistion but since that will happen only sporadically, it seems like a non-issue.

This would make ACC much more attractive for GPUs that can run decent settings during clear daytime but struggle a lot with nighttime rain driving. You could even run an aged/mid range Radeon GPU (those are handicapped, a lot in ACC vs. NVidia) with a good picture and FPS in all situations.

IMO this seems to be a low-risk and maybe even relatively low-effort (as compared to deep engine adjustments) optimiztation measure.

@Lord Kunos, @pankykapus is this worth considering?

 

I'd like this, even something as simple as being able to save graphics 'profiles' that you can switch between with some hotkeys, to avoid complications with it being automatic.

I have to run much lower settings in VR (Rift, 1080ti) to stay above 90fps than I do in daytime, but since I can't be bothered changing them all the time (and you sometimes get a transition in an online race), I spend the entire time running around with the 'night settings', so in the dry I have only like 60% GPU load, and much compromised visuals.

 

I'd definitely love to have a separate set of video settings for VR as compared to normal screen running. Automatic or manual selection would be fine.

 

Could run epic settings fine, but on one monza race the sun was setting and got something like 47 fps through lesmos and ascari. When the sun was down, it was fine again. Could not change the settings as in MP so "deal with it" Something like this would have helped.

Edit: so some automation and setting that if fps goes below value XX try automatically lower gfx detail

 

The most recent forza titles do exactly that with their ‘dynamic’ setting

 

^^
this !!!

 

It is already part of UE4, if you care to try it and report, that could be useful until we get better optimization.
Dynamic Resolution adjusts the primary screen percentage according to the previous frames' GPU workload. The resolution adjusts (as needed) based on a heuristic, for example, when there are too many objects on the screen, or if there is an expensive effect that suddenly enters the frame. The GPU rendering time will increase, and the resolution of the screen will be lowered to maintain the targeted frame rate.
You can enable Dynamic Resolution for your project by using Operation Mode to set how it can be overridden and used in your game. To control this, in your project's per-platform configuration profile
you can use the following console command:
r.DynamicRes.OperationMode

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/DynamicResolution

 

Although that's a pretty cool feature, resolution is not the screw I'd like to turn for better performance. The visual quality would decrease significantly. Shadows, Effects, PP or foliage would be better.

 

Yes, good one! Didn't think about that - manual selection would be totally sufficient and certainly easier/faster to implement.

 

+1 for video profiles

 

The difference between good and bad weather FPS is what’s keeping me off ACC before it’s properly released. I have a 1070 and cannot be bothered tweaking over and over again between builds.

This would be a great feature to implement.