If you’re being honest, do you really know exactly what every setting in the video settings does?
Most people don’t. And even in games where a description is provided with each setting in the video or graphics options, it can be hard to visualise the actual impact each specific setting will have not only on your frame rate, but the overall look.
So Shadow of War has an idea. In a chat at the NVIDIA briefing before Gamescom, Matt Allen, director of technical art at Monolith, told me that Shadow of War would ship with a before and after primer for each setting so users knew exactly what each option changed.
“One of the things we’re actually doing is that on the PC options menu, we have tons – flip all the bits you want – one of the things we’ve done is take screenshots of the same area, so you can basically say, ‘What does it look like if I turn this off?’”
Allen explained that the feature was inspired by a graphics engineer, who wanted to be able to show users what they were giving or gaining with each setting. It’s not too dissimilar from the before and after screenshots in NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience middleware, although developers haven’t typically offered such precise comparisons in-game.
Given the numbers of AI that can fill the screen, along with the effects, post-processing, lighting and everything else going on at once, most PC users will probably have to turn down a setting here or there if they want a nice, high frame rate. That’s a job made a lot easier when you know precisely what the trade-off is – and hopefully it’s the kind of detail that other developers will mimic before too long.
The author travelled to Gamescom as a guest of NVIDIA.
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