How many FPS for a really smooth image

[Max Melamed]

Hey guys,

so I am playing around with my graphics settings atm quite a lot as I want to maximise the eyecandy ACC delivers. While doing so, I personally get the feeling that ACC or to be precise the Unreal Engine 4 delivers a smooth experience only over 90 FPS. Is this only me or can anyone relate?

Hints/tips on the fps optimal for the UE4 are welcome.

 

[Asterix]

What do you consider better looking Jim, for reference.

Also, what are your cpu & gpu?

 

[jimortality]

What do you consider better looking Jim, for reference.

Also, what are your cpu & gpu?

Better looking to me would be project cars but even that has some graphic issues. I have I7-6700k with 1080ti card. I think it's my monitor which is Benq E3203R which is a nice monitor but I don't seem to be able to get the best results out of it, that could be my lack of technical knowledge though and what to turn up and down. All the reviews like the Benq and it's actually designed for sim racing. It has hdr 400, 3 different gaming modes and stuff but if I don't know how to utilise it, then.......

 

[Kek700]

Rasmus would best suited to answer those problems, personally I find ACC excellent for graphics.
Perhaps because I have also assumed that the game will improve in keeping with past sim's I have
started with at their inception. Yes I know its near release from beta.

 

[maelstrom]

So I get over 100fps sometimes 130 but I'm not sure what else to do to make it look better, especially the aliasing.

What screen resolution are you using? I'm running at 2560x1440 and get smooth gameplay and good AA.

Edit: just noticed that your using UHD (got distracted and took a very long time to type my post!). I'm surprised you notice aliasing problems with UHD on a 32" screen.

 

[RasmusP]

What screen resolution are you using? I'm running at 2560x1440 and get smooth gameplay and good AA.

Edit: just noticed that your using UHD (got distracted and took a very long time to type my post!). I'm surprised you notice aliasing problems with UHD on a 32" screen.

It's not uhd. I looked up the monitor and I already mentioned in one of the posts that I don't know why he can select uhd apart having dsr enabled or being in windowed mode.

It's 2560x1440 at 32". That's okay but not great. Especially if you sit quite close to it.
I went from 27" 1080p to 27" 1440p (it's ultra wide but same height as 27").
I was always bothered by aliasing. Very sensitive to the ugly pixel crawling.
Now with the higher pixel density I'm pleased although I can still spot it.

32" is probably like my old monitor regarding pixel density and I was sitting about 90cm away from the monitor when being behind the wheel.
Msaa in assetto 1, rF2 and raceroom helps, pcars 2 got some good aa modes too.
Now the unreal engine only has taa or fxaa which both are post processing smoothing algorithms and not a higher rendering resolution like msaa.
With a high pixel density you don't see the induced blur from taa and can enjoy the reduced pixel crawling, with a lower density you can choose between blurriness and smoothness.
Acc is rather sharp still I'd say. Depending on the sharpness settings!

@jimortality what do you have the sharpness slider and the advanced sharpening setting at in the graphics settings? Maybe reduce this and love with the blurriness?

Additionally about the monitor:
The higher the contrast, brightness etc the more you'll see the white pixels of the white lines jumping around on the dark tarmac. You have an hdr VA panel which means very high contrast and brightness. You could try to make the blacks a bit more grey and the white a bit less Wight be disabling hdr, lowering the brightness/backlight lumination and also the contrast.

 

[jimortality]

Thanks all for the help so far, I'm going to be on after tea and probably spend some time learning the monitor. Sharpness is on default 80 I think and the blacks are too black. I don't use the hdr and I keep the contrast and brightness to 60 or 70 because I have this fear that I will damage the screen with those 2 high.

 

[RasmusP]

Sharpness is on default 80

I meant the ingame settings. You have the sharpness slider and then the "advanced sharpening filter" or something like that in the advanced tab.
Deactivate the "advanced" one and put the normal slider to 75-110% and see if it helps or gets too blurred.
To set the sharpness of your Monitor, use this:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/sharpness.php

You'll have to step back a little for sure to make it work like it should. You can also use this page for everything else. One important note: These things are made to be 1:1 image pixels to monitor pixels. So do NOT zoom in, check if your browser is set to "100%" and if you're unsure, disable the desktop scaling for the desktop icons etc too.
Only then the sharpness lines will merge correctly at all if you go a few steps back and squinting your eyes.
I say this because it won't work at all on my phone for example. There's no setting in Android to make an image go to 1:1 image/display pixels...

 

[jimortality]

Had quite a bit of success last night with this and my worst looking track was Paul Ricard which now looks a lot better. Still the aliasing problems but nothing to worry about. I turned off the gsync compatible and went with fixed refresh, turned down in game Sharpness to 55, changed from standard to game mode 1 on the monitor which I read somewhere that was the one to use for sim racing. Shadows and post processing from epic to high, tried different resolution scaling and stuck with the default 110. Mirror resolution on mid and the one above on mid everything else on epic. Monitor brightness on 60 and contrast on 55. I'm getting 130 fps on 1 car practice and about 80 with a 32 car grid. It looks good, runs good and of course drives amazing. I also moved my monitor closer to behind my wheel and I'm sitting about 75-80 cm from screen instead of 90cm. That's about it lol Monza looked very good indeed so I think it's sorted.

 

[DrRob]

I always had problems with stuttering during AI races which really annoyed me. I read this thread any many more and tried to use all the good advice out there.
After fiddling around with the graphics settings over the past weeks I now found the ideal solution for my setup...and a rather surprising one for me. One step back: The cpu of my gaming pc is a little underpowered with only 4 cores for ACC to handle more than, say, 15-18 AI cars albeit at 4GHz per core. The graphics settings can be set on high to epic with my GTX1070 without little impact on fps besides shadow, foliage and mirror quality, which I have on mid or low.

I tried vsync, fastsync with and without frame limit, pixel density settings and whatnot. Even with all sync'ed settings I had some stuttering and hiccups from time to time. This never came with a smooth rendering.The setting to achieve a truly smooth experience I discovered just recently. I was always trying to get stable 60fps to match the refresh rate of my display. I also thought this would be enough to hinder my GPU to overrun the CPU with the amount of frames which the GPU could render, but the CPU could not follow.

Now I disabled vsync in the Nvidia tools (and ingame) alltogether and set a frame limit to whatever fps, which seems to be the minimum fps with all gimmicks activated, which I desire plus night racing, rain and min. 15 AI cars. At the moment I have set 50 fps, get a (to my eyes) totally smooth rendering and also the textures load much more quickly on race startup. Really chuffed with the setting so far. I may not be as sensible to some motion related artefacts as others plus my display is rather slow compared to gaming monitors (front projection) though.

Yesterday's' short rain and night races on Paul Ricard against the AI were super enjoyable also because of the now smooth rendering. I thought I could share my findings to maybe give usable feedback to others with similar problems.

Thanks to all contributors here and there for the tips!