Some cool graphics ini tweaks I stumbled upon (PC)

So, the other day I was looking at the steam community page for CE.

Was looking for something totally different, but a guide shows up by Icebreaker about tweaking certain UE variables through the engine.ini to make your game look better.


Boring Intro

Now, I usually don’t bother with this type of stuff as in general most games have their settings profile and hey, if the developers are happy with it, who am I to disagree, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right? (that’s not to say I don’t mod Skyrim to oblivion with graphical stuff like everyone else, but that’s a different story).


I had time, so I figured I’d give it a shot… I didn’t spend nearly as much time with it as I should have.
I took Icebreaker’s list…
Copy pasted it into my ini file, loaded up the game and started getting a bit paranoid over it, cuz while it seemed like my pc is handling it just fine, I did see a big jump in GPU usage compared to before and I wasn’t sure which part was the new and which was the old and what am I really looking at…

So I tried to fine-tune it a bit and at the same time look up other popular UE4 ini tweaks people have been using to both try to make their game look a bit better but also to preserve performance as much as possible… and if I was doing it, I was really trying to go after that elusive UE fps near player buildings a bit too, with little success ofc - the game does run a miniscule tiny bit better on my system than it used to, but at the same time in my opinion also looks way better… so I still call it a success.


(Hold on, lemme insert a picture here to grab your attention cuz this is just boring text)

On the left side you can see how the game looked on the default Ultra settings, on the right side how it looks now. While the scene is different, the location is roughly the same you can’t really see the tiny differences, however you can see the huge ones… like the lack of blur and the grass looking like it’s from another planet pretty much.


Now, I didn’t take proper before-after screenshots as I was too distracted by tweaking values then restarting the game, then tweaking them again etc etc… so it’s obviously not the same scene as I simply looked through my steam screenshots to try and find pictures of the same area.


More boring text about the method in the madness..

Some of the variables in Icebreakers initial template were forced to quite extremes so a couple of them I went ahead and looked up in the UE documentation and set back to what their Epic level preset would be.
Like the shadow max resolution seemed very extreme to me and that came at a hefty performance hit as well. (that one I just deleted to use the one configured for conan, preset Epic would be 1024 so 4 times as less as in Icebreaker’s version)
I also omitted the entire first section regarding viewdistance and foliage as I did not have an issue with them even prior. And I believe it was AmbientOcclusionRadiusScale if I remember right that is set to pretty much an out of bounds extreme making the game look outright sketch / cartoon -like especially building interiors, so I set that back to 1. Kept pretty much the whole Sky part thou :slight_smile:

Basically my process was… After initially testing it as it is and not liking it, I took his values, broke it into like 4-5 sections, foliage, shadows, sky, lighting, postprocessing related etc etc. I left the ones I wanted to bother with, discarded the ones I didn’t necessarily want, then added the sections into my ini file testing after each section to see what it changed and correcting the things I didn’t like about it.
Then added a handful of texture streaming nonsense off of various websites to season it with (I’m pretty sure those don’t do much as I imagine they’re similar to the default settings and some might not be correct usage etc… I really didn’t dive into that part… it works, didn’t cause any issues and I might have gained 5-10 fps near buildings so… hmm grain of salt I guess).


This post is getting long so I’ll wrap it up… long story short, this is how my Engine.ini file looks in my ..\ConanSandbox\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\


Engine.ini (EXPAND THIS FOR THE SETTINGS)
[SystemSettings]
r.bForceCPUAccessToGPUSkinVerts=1
r.MaxAnisotropy=16
r.Fog=1
r.FogDensity=0.03
r.FogStartDistance=4
r.TrueSkyQuality=1
r.SkyLightingQuality=1
r.VolumetricCloud=1
r.VolumetricCloud.SkyAO=1
r.VolumetricCloud.SkyAO.Filtering=1
r.VolumetricRenderTarget.Mode=1
r.SkylightIntensityMultiplier=0.4
r.SkyAtmosphere=1
r.SupportSkyAtmosphere=1
r.SkyAtmosphere.LUT32=1
r.SkyAtmosphere.FastSkyLUT=0
r.SkyAtmosphere.AerialPerspectiveLUT.FastApplyOnOpaque=0
r.SkyAtmosphere.TransmittanceLUT.UseSmallFormat=0
r.SkyAtmosphere.AerialPerspectiveLUT.Depth=96
r.SkyAtmosphere.AerialPerspectiveLUT.DepthResolution=16.0
r.SkyAtmosphere.SampleCountMin=64.0
r.SkyAtmosphere.SampleCountMax=128.0
r.SkyAtmosphere.DistanceToSampleCountMax=128
r.LightFunctionQuality=1
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=2
r.AmbientOcclusionMaxQuality=100
r.AmbientOcclusionRadiusScale=1
r.RefractionQuality=2
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.PostProcessAAQuality=6
r.ScreenPercentage=100
r.TemporalAASamples=16
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.30
r.TemporalAAFilterSize=1.0
r.TemporalAACatmullRom=1
r.TemporalAAPauseCorrect=1
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.5
r.Color.Mid=0.43
r.Tonemapper.Quality=3
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=0.45
r.TonemapperGamma=3.2
r.SceneColorFringe.Max=0
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=1
r.LensFlareQuality=2
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=1
r.SSR.Quality=3
r.SSR.MaxRoughness=1
r.SSS.Scale=1
r.SSS.SampleSet=2
r.SSGI.Quality=3
r.ShadowQuality=3
r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=1.0
r.DistanceFieldShadowing=1
r.Shadow.PerObject=1
r.AllowLandscapeShadows=1
r.Shadow.AllowForegroundShadows=1
r.Shadow.PreShadowResolutionFactor=1.0
r.Shadow.FadeResolution=0
r.Shadow.MaxPointCasters=1
r.Shadow.CSMDepthBias=20

[/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]
r.Streaming.Boost=0
r.Streaming.PoolSize=0
r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM=1
r.Streaming.DefragDynamicBounds=1
r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=2
r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1
niagara.CreateShadersOnLoad=1
r.CreateShadersOnLoad=1
D3D12.PSO.DiskCache=1
D3D12.PSO.DriverOptimizedDiskCache=1
r.HZBOcclusion=0
r.AllowOcclusionQueries=1
r.Shaders.Optimize=1

[TextureStreaming]
r.Streaming.Boost=1
r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1
r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=2
r.bForceCPUAccessToGPUSkinVerts=True
r.Streaming.FramesForFullUpdate=60
r.Streaming.DropMips=0
r.Streaming.MipBias=0
r.Streaming.UseAllMips=1
r.Streaming.UseMaterialData=1
r.Streaming.UseNewMetrics=1
r.Streaming.UsePerTextureBias=1
r.Shaders.Optimize=1
r.Shaders.FastMath=1
r.UseShaderCaching=1
r.UseShaderPredraw=1
r.UseAsyncShaderPrecompilation=1
r.TargetPrecompileFrameTime=13
r.PredrawBatchTime=13
r.AccelPredrawBatchTime=0
r.AccelTargetPrecompileFrameTime=0
r.Streaming.DefragDynamicBounds=1
s.AsyncLoadingThreadEnabled=True
r.Streaming.PoolSize=0

[ConsoleVariables]
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesDuringGamethreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesDuringGamethreadUpdates=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesEditor=1
AllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdatesEditor=1
s.AsyncLoadingThreadEnabled=True


Now the list is not “perfect” in fact I’m sure some of that will cause some issue for one person or another. Keep in mind these were intended for a similar computer spec described in Icebreaker’s thread. Other than this my game was set to Ultra 1080p before these tweaks.


Here are some more pictures:


Bottom line, the credit of the idea goes to Icebreaker on this one, I just stumbled upon his guide and went down a bit of a rabbithole to tweak it :smiley: (moved the link here, since people were blindly clicking it without reading the post about how that contains some very unrecommended values)

In any case, I liked the result so that’s why I’m sharing it here, maybe someone else will like it too.

Cheers!

5 Likes

I tweaked my Engine.ini quite some time ago, in fact, it has been so long that I had to double check what I had changed. Some of what you listed were already tweaked in my settings, but here are a few more you might enjoy.

Engine.ini

[SystemSettings]
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.2
r.TemporalAASamples=32
r.TemporalAASharpness=1.0
r.MaxAnisotropy=16
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1
r.UseMobileBloom=0
r.BloomQuality=0
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=1
r.Shadows.MaxResolution=4096
r.ViewDistanceScale=2.3

I also have the shadow quality tweaked in my Scalability.ini, which is a little bit different in each graphics pre-set. For Ultra, I have it set as follows, keep in mind, I have an old system and performance is very important, so I can’t afford all the bells and whistles UE has to offer. :wink:

Scalability.ini

[ShadowQuality@3]
r.Shadow.CachedShadowsCastFromMovablePrimitives=1
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=2.3
r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=2.0

2 Likes

Nice!

I will compare it to my edits, because I edited the lightmass too for a bit better lighting.
Thing is tho, my character ghosts when I’m moving, and I edited so many things so many months/years ago, I don’t recall which one is a culprit.

OR could be game issue, because I restored the files to default, and still (monitor, graphics card were upgraded since the problem occured, but this problem is still there) no luck.

Did you guys experience this too? Because other than set the files to default and changing hardware I have no clue what the problem could be :rofl: .
I tought it is because of the files, but nope.

This was the value that’s the same as yours in Icebreaker’s preset and what I noticed is that having this line gives you like a static 10-20% GPU hit in the zone where I was (down by the river), but visually I didn’t notice any difference in 1080p resolution so I just removed that line and it reduced GPU usage by a lot. In the Unreal Engine docs their “Epic” level scalability preset has this at a mere 1024 so it seemed excessive, maybe it helps a bit on higher resolutions, idk.

Most of the others are contained in what I listed above as well, like the enabling of TAA and 16x AF, which are the major hitters :slight_smile:

Also the ini I ended up pasting above still has some redundancies in the texture streaming area since parts of it are taken from different websites so I noticed that the same variables were listed under different sections with different or similar values :smiley: I caught like 2-3 but it seems like there’s still duplicates… Oh well, I’m guessing the one further down in the list is the one in effect.

Is there a way to fade light reflections on building pieces (or in general)? I hate using stormglass pieces, because as soon as I put a torch somewhere near they start to look like they’ve been covered in wax or drenched in water - although same pieces look ok in outside daylight.

:thinking: Try one or both of these @tin_egg:

r.UseMobileBloom=0
r.BloomQuality=0

Not sure if it will do the trick though as I have not experienced what you described. Best of luck. :sunglasses:

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

I reopened this in case anyone else has suggestions or questions.

1 Like

Do you know any way to improve fortnite(mobile) graphics in .ini files?

Hello, in the settings of Icebreaker, there’s also these values:

r.HLOD=1
r.HLOD.DistanceScale=1.5
r.HLOD.MaximumLevel=1

After have doing a small search on the UE4 documentation, these are features supported and implemented, but, if i put these in the Engine.ini, game chrashes at boot, with this message:

Fatal error: [File:C:\B\tech_exiles\code\Engine\Source\Runtime\Core\Private\HAL\ConsoleManager.cpp] [Line: 1315]
Console object named ‘r.HLOD’ can’t be replaced with the new one of different type!

!0x0000000000000000

Any idea about? are the HLOD ( Hierarchical Level of Detail, that’s is what it is) removed/changed by Funcom?

1 Like

I would like to remove the lens effects for siptah, but can’t figure it out.
Any suggestions anybody?

Same here…

Edit:
I disabled/removed these 3 entries. Works great and looks fantastic so far.
(NVidia Card)

Accordingly to the UE4 documentation, SHOULD be:

r.DefaultFeature.LensFlare=0
r.LensFlareQuality=0

The first line disable, the second line if set to 0 remove the feature (or give the quality at values from 1 to 3), using both should be safe.

Disable this only for Siptah i think it’s barely impossible, due the fact both the maps, Exile and Siptah, share the same Engine.ini, BUT, you can make a copy of the config folder (or just of the engine folder) with the modified settings without lens flare, and then rename and use these when you load on Siptah.

If there’s a better solution, i don’t know yet.

You can also comment these two lines using the semicolon:

Example

; r.DefaultFeature.LensFlare=0

But, at the next load, comments beings removed on the Engine.ini.

Last thing, related to the settings: If you like more saturated colours (and unfortunately nights and caves pitch black), you can lower the gamma, from the default of 2.0 to 0.5 less. (1.5 and more, less than 2.

Hope this can be useful.

1 Like

Thanks. That should do it! :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

Lemme know :slight_smile:

r.DefaultFeature.LensFlare=0 seems to do nothing…

r.LensFlareQuality=0 works!

1 Like

Insane, i will said :slight_smile: but i suppose this is how UE4 works, two is better than one.

Jokes apart, I’m glad at least one works :slight_smile:

1 Like