Graphics and performance guide for SWO

You all know Brandon, he needs no introduction by now. He's been helping with so many things on the Patreon, and with such indefatigable presence and kindness, I have no idea what I'd do without him. He truly is the Post Maester!

His latest contribution is a detailed analysis of everything there is to know in order to make Star Wars Outlaws run at its best in VR. With no further ado, I'll just step aside and let him take center stage []-D

So, you just got a shiny new Luke Ross mod and you want to grab all the extra performance you can. Well, for better or worse there are not a lot of options in terms of game settings that will get you a ton more performance unless you are coming down from the Ultra preset. This game uses software based RT and there is no rasterized fallback. Furthermore, if you are pushing performance, just the simple act of turning around and looking the other way can drastically change your fps.

The first thing I hope for when trying to optimize performance for a game is a good benchmarking video. There are people that do this as a hobby and some of them are very good at it. So, instead of trying to spend lots of time changing settings to and fro every time you reach a new planet or see a drop in fps, watch this video by one of my favorite benchmarkers. He is excellent at picking apart the visual vs performance impact of each and every setting in the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Y7nOtXM38

But wait... at some point, at least one of you brave explorers of a galaxy far away is going to venture off in search of other mods for the game. In doing so, you will most likely run across one that disables ray tracing or parts of it.

Or, you may see one that promises the possibility of optimized graphics config settings!! Let me save you the time and effort of going down that black hole of continuously restarting the game and changing the config file repeatedly until your excitement to actually play the game degrades a considerable amount. There are only a few things worth changing in the "graphics settings.cfg" file and changing other things can stop the game from loading in or possibly break it in other ways.

First off, you can disable ray tracing by changing rtenabled=true to false, but this will break the games lighting because it is RT based and there is no rasterized fallback. You will gain some decent performance but the game will just look flat and quite bad. I don't recommend doing this at all. The only RT setting I would consider changing is rtspec=On to Off but there is a drawback to doing this. This setting is ray traced specular reflections. They can appear very swimmy or shimmery in VR and it bothers me quite a bit personally.

It also leaves you with just the screen space reflections which I think look quite good in this game once you can really see them under the RT ones. The drawback is that you are going to notice the lighting and RT shaders load in more slowly, especially in the big main city. Turning rtsunshadows off, as one mod suggests, makes this even more noticeable in my opinion, so I would just leave it on. I wouldn't mess with anything else in the ray tracing section as disabling diffuse options will stop the game from loading in.

You can also control the in-game sharpening from this file. Sharpen2 defaults to .69 and you are able to lower or increase it up to 1.0, but keep in mind that the mod has a built in sharpener that defaults all the way up. It is the deblur slider in the main overlay tab. Too much sharpening will bring out the shimmering around objects and just look bad in general.

Furthermore, you can adjust the TAA up or down. I haven't tried going up and I also have only done this while using upscaling. With upscaling, it will default to taa = "Supersampling Medium". You can change this to "Supersampling Low" for a less blurry image according to my eyes. You can probably raise it to High if you wanted as well but I haven't tried it as this game doesn't really have much for aliasing issues in my experience. Changing the TAA will most likely cause the game to load slowly the first time you play it after doing so. The next time you boot it up after that it should load in normally.

You are able to use SSAO but it may also cause the game to load up slowly the first time. If you go down to ["ssao quality 3"] you can change this from Off to Low through High, possibly Ultra but I didn't notice any difference from High. It is not going to make a world of impact but you can use it in place of rtsunshadows for shading.

There are a few other things it is possible to change without breaking the game but I didn't really notice any performance or real visual impact for these. Glare, vignette, bloom. 

Lastly, if you really need a bit of extra performance you can turn these to low but I only get a few fps extra from doing so and it is most likely not worth the possible loss in visuals. I haven't actually taken the time to experiment with the visual quality of changing them though:

Vegetation quality, vista quality and water quality.

After changing many of the options in this file these are the only ones that I would recommend touching. Again, messing with this file is at your own risk!! It can break things in the game and stop it from loading!

It is a good idea to have a backup copy of the file so you can replace it if you mess things up. You can also just delete the file and run the game and it will create a new default version of the file. Mostly I hope this helps others to not get seduced by the promise of even more VR performance. In the words of master Yoda... "The fear of performance loss is a path to the dark side"

OK, I might have added a word there :)