Improved visuals and performance

Improved visuals and performance

Thanks to enabler dev-console on PCGamingWiki I was able to test a bunch of different settings quar: UE4 actually has a lot of different graphics settings under the hood, unfortunately, the menu of CV settings affects only a tiny part of them.

I've looked at and tried tinkering with dozens of different variables, and this configuration file contains some of the variables that I think have had the most positive impact on the game.

Note: use this mod only if you can already run the game on the highest settings! (this is fine if you occasionally stutter at the highest settings - hopefully this configuration will help solve this problem)

Features

• Increased drawing/detail distances of objects, characters, terrain and grass... Much more granular objects and much less visible pop-ups!
• Increased shadow map resolution and distance.
• Sets various parameters (e.g., light quality, autofocus...) to the highest quality that UE4 delivers - a better quality than the game settings menu can give you!
• Improved TAA filtering.
• Changed the game to use an improved tonal mupper film UE4 (really not sure why they didn't use it seems much better IMO!)
• Sharpening game textures with no third-party tools makes the background details much less blurry.
• Improved bulk fog and particle effects - the number of particles is doubled compared to the standard game, making these effects look much better with a slight reduction in performance.
• It can help to significantly improve performance and significantly reduce hangs during the game by disabling the game's texture streaming and forcing the game to load all textures the first time it loads onto the card.

To install, simply extract Engine.ini to the Saved Game Configurations folder (%LocalAppData%\CodeVein\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\), overwriting all existing game configurations.

Once checked out, you can open Engine.ini in a text editor and customize it to your liking, delete the lines of any changes you want to delete, etc.

To delete, open Engine.ini in a text editor and delete the [SystemSettings] section and everything under it.

Notes

The new "film" tonmapper makes most of the scenes a little darker

If you want, you can use this mod without any color changes by deleting the line "r.TonemapperFilm=1" at the top of Engine.ini, for example if you are using a ReShade preset that already changes colors.

The new performance fix is significant

increases download time If your game is not installed on a fast disk, you can disable this patch - just delete the line "r.TextureStreaming=0" and all lines below it.

Tremendous performance degradation in rendering

certain particles/bulk effects (ice / debris / etc.)Try to lower the quara value "r.EmitterSpawnRateScale" - this config doubles it to 2, but the default game is 1 (you can even try to lower it to 0.5 if these effects really hit your FPS), thank you so much diasyxa for diagnosing this problem!

Use with other games

UE4 The many changes used in this fashion should apply to other UE4 games - after all, the variables changed here are the default UE4 variables that should be included in most games - of course, you should probably experiment first (perhaps use UE4 dev-console enabler to test things in real time)

If you want to use this config with any other game, or release a mod for another game based on this config, please feel free to!

Lending is not compulsory, after all, it is just a small change, but I would appreciate it nonetheless.

I would also like to hear about what people do out of it!

Best Practices for People Who Create Custom Configurations

faced with several different pitfalls in making this config, i suppose i should probably report them to people so that anyone who makes their own configuration does not get into it by mistake:

- Don't mess with r.Shadow.DistanceScale - Almost every UE4 game I've tried it with seems to be broken: Changing it to anything other than 1 just seems toIf you need to increase the distance to the shadow, you should change the variable r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold (lower value = further distance to the shadow)

- PCSS shading (r.Shadow.FilterMethod 1) - PCSS was added to UE4 as an experiment many years ago, but it looks like they never worked on it again after that: it is too noisy and blurry, and its use is basically the same as switching off shadows, my advice is not to approach it.

- Do not touch the TAA variables - the TAA used in the game seems pretty good in itself, increasing the number of samples or changing the frame weight will simply lead to more AA jitter or even worse TAA in general (it seems that more samples do not always mean better quality with TAA...). Changing the filter core (as this configuration does) is probably the only good change that can be made.

- Check the limits of the variables before increasing them - Many variables have limitations, if you go beyond them, they will usually either return to the maximum value they support, or completely disable what you change, or, in the worst case, it may even fail because the game does not actually check the cvars restrictions (for example, the variable r.VolumetricFog.HistoryMissSupersampleCount, which caused failures with older versions of this mod...)

You can test a variable using something like this cvar: https://digilander.libero.it/ZioYuri78/ list and see what's written about it.

- Make sure that the variable does exist - There are many different lists of quars UE4, but the names and values of quars can vary greatly in different versions of UE4 - a quar working in one game may not work in another. If the quar does not exist, you will just spend space in the configuration file and can assume that something has changed in the game, although in fact it is not.

You can check whether the game actually uses cvar, either by searching the .exe file (for example, using a hexadecimal editor or maybe notepad++), or you can install the enabler dev-console referenced below, and try typing in the name of the change, if the cvar exists, it should tell you its value in the console window.

(older version) Stutter-reducing fix causes slowdown/freeze immediately after loading to card

Just wait a second or two and it should boot normally - after this extra boot step, hopefully the stutter during the game should decrease!

If you wish, you can remove this patch by removing the strings "r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1" and "r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=2" from Engine.ini.

(old version) Slow/stutter on change of direction

lookThis can happen because too many textures are loaded at the same time, you can fix this by deleting the string "r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1", if it still happens after that, try deleting the string "r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=2", which hopefully will solve this problem (thanks diasyxa for researching this!)