After seemingly endless delays, Dying Light 2 is here. Although the game doesn’t fully live up to expectations, it’s still a true next-gen experience. To optimize your gameplay, I’ve rounded up the best settings for Dying Light 2, as well as a look at the performance you can expect with ray tracing and scaling.
The game’s huge open world requires even the latest hardware, so you’ll need a powerful computer to run it Dying Light 2 with ray tracing. The three upscaling options offer plenty of bandwidth for cheaper hardware, thankfully, though their compromises in image quality might be too much to stomach.
The best settings for Dying Light 2
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Dying Light 2 doesn’t have a lot of graphical options, it offers a nice change of pace from the cluttered menus in titles like Call of Duty: Vanguard. Those few settings still offer a lot of bandwidth. After testing each of the settings and tweaking the biggest losers, I was able to increase my frames per second by almost 33%.
Here are the best graphics settings for Dying Light 2:
- Rendering mode: D3D12
- Anti-aliasing: High
- Motion blur: Off
- Particle quality: Low
- Contact shades: High
- Ambient occlusion: Low
- Global illumination: medium
- Reflection quality: Low
- Fog quality: Medium
- Sunshades: PCF
I ignored ray tracing for these settings to get a baseline. I’ll talk more about ray tracing later. I usually try to find a balance between image quality and performance, which generally leads to a combination of medium and high settings. Dying Light 2 it’s more taxing than most games though, so I turned some settings down.
For easy wins, change the draw mode to DirectX 12 and reduce the reflection quality to low. A simple switch to DirectX 12 brought back an extra frame, while the reflection quality brought almost a 13% increase in my average frame rate. Reflections are important, draw mode is the most demanding setting based on my testing.
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Other important settings are ambient occlusion and fog quality, both of which resulted in a 10% increase in average frame rate. I left the fog quality on medium because the low setting really ruins the atmosphere. I was happy to reduce the ambient occlusion to low because the visual change is not that obvious.
I would not recommend turning off ambient occlusion. The game looks much smoother and there isn’t much difference in performance between the low setting and turning ambient occlusion off completely.
Another interesting note is motion blur. I always turn off motion blur and recommend that you do too Dying Light 2. Turning off motion blur not only looks much better, but can also increase the frame rate by around 8%. If you need motion blur, leave the setting low.
Dying Light 2 system requirements
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As Back 4 Blood and numerous other games released during the last year, Dying Light 2 has five different lists of system requirements. You’ll need a GTX 1050 Ti as a minimum, and if you want ray tracing and 4K, you’ll need at least an RTX 3080. However, the system requirements have some interesting drawbacks.
All three ray tracing presets require Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and there’s a reason for that, which I’ll cover in the following sections. Ray tracing is incredibly demanding Dying Light 2. It’s beautiful, but impossible to run in native resolution. You need something like DLSS.
For other system requirements, check most of them. A decent quad-core processor from the last few generations will do the trick, although a hexa-core CPU is ideal. Techland recommends the octa-core Ryzen 7 3700X for the top spec, but a six-core chip like the Ryzen 5 5600X will do just as well.
As for graphics cards, Techland relies heavily on DLSS. Based on my testing, the recommendations are only slightly weaker. You can hit the performance bars set by the system requirements, but Techland seems to have considered an aggressive mode for DLSS rather than a Quality or Balanced mode.
Dying Light 2 performance, tested
Enough with settings and system requirements — let’s talk performance! It’s rare to find games that look next-gen on PC, but Dying Light 2 fits the bill. It can run on today’s hardware, but it’s built for tomorrow’s hardware, especially if you want all the visual benefits.
| RTX 3070 | RTX 2060 Great | RX 580 | |
| 1080p Ultra | 103 fps | 61 fps | 39 fps |
| 1080p recommended | 127 fps | 82 fps | 46 fps |
| 1440p Ultra | 75 fps | 43 fps | 26 fps |
| Recommended 1440p | 93 fps | 59 fps | 32 fps |
| 4K Ultra | 40 fps | 22 fps | ON |
| 4K recommended | 53 fps | 32 fps | ON |
As I usually do with PC performance guides, I took three graphics cards for three common resolutions — an RTX 3070 for 4K, an RTX 2060 Super for 1440p, and an RX 580 for 1080p. I ran all the cards through my test rig with an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and 32GB of memory.
With the RTX 3070, I couldn’t manage native 4K at 60 frames per second (fps), even with the recommended settings. If you want native 4K, the RTX 3080 will be much better. Fortunately, plenty of upscaling options enable 4K on the RTX 3070, and you can get even more performance out of it with my recommended settings.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Dropping down to 1440p was much more forgiving, which isn’t surprising, since 1440p is still the sweet spot for native resolution. At recommended settings, the RTX 2060 Super manages nearly 60 fps at native 1440p, and the RTX 3070 nears 100 fps. But 1440p is the basis for Dying Light 2, with native 4K reserved for only the most powerful hardware.
The RX 580 is showing its age in a big way Dying Light 2. I wasn’t even close to 60fps at 1080p, even with the recommended settings. That’s not a good sign for modest gamers, especially considering the weaker RX 6500 XT. There are upscaling options, but as I’ll talk about later, they sacrifice a lot of image quality at lower resolutions.
Dying Light 2 ray tracing performance
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Ray tracing is always demanding, but it is especially rough Dying Light 2. Without upscaling, ray tracing is almost exclusively reserved for RTX 30 series graphics cards. It’s too taxing for AMD’s RX 6000 cards, as well as older RTX 20 series cards. You can turn ray tracing on, but you’ll have to accept the trade-off.
| RTX 3070 | RX 6700 XT | |
| Air tracking | 40 fps | 21 fps |
| High-quality air tracking | 30 fps | 13 fps |
I originally tested ray tracing in 4K, but after seeing single digit results in native resolution I dropped to 1440p. The above results are at native 1440p resolution for the two ray tracing presets Dying Light 2. There are about five ray tracing options in the game, each of which represents a significant performance degradation.
You don’t want to include ray tracing at native resolution in Dying Light 2. There are a number of sizing options and they should be a must. Even the RTX 3090 can’t manage the rendered fps with ray tracing on at native resolution. In the next section, I’ll touch on different ways to increase size, including ray tracing.
For native resolution, you can see how far behind the RX 6700 XT is compared to the RTX 3070. It’s no secret that AMD’s latest graphics cards don’t handle ray tracing well and Dying Light 2 puts that question in the foreground. The game is beautiful even without ray tracing on, so I’d recommend most people just leave it on.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
In the comparison above, you can see how much depth the ray tracing tracks Dying Light 2world. The grass shows complex shadows, and the distant tunnel is shrouded in shadow. It looks great, but Dying Light 2 is so beautifully detailed that you don’t need ray tracing. The game looks great either way, and the performance trade-off is too steep.
DLSS, FSR and upscaling in Dying Light 2
Dying Light 2 includes three upscaling options: DLSS, AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and an in-game upscaling tool. DLSS is only available on RTX 30 and 20 series graphics cards, but the other two upscaling modes are available for each GPU.
I usually test upscaling to reach the desired scenario — 4K at 60 fps. I couldn’t do it with Dying Light 2. Instead, I tested the medium quality preset for each of the upsizers for the appropriate resolution for each graphics card: RTX 3070 for 4K and so on.
| RTX 3070 (4K) | RTX 2060 Super (1440p) | RX 580 (1080p) | |
| DLSS Balanced | 64 fps | 68 fps | ON |
| FSR balanced | 79 fps | 75 fps | 60 fps |
| Linearly balanced | 82 fps | 79 fps | 61 fps |
| DLSS balanced (with RT) | 34 fps | 32 fps | ON |
| FSR balanced (with RT) | 37 fps | 34 fps | ON |
| Linear balanced (with RT) | 38 fps | 35 fps | ON |
All three offer significant performance improvements. Without ray tracing, they push each GPU over the 60fps line, optimizing far more than the settings alone can. I used the medium quality preset for the scaling modes, but note that these presets use different plotting resolutions. FSR Balanced uses a higher rendering resolution than DLSS Balanced, for example.
You wouldn’t know it from the picture quality. In the image below you can see the three ways of increasing the size stacked. DLSS is on the left, FSR is in the middle, and in-game upscaling is on the right.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Despite working at a lower resolution, DLSS retains much more detail. You can see this clearly in the distant trees, as well as up close in the wagon. FSR and the in-game upscaler offer bigger performance improvements, but don’t look nearly as good as DLSS.
In terms of image quality, they stack up as you’d expect: DLSS looks the best, and in-game upscaler looks the worst. However, the FSR and the built-in upscaler are incredibly close. The upscaler is softer with objects close to the camera, but the difference is not huge. And the built-in upscaler offers the biggest performance improvement across the board.
Most players will only have the option between FSR and the built-in resizer. FSR is the better option in most cases, unless you’re trying to play a game at 4K. In this case, the linear scaling tool is close enough and performs better.
The main problem is when you reduce the resolution. If you upscale to 1080p, for example, the picture will look much worse overall. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of upscaling, and general-purpose solutions like FSR and linear upscaling can’t reconstruct a low-resolution scene like DLSS can.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn