LOD Fix - Optimized Clarity

TL;DR

This mod is focused on fixing the game's LOD draw distance at the cost of lowering FPS, and most likely increased memory usage. An optimized Lower-than-Low Engine.ini is also provided for devices like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally.

The main setting to be concerned with is Background Model Detail. Best provides the most seamless experience, but is the most expensive. The new High is more expensive than Vanilla High, but has comparable pop-in to Vanilla Best. Medium and Low has lower quality vegetation mips while trying to maintain a minimal pop-in experience.

This mod unfortunately cannot help with the LOD pop-in when moving the camera around really fast.

A Mild Change in Graphical Options

Before anything, I first have to commend the developers at Square Enix for their work at optimizing this game for a 1. 0 release. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I have to acknowledge that it is better that most Unreal Engine titles released in recent times. One contributing factor to this is the fact that the game was built using a modified UE4 engine specifically tuned for this game.

The game launches and loads incredibly quickly, albeit a with long initial Shader Compilation step. Because they're using a modified UE4 engine, it allowed them to integrate a unique rendering system, referred to as MassiveEnvironment within the internal configuration (.ini) files. This system allows the game to render incredibly lush and dense Vegetation, along with having very detailed normal maps for the Terrain and Props.

Unfortunately, because of this modification, a lot of the typical UE cvars that control LOD simply do not work. These three settings: Background Model Detail, Character Model Detail, and Texture Resolution, are the only ones controlled through UE's Scalability. The rest of the settings modify cvars at runtime through Code. Hopefully a later patch would rebind a lot of these settings back to the Scalability groups.

To see more explanation for how each cvar works, please see the GitHub page.

All screenshots we're captured at 1440p Native HDR (DRS off), Antialiasing set to TAA, all settings set to Low and only modifying one setting at a time.

Background Model Detail

This setting controls the LOD of everything except for NPC's. Vanilla's highest setting still exhibits some pop-in, worsening as this setting goes lower. This mod trades far draw-distances to minimize near-field pop-in (close to the player's feet).

Chapter 4 in Junon revealed some issues with regards to overfilling the allocated MemoryPoolSize. I've adjusted this value on the Low setting from 900 to 13