Intro In recent years, it's uncommon to see a studio using an in-house engine. Most developers opt for Unreal Engine 5 as it saves time and money by providing a fully developed engine with all the necessary tools. However, there have been notable exceptions recently, like the game we're looking at today: Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, developed by Saber Interactive using their in-house Swarm Engine. And personally, I'm a big fan of in-house technologies, especially when the developers push the boundaries to create something ambitious as we see here with this game. While there's no Ray Tracing or any other cutting-edge techniques, The team has effectively utilized their engine, delivering large environments filled with tons of intricate detail and swarms of enemies. the sheer density of objects,effects, particles and action at any given moment is simply outstanding and something we don't often see in modern video games However, this comes at a significant cost, making the game highly CPU-intensive And to illustrate this, I’ve selected a section that puts considerable stress on the CPU. here we can see that the 5700x3D can easily drop to the 70s, which is insane and something that will hinder the performance scalability of this game. On the bright side, the graphics menu is impressively well-designed. featuring preview images and clear descriptions that provide insight into how each setting affects the visuals. however, I'm disappointed by the limited number of graphics settings here which is another factor that may limit how much performance we can gain from these settings. So in this video we will explore whether this is the case by discussing the visual and performance impact of each setting to find the best balance for a playable experience without significantly compromising the visual fidelity. So without further ado, let's get going. Image Quality(TAA,FSR2 and DLSS) When it comes to image reconstruction techniques, Space Marine 2 takes a somewhat unusual approach. The game currently offers FSR1, FSR2, and DLSS2, instead of their latest versions. As a result,Frame Generation is not supported for either technique. but Saber Interactive has confirmed that DLSS3 and FSR3 support will be added post-launch Now at native 1440p we can see here that TAA exhibits a lot of shimmering compared to FSR2 and DLAA. but in this game TAA looks sharper especially when compared to DLAA which looks so soft and blurry and the issues of DLAA don't stop here because when it comes to the performance at native 1440p for some unknown reason, FSR2 is a lot faster compared to DLAA and TAA here we can see that FSR2 runs around 43% better than TAA and 49% faster than DLAA. and what's even more interesting, is that when using upscaling both DLSS and FSR2 performs identical with the softness problem of DLSS becoming more pronounced here thanks to the upscaling. FSR1 is used in conjunction with TAA when using upscaling, and it doesn't look great at all, giving the game an oil painting look with an oversharpened appearance. And as expected, FSR1 is faster, being a simple spatial upscaler that is less complex compared to DLSS and FSR2. Overall, this has to be the worst implementation of DLSS I’ve seen recently. and I hope Saber Interactive improves the DLSS implementation or adds a sharpening slider to the game. Frame Generation also needs to be implemented as soon as possible, as this game is the perfect use case for it, given how CPU-intensive it is. Dynamic Resolution Scaling The game includes a Dynamic Resolution Scaling option, which can be used with any upscaler and allows you to choose a target frame rate. I was pleasantly surprised by how well this feature works, as DRS often doesn’t function properly in most PC games. Here, I’m using FSR2 and targeting 60 fps, and even during intense combat with all the effects, enemies, and particles, DRS remained responsive and maintained the target frame rate most of the time. One thing worth noting is that if you have a monitor with a refresh rate above your target frame rate say a 120Hz monitor while targeting 60 fps, you need to limit the frame rate to 60 fps Without a limiter, DRS will target the maximum refresh rate and lower the resolution in an attempt to hit 120 fps instead of 60. which will significantly affect image quality. and I highly recommend using Dynamic Resolution Scaling in this game, as it helps maintain stable performance, especially during intense combat scenarios. Texture Filtering Let's move on to the graphics settings starting with Texture Filtering and here we can see that each option significantly affects the quality of textures viewed from an oblique angle. and usually in most games this setting doesn't have a big impact on performance. and thankfully Space Marine 2 is no exception, as there's only around a 3 to 4% performance hit when going from Low to Ultra. Therefore, I recommend keeping this setting at Ultra. Texture Resolution Moving on to Texture Resolution and here the most significant visual impact occurs when transitioning from Low or Medium to High as High offers notably higher resolution textures. going beyond that to Ultra doesn't make much of a noticeable difference. Additionally this setting also have an impact on the quality of some visual effects like fire as we can see here. where Low and Medium looks significantly low res compared to High and Ultra. and when selecting Ultra, I always receive a message indicating that the GPU is out of memory. however, I've played with Ultra at native 1440p on the RTX 3060 Ti for a while without encountering any problems but despite this I recommend High for 8GB GPUs, just to be on the safe side. Shadows Next we have Shadows. And it's hard to notice the visual differences between the options during normal gameplay you have to stop and look closely to notice them, and here High looks sharper and has slightly more details. Performance wise in this scene Low and Med perform similarly and going to High can have around 8% performance hit or in some other instances like here about 10% cost. Therefore I recommend keeping the Shadows at Medium. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion Let's move to Screen Space Ambient Occlusion or SSAO. Ambient Occlusion is crucial to the overall lighting in any game. Without Ambient Occlusion, the game looks flat, and most objects lack depth. and here going from Default to High slightly improves the accuracy of SSAO. But that's not all, if we compare Default SSAO between TAA,FSR2 and DLAA at native 1440p we can see here that when using Default, SSAO looks flickery with TAA and FSR2 unlike DLAA and if we switch to High SSAO, all 3 options look similar and stable. Performance wise there is around 4% cost when going from Off to High. So if you're using FSR2 or TAA set SSAO to High and if you're using DLSS leave SSAO at Default. Screen Space Reflections Moving on to Screen Space Reflection when it comes to the difference between the options we can see here slightly higher resolution and more accuracy when going from Default to High. It is also worth noting that blood decals which are emitted when you damage enemies or take damage, are reflective and use SSR. meaning during combat, SSR will be everywhere which could impact the performance. speaking of performance, here going from Off to Default costs around 5% and to High around 14% So for this one I recommend default but keep in mind that disabling SSR might help with the performance in intense combat scenarios. Volumetrics Next we have Volumetrics and this has by far the most subtle visual impact, even with moving Volumetrics like here it's hard to distinguish between Low, Medium and High but despite the minimal visual difference, the performance impact of this setting is significant. here there is around 8% costs when going from Low to Med and High but here with more Volumetric lighting on screen there is around 28% cost when going from Low to Med and High So I highly recommend keeping Volumetrics at Low. The effects Setting according to the graphics menu description Effects should impact water simulation, decals on characters and particles quality. So let's go through all these visual effects one by one. First, we can see that the water simulation quality is nearly identical across all options, despite Low performing around 4% to 5% better than Medium and High. Moving on to Particles, the blood splatter looks identical across all options, with slightly more particles when using High. Performance wise, there's around 4% hit when going from Low to Medium and 7% hit when going to High. Lastly, looking at the blood decals on the character during combat, Low disables this effect entirely, while Medium and High enable it, so to conclude, if you care about blood decals on characters, keep this setting at Medium. Otherwise, using Low should give you around 4% boost with no significant visual difference. Details Moving on to Details and here going from Low to Med has a significant visual impact on both the geometry quality of distant objects and the quality of parallax mapping on the ground, going to High slightly improves the parallax mapping with no change to the LOD of objects. and going beyond to Ultra offers no additional visual benefits. Performance wise going from Low to Medium and High costs around 4% and going to Ultra around 5% So here I recommend Medium or High. Cloth Simulation And Lastly we have Cloth Simulation And this is another setting where it's hard to notice the visual impact but here in this scene, when the character is moving forward I observed that with Medium or High this piece of cloth rises slightly higher compared to Low and at this CPU limited scene I measured around 4 to 5% hit when going from Low to High So giving that the visual difference is negligible during normal gameplay and this is the only setting that can help the CPU performance, I recommend keeping it at Low. Optimized Settings And with all that being said, these are my recommended settings for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Optimized vs Ultra Preset Let's now compare the performance of Optimized settings and Ultra Preset at 1440p using FSR2 Native here at the beginning of this comparison, the difference on average between Optimized and Ultra is around 30 to 32% but during combat the performance difference is smaller because during these moments the game leans more toward the CPU. also we can notice that even with Optimized Settings the performance can go below 60 fps which why using Dynamic Resolution Scaling is really important to keep the performance stable. Outro And with that we arrive at the end. Thank you so much for watching and for your time. if you enjoyed the video leave a like, and if not leave a dislike. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell for future videos. And hopefully, I'll see you all in the next one.