When implemented well, motion blur can look great. Forza Horizon 1 and 2 both run at a perfect 30FPS, no drops whatsoever, and they both look super smooth thanks partially to the rock-solid framerate and partially to the motion blur. You'd only pick up on the fact that it's blurred if you're really looking for it, though. Whoever implemented the motion blur in Forza Horizon must have had a keen eye for how it should and should not look.

But almost nothing implements it that well. Most of the time, motion blur looks like it's just haphazardly thrown on there, so it's got a pretty bad reputation.

I don't own the game yet but it seems like we're entering a new level of Crysis. People want games that are highly demanding of their systems but when that happens, people moan. There's a bunch of new tech in here that not even the 1080 can handle at maximum settings.

If you want decent performance (let's say 60fps@1080p), then you're going to have to compromise and that means turning off MSAA with a mix between high and very high. If you're running older hardware, maybe drop it to a mix between medium and high.

Despite the impressive tech, the poor lip sync and stiff animations are real downers in an otherwise impressive technical package.

@mrcraggle: It's comparable to Crysis in some ways with the inclusion of new tech. There have been a couple of games over the past few years that include one or two advanced effects which are very demanding but not in line (performance wise) with how the rest of the game looks and runs. I feel like that is the case here. It's a decent looking game but the impressive tech bogs down what would otherwise be a good looking, well running game. The 'problem' for a lot of us with high end PCs is that the base isn't running that well on some setups (yes, some, because there are people who run it fine). I still feel OK saying this as Eidos have mentioned working on performance optimisation for this situation but not for the effects like POM and contact hardened shadows because they didn't expect them to run well on current hardware and there is likely little they can do about that now.

Even with MSAA off and on medium I can't hit 60 and it sounds like they're going to be addressing that specifically, but I think you're right in that the inclusion of new tech is confusing some about their low framerate but some of us have it even with all that stuff turned off.

@alistercat: I have a GTX 770, I'd be lucky to run this game on low/medium based on what I've read. Sad times. I wanted to upgrade to the 1070 but I still think I'll continue to wait. The game probably has a lot of new tech that doesn't actually provide much of a graphical difference that we'll notice yet but it just kills performance. Sometimes there's very little noticeable difference between high and ultra but something is turned on that chops your frame rate in half so I have to wonder if that's happening here. Quantum Break is also another game that comes to mind that had performance issues on PC. It was a nice enough looking game but it also has crazy new tech that you probably won't even notice but specifically its lighting system. It's highly demanding to say the least.

I'm running on a GTX 750 Ti and regardless of any settings I use, I will always get a bit of frame hitching. Performance varies drastically depending on certain areas I'm in. The smoothest consistent performance I've managed to push up to (albeit still with occasional frame hitches) is to run the game at 720p with mostly medium settings and some stuff turned off.

My biggest issue I have with the game are the absurd load times. Whenever I start the game up (or if it crashes and I restart) I've timed it taking anywhere between 1m30s to 2m16s to load a save.

@mrcraggle: Well I have a 1070 and like I said, even with the fancy stuff off it still isn't great. Despite me repeating that it isn't a bad or broken port people have accused me of just being dumb. Quantum Break, No Man's Sky and Arkham Knight were way worse (though No Man's Sky was easily fixed for me). Arkham Knight was broken for me on my 970 and I'm too scared to try Quantum break even on a 1070. Waiting is probably a good idea, though these are great cards.

@mrcraggle: You can run it on Medium/High if you turn off MSAA. I got a GTX770 and i get around 40 fps most of the time witch is totally fine for me.

Now my game crashes when I load my save. Thankfully I only made it past the tutorial level and haven't left my apartment.

@soulcake: I'll be checking it out later down the road. I simply don't have the time nor money for games right now.

@mrcraggle:Well to be fair, Crysis 3 still looks better than this. I feel that way about the new tomb raider, it's a beast and there are a few things i have to turn down on my 1080 and can't play over 1440p at all and maintain 60. But it looks a hell of a lot better than Mankind Divided, i think that is the issue most people are having is that it doesn't look like it should be that taxing even if its using cutting edge rendering tech or whatever.

Again, i don't think the port is bad at all I just don't think this game should be compared to crysis(series) just because it can't run maxed on high end machines, that's kinda where that comparison dies IMO.

@alistercat: yeah this is no where near Arkham Knight, even with the game being capped at 30fps it couldn't maintain a smooth framerate, the ram issues would cause the game to crash if you played to long, and they changed the minimum requirements like hours before it released. This game just has a bunch of high demand effects.

Anyone getting crashes while in the shooting range? It's just happened to me twice thrice...

@beachthunder: me too, tried it and straight ctd

I just got the game on PC. Any noticeable difference between playing this game between keyboard and mouse vs. controller?

Just jumped into the game. I don't have anything on higher than high with MSAA turned off and performance is okay with my 1070 (around 60 with not much in the way of frame drops that I notice). I think it's better than the console version at least, which has trouble running at 30 FPS. Have the newest drivers installed and all that. I could tweak around and see if I can make it look better and see the performance cost, but I'm glad I got it on PC due to the aforementioned console version being the way it is. My biggest problem has to do with the actual game itself, not performance, but I'm gonna see how it pans out.

If you have a HDD I would try a defrag I use a defrag program and notice that the game was fragmented alot I also turn the mouse sensitivity to 0 and roll back nvidia drivers to 368.69.All these things help my stuttering alot but combat still stutters at times I'm on Win7-64 with a 970GTX 16GB.

i5 6600k @ 4.6GHz

16 GB DDR4 3200

GTX 1080 with a decent overclock

I've been playing on ultra with 2x MSAA. The only thing I turned off was the horrific sharpening filter. I felt like I was getting a fairly solid 60 fps with minor stutters every so often. Decided to run the benchmark and got an average of 55 fps. I ran it before without the MSAA and while I don't remember the exact numbers they were a fair bit better. 4x and 8x MSAA completely ruin the framerate.

@ds9143: Okay, it seems like the issue is when you try to access the weapon wheel. I think I'm just going to skip that part anyway, it's tedious and I'm playing pacifist...

PC Patch notes from earlier:

Adjustments to the Mouse Sensitivity settings, which mean that you can now set sensitivity for the X and Y axis separately.

Increased range of Mouse Sensitivity settings.

Fixed an issue that could cause missing geometry in the Dubai level.

Fixed an issue with player movement and running on stairs and sloped surfaces.

Fixed various issues with 21:9 setups.

Fixed an issue where the “Unmark All” prompt would stay on screen.

Field of view setting now displays the angle used.

@mike: Thanks. We can now run up stairs! Crash fixes would be nice.

@mike: And i just gave in and put a point in the mark augment to get rid of that "unmark all" ...................

So does this mean playing with a mouse isn't completely messed up anymore? I wanted to use mouse and keyboard for some fidelity when aiming and such but man was it nearly unusable the last time I tried.

@humanity: Last I heard, people were saying that the mouse acceleration is tied to the in game sensitivity options (no idea if that is intentional, certainly doesn't state it) and turning it to 0 fixed it but you'd have to increase sensitivity outside of the game. Luckily I can easily do that with Steelseries but that would suck otherwise. Been having a fine time with the mouse.

Huh I was about to say mouse is perfectly fine but I have been running at 0 sens (which is still too high, wtf) the whole time.

It was super swimmy and accelerated for me when I tried so I just flipped back to gamepad without messing around too much.

They fixed a bunch of mouse things...but you still have to drag the map around to select things =/ Oh well, at least I can run up stairs now...

I've only had a chance to check this out today so maybe Nixxes improved things in the latest patch, but once I disabled contact hardening shadows and MSAA the game's been running beautifully on my 1080. Unfortunately, the frametimes were all over the place in exclusive fullscreen mode, even after I capped the framerate with RTSS, but switching to borderless fullscreen smoothed things out at the expense of some performance.

Nothing I'm reading in this thread or elsewhere sounds real great , think I'm going to wait on this one for a price cut.

Steam says i have an update, but won't let me download it. Anybody else having this issue?

Edit: wouldn't let me even verify the game cache, looked online and saw they said to switch your download region and now it's unlocking something but still not actually downloading. Not sure what's going atm.

@oursin_360: I did have that issue but didn't try to fix it.

@justin258: I changed my Dl region and it seems to work but i haven't fired up the game yet, probably will in a little while.

Does that say "D I" or "D L"? I have changed my download region and it still won't start the update. I am now trying to verify the integrity of the game cache and it doesn't seem to be doing anything.

...now this really does suck. It's stuck on an update. Perhaps I could try to delete the game and download it again. Man, that sounds like a pain.

EDIT: Whoa. I deleted it and it won't let me download it again, it says the same thing. "An error occurred while trying to download (missing content manifest)".

EDIT 2: I changed my download region to Vietnam, started downloading the game, then changed it back and it worked.

@oursin_360: I dont think thats fair. This game does look really really great maxed out.

I agree that things like faces and animations aint top of the line and some models and areas have recieved less love than others. You can always nitpick. All in all with the complete package there is no doubt this looks better than lets say Tomb Raider and Witcher 3 and i have more than 100 hours in both those games.

It also looks waaaaaaaaaaaay better than Hitman and im only getting around 10-15% better performance in that game which everyone is giving a pass. That game is a real joke when it comes to its performance and how it looks.

@rethla: it's subjective but I disagree on both counts. Tomb Raider and Witcher 3 look way better than this game though I do love the art direction in this. I even love the floorboards in Jensen's apartment.

@rethla: well i have all 3 games and i dont think this one comes close to those in terms if graphics. I dont know i would say this is on par with fallout 4, pretty in spots but all around not top notch.

For anybody having scaling issues with ui and cutscenes, it seems like the issue is exclusive fullscreen. Ive set it to fullscreen (borderless) and no more black bars and squished ui. However, it comes with a performance cost drops both my average and minimum fps whith vsync on. Without vsync i actually get better fps but ingame i get wierd double frames when moving (not exactly tearing but not smooth).

I know performance vs fidelity is largely subjective but when Battlefront looks how it does and runs extremely well it does make me question what's going on in games like this.

@hayt: It's the engines they use, battlefront runs on that Frostbite(?) engine from the battlefield games. Looks like Deus Ex runs on a proprietary engine based on the one from Hitman Absolution, which would explain the stiff animations and facial expressions. Maybe Squenix should start using the tomb raider engine on all there games?

Also they dont have anything else to render but an fixed empty map with no objects in Star Wars. Dragon Age running on frostbite doesnt look better than Deus Ex and Bioware even said they had a hard time with that engine.

Comparing two different game engines used in two very different kind of games seems a bit misguided.

Such a shame that many had their experience with the game diminished due to these issues. I just beat it and I really loved the whole adventure.

Ah, yes. PC gaming in a console-dominated market. The graphics stay exactly the same, but the performance gets worse. Totally not a deliberate act by the PC hardware manufacturers. They would NEVER provide software developers with much needed financial support.

@eastbound4: it performs better on pc, all those effects are probably not on the console version and that version is capped at 30fps i believe.

I suggest watching this so you can become more informed.

I have a GTX 970, and being out in the hub area is 21 to 40 fps at high settings with a lot turned off. Even switching to low or medium settings, its impossible to reach 60 fps in the hub world.

There is a little known issue with the latest Nvidia drivers causing bad DPC latency when paired with crappy audio or network drivers (which is a LOT of them, the most common ones). It may only be an issue with the 10 series cards though. Either way, after I fixed that on mine this game runs at over 60 dos on average, dips to 50 at worst for a split second, and I swear is running at full ultra - even the settings that go higher than the ultra preset. Even with MSAA! If it's running poorly, check your DPC latency and make sure to clean install the latest Nvidia drivers. It can run like a dream, I swear!

@colourful_hippie: Yes I understand that games engines are different. That's precisely what I was musing about. How one game with one engine like the Witcher can handle multiple actors in both close and wide open spaces without issue or Battlefield 1 with 64 actors without issue yet this game seems to tank on a fly through of a small area with few actors while not looking as good. I've no doubt there are meaningful reasons for this but as an end user it does just make it look like something has gone arry. It's not that I expect all games to operate the same but one operating worse than it's contemporaries with no payoff is perplexing.

I run a GTX 1080 with a 1440p G-sync monitor and I get 70-90fps with textures on High (not Very High) and MSAA off or at 2x (I don't remember).

That's weird. I'm playing with a 970/i5 4590/16 gb ram and with most everything set to high and no msaa, it runs at a pretty constant 60 fps at 1080p.

For comparison, I can't get hitman to work at a good constsnt framerate, it always tanks in certain areas with my 970.

Alright i figured out why this game just doesn't look all that good to me at times, some objects just don't cast shadows for some reason. Even static objects that are part of the geometry with static lighting.

I see why it reminds me of fallout 4 in spots. Maybe it's because things are so detailed that missing shadows just pop out to me subconsciously, but man i don't like false lighting. They can take out the whole volumetric lighting (Godrays?) and just give me the shadows lol.

@oursin_360: Yeh some poor shadowmaps and some poor models and geometry and oddbits here and there, thats what you get everywhere in Fallout 4. The technical stuff you dont get anywhere in Fallout 4 however so i still think its very unfair comparisons you make.

I just dont agree that they should use an less impressive/demanding engine just because they dont got the manpower to fill the entire game with high quality handmade assets.

This is an really impressive RGP all in all. The only RPG that can be properly compared to Witcher 3 even though you can easily argue for Witcher 3 to be the better one. There are many parts where this game looks better than the Witcher up close but ofc in scale and vistas it has nothing in comparison.

This game makes me so exited for cyberpunk.