Thanks to the ray traced global illumination, areas of the game that would be dark in real life, due to where they are in relation to a light source like a window or a light bulb, are actually dark. In a horror game like this, with a lot of dark spaces where you want to feel like there could be monsters lurking, a more realistic lighting engine just makes sense. But for most people, I usually recommend turning it on, looking at how fancy it looks, and then turning ray tracing off so you get a playable frame rate. I'll probably always enable ray tracing for games that support it, because I like shiny things. (Image credit: Future) Is Dying Light 2 ray tracing worth it? And, honestly the game will probably be easier without the lighting effects, so that’s something to take into consideration. Don’t get me wrong, the game doesn’t look bad with ray tracing enabled, it’s just a bit different. And, if you turn it off, you’re going to get extremely good performance across the board. In Dying Light 2, at least, ray tracing is simply not worth enabling on an AMD graphics card. Turn the ray tracing effects off and that number jumps up to 113 fps. With ray tracing enabled and FSR set to Balanced, the 6700 XT gets just 32 fps at 1440p. It’s a similar story with the RX 6700 XT at 1440p, that graphics card’s target resolution. The games presentation changes quite a bit – especially in indoor areas, due to the lack of ray traced global illumination – but your performance will jump up fourfold.Īt 4K with FSR set to balanced and ray tracing disabled, the RX 6800 XT jumped from a 25 fps average up to 101 fps. Luckily, just turning off ray tracing on the AMD cards completely solves the issue. But if you’re cutting down to 1080p on a 4K monitor, and you’re adding FSR on top of that, it’s pretty hard to look at. At that resolution, you’re getting 64 fps. With the RX 6800 XT, you’re not really going to see great performance with ray tracing enabled unless you’re running at 1080p, again with FSR set to Balanced. DLSS is more powerful than FSR generally, but if you’re using the best option you have available to you, Nvidia just has the stronger hand in this game. That’s compared to the RTX 3080’s 48 fps with ray tracing enabled and DLSS on Balanced. The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, a GPU pitched as a 4K graphics card when it launched, gets just a 25 fps average with ray tracing enabled and FSR on its Balanced preset. Yes, Dying Light 2 features both DLSS and FSR it’s like the developers knew how hard the game would be to run.īut the gulf in performance is obvious when you look at the numbers. But AMD is far behind Nvidia when it comes to ray tracing, even with its generally fantastic FSR software enabled. Performance doubles without ray tracing on Nvidia cards, and will go up by 4x on AMD Radeon cards.ĪMD’s RDNA 2 architecture finally added ray accelerators, meaning Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards such as the RX 6800 XT can use ray tracing effects without being a literal slide show. If you do have a less powerful card and want to play at 4K, our advice is to just disable the RT effects and keep DLSS and FSR enabled. But if you don’t have an RTX 3080 or better, you should basically forget about playing Dying Light 2 at 4K with ray tracing enabled. That’s essentially 60 fps, and felt incredibly smooth. If you’re not one of the privileged few able to afford an RTX 3090 or RTX 3080 Ti, you’re going to need to move to the Performance DLSS option, which saw fps go from 48 fps to 58 fps on the RTX 3080. So, that’s the preset we did all of our testing with.

Changing the DLSS preset to Balanced mostly fixes this, and we see performance at this level go up to 55 fps. You don’t want a zombie – sorry, biter – to take a chunk out of you just because your framerate dipped. That’s definitely playable, but it’s not ideal, especially in a game that’s so focused on quick movement. With all the ray tracing effects enabled and DLSS set at the Quality preset, the RTX 3090 usually hovers around 40 fps at 4K. But even with DLSS enabled, there's hardly a graphics card out there that can hit 60 fps at that resolution with ray tracing enabled. That resolution was supposed to be democratized with the release of the RTX 3070 – something I called out in my review of that graphics card. RAM: 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 5,200MHzĭying Light 2's performance, especially at 4K, is really funny to me.

This is the system we used to test Dying Light 2 PC performanceĬPU: Intel Core i9-12900K (16-core, up to 5.2GHz)

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