Dying Light Performance: Best Gameplay Settings On ROG G771JM & G551JM Gaming Laptops

As creators of the Call of Juarez and Dead Island franchises, Techland has a knack for innovation. They are back with another first person shooter called Dying Light.  You are Kyle Crane, an undercover operative infiltrating the fictional city of Harran, where a mysterious viral outbreak has turned the majority of residents into soulless creatures.   Not as dangerous during the day, but at night the creatures' senses increase tenfold, making the infected much deadlier.  Your mission to find Kadir "Rais" Suleiman becomes side-tracked as you need to decide whether to complete the mission or help the very survivors who helped save your life.

There certainly isn't a shortage of zombie movies and games in recent years, but there is arguably only a handful of creative people who have been able to bring the genre up a notch in terms of delivering fear. Dying Light allows you to look back while doing so, and shows you a few different reasons why this game takes the genre to a whole new level.   First of all, the new rules to the zombie genre: now zombies not only run, they climb and they jump buildings!

With the addition of verticality, surviving requires you to learn Parkour (developed from military obstacle course training, focusing on freerunning from A to B  in the most efficient way possible) to evade the climbing zombies and complete your objectives.  In a way, this is a cross between Mirrors Edge and Tomb Raider. 

The game adds the need for improvisation (common sense and problem-solving skills even under dire circumstances), you can use more than a hundred various objects as weapons to chop, burn, shock, hack or bludgeon the infected when (not if) confrontation is necessary.  You can also use distractions, traps  and ultraviolet light to slow down the infected. 

There is a dynamic day and night cycle effects. By day you can play this like a stealth game to avoid confrontation, but the change of pace keeps you on your toes and brings anticipation when day turns to night.  XP rewards are doubled at night, so you'll have to 'man-up and do the right thing'.  

 There's also a dynamic weather system to not only showcase the nice visuals involving rain, wind and fog in the gorgeous open urban environment; it actually affects the way you play the game.  Whenever you are climbing up high with sudden gusts of wind, you are just as worried about getting blown off as you are about being eaten, with every step the image of Neo's phone flying out of his hand in the movie Matrix plays over and over. 

As if climbing zombies and the need to worry about falling to your death wasn't enough, you also have other humans to worry about.  Smarter, armed and just as motivated to accumulate Antizen (not a cure, but something to keep bite-victims from turning into zombies) and other supplies.

There's a 4-player online co-op mode, a new 'Be the Zombie' mode, and coming soon will be a Hard Mode for those of you who put in the hours to get a PhD in game play.

Chrome Engine 6

While Kojima Productions has its new Fox Engine, Techland's answer is Chrome Engine 6.  In it's sixth iteration (as the name suggests), after three dozen games over 12 years, it's safe to say Techland had a lot of time to work on its secret formula, particularly in the open world first-person-shooters genre.   Dying Light is the first in showcasing Chrome Engine 6, where developers were offered the power thus freedom to create bigger and more detailed open worlds, whether outdoor or indoor environments.   Like the Fox Engine and many other modern game engines, Chrome Engine 6 has been refined to make the environment more photorealistic than ever, also implementing changeable day/night/weather conditions in a way that is interactive rather than just looking pretty.  Notable advancements include Physical Lighting Model, Spherical Harmonics based Indirect Lighting, and Atmospheric Scattering.

PC-Exclusive Graphics Enhancements

Needless to say, if there is a multi-platform game, the PC version is the best.  Not bound by power, you can have better texture quality and view distance, also having the power to tinker with other options.   Not bound to 30 frames per second, you can play Dying Light at 144 FPS (if you are lucky enough to power a 144Hz/G-Sync monitor). Collaboration with Nvidia means you have goodies such as NVIDIA HBAO+ Ambient Occlusion, NVIDIA Depth of Field technology and NVIDIA Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) to get graphical fidelity not possible on other platforms.   If you are the owner of a portable Nvidia Shield gaming console, you can even play Dying Light on the go via GameStream (Both G771 and G551 are fully-compatible!).

Dying Light Performance: Best Gameplay Settings

The G771JM and G551JM are ROG’s ‘performance-mainstream’ 17-inch and 15-inch gaming laptops respectively, both feature up to a quad-core Intel Core i7 4710HQ processor, 16GB of DDR3 and Nvidia GTX 860M graphics.

Let’s find out what the best playable gameplay settings are for these gaming laptops:

G771JM & G551JM tested spec:

• Intel Core i7 4710HQ processor
• 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 (2x8GB)
• Nvidia GTX 860M graphics card 4GB DDR5 (Maxwell: 640 cores)
• 256GB PCIe SSD option
• Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS display
• [ROG Gladius gaming mouse]
• Nvidia GeForce driver: 347.36
• Intel HD Graphics driver: 10.18.10.3910 WHQL
• Windows 8.1 Pro

If you are anxious to get into Dying Light, you can allow GeForce Experience to automatically apply graphics option for you.  However, the balance is often leaned towards performance more than quality.  Allowing Nvidia to decide the options you would be offered these settings.  

• Ambient Occlusion - Off
• Anti-Aliasing - Off
• Foliage Quality - Off
• Nvidia Depth of Field - Off
• Nvidia HBAO+ - Off
• Resolution - 1920 X 1080
• Shadow Map Size - Low
• Texture Quality - Medium
• View Distance - 0/12 (not sure why this is 12 when there are 17 levels available)

Let's check out if we can squeeze out more quality whilst maintaining good performance.  To do that we need to first look at what options are offered:

Texture Quality

Having an accurate comparison between High and Medium was not easy since Texture Quality can't be changed mid-game, and the differences were so subtle I may have needed a microscope.   If you want more performance, then take comfort in knowing that you're not missing out on much if you choose medium over high.   There is a performance impact and so setting this to medium would be a sensible choice, especially considering that you may need up to nearly 4GB of VRAM (High/not a problem for G771 and G551) as opposed to 2GB (Medium/uses around 2GB of VRAM).

Shadow Map Size

This is a name that might be confusing as it's often called shadow quality.  While I don't think high-quality shadows are a necessity in general, spooky zombie shadows would be an exception.

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Foliage Quality

Adjusting this setting alters the density of grass.  Adding objects usually affects performance and grass is no different, this is one of the first settings you can lower to gain performance.

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View Distance

While other games would find ways to avoid showing objects at a distance with fog, smoke, or other buildings, in Dying Light just the detail level is turned down.   This is done so you can plan your parkour route.   View Distance makes the biggest performance impact of all, but there is a 17-step slider so you have great control over how much detail there is in objects at a distance.  We preferred 75% as the best balance, as anything beyond that was difficult to notice. It is also handy to know that CPU is the bottleneck here, so having an Intel Core i7 quad-core CPU really helps!

100% View Distance

 

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NVIDIA Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion (AO) adds contact shadows where two surfaces or objects meet, and where objects block light from reaching another nearby game element. Simply put, Ambient Occlusion adds depth and realism.  There are two types of Ambient Occlusion in the game; SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) which comes at the cost of a few frames per second, and HBAO+ (Horizontal Based Ambient Occlusion) which is a higher-quality SSAO that only affects performance slightly more than SSAO.  So just use HBAO+ or turn it off altogether if you need more performance.  

For SSAO, simply enable the Ambient Occlusion option in the video settings. For HBAO+, enable both Ambient Occlusion and NVIDIA HBAO+.

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NVIDIA Depth of Field (NVDOF)

This DirectX 11-powered effect is only active in cut scenes and conversations, increasing the quality of blurring.  Although there is a significant performance hit, it doesn't apply to gameplay, so just leave it on.

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Motion Blur

Realistically, when you snap your head around you need a split second before you can focus on anything.  In the game the motion blur helps you recognize when Kyle still needs to come to his senses (eg. after leaping onto another building, or in shock from being attacked, etc.).  Not much of a performance impact here.

Anti-Aliasing

Anti-aliasing gets rid of jagged edges, without it we won't be left with Space Invaders graphics, but smoother edges are always welcome, noticeable and comes at a very low cost.   Avoid turning this off.

 

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Film Grain Effect

This effect isn't for everyone, there's noise overlayed on the image much like and old film or ISO-grain, creating more of a 'horror film effect'.

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Dying Light Best Performance Settings

Before anything, I surrounded myself with lots of zombies and have a great view where I can see as far and as much as possible, to create a worst-case scenario. First, I'm going to set Texture Quality to Medium if it makes no difference except use up system resources. Now I'll check out how much of an impact Shadow Map Size makes.

The difference between Very High and High is as clear as day, almost five frames per second difference!  Ok, let's leave that on High, there isn't much of a benefit if turned down to Medium or Low.

Let's look at how View Distance affects performance:

As we can see the results are linear, somehow at 75% there is a small but noticeable spike, which is perfect because that's where we want to be anyway.  Not a hard choice here, 75% it is. 

With Texture Quality set to Medium, Shadow Quality set to High, and View Distance set to 75% we're chugging along at 28FPS (Max=30/Min=27).   No other option made a significant difference except for Ambient Occlusion:

As the graph indicates, sacrificing Ambient Occlusion provides us with at least 30FPS in the worst-case scenario.  

Finally to put these settings to the test, I benchmarked actual gameplay for five minutes using these settings and compared with the Nvidia optimized settings:

 

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It would seem that Nvidia's optimized settings are focused toward best performance achieving an average of 48FPS (Max=72/Min=40).  My approach on the other hand was more focused toward best quality, achieving an average of 38FPS (Max=42/Min=34), although this is an open world game I have found that most of the time you are not standing around sight-seeing so these settings should serve you well.  

As far as gameplay is concerned, this is best played in the dark with a pair of Strix 7.1's strapped to your head... although I haven't yet dared try.