Testing GPUs with AMD FSR3 and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — 16 graphics cards and hundreds of benchmarks

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
The 4090 is now over a year old. Yeah, its expensive, but the developers probably expected the 5xxx series to be out by now. Or some kind of stopgap upgrade.
That doesn't really make sense. Sure, the RTX 4090 is over a year old but it's still the fastest gaming card that money can buy. I was using it as a case-in-point because if it can't run properly on an RTX 4090, then it can't run properly on anything.

If the RTX 4090 isn't enough, then nothing is and the game is broken.
 
That doesn't really make sense. Sure, the RTX 4090 is over a year old but it's still the fastest gaming card that money can buy. I was using it as a case-in-point because if it can't run properly on an RTX 4090, then it can't run properly on anything.

If the RTX 4090 isn't enough, then nothing is and the game is broken.

As a 4090 owner, i have to admit the game is impressive!

However, at 4K Unobtainium settings, i have to resort to Performace DLSS, in order to get 55-64 FPS, and to Ultra Performance, if i want more than 80.

They should have done a better job on the optimization front.

P.S. Is the situation any better with your 7900 XTX, using FSR? Have you had the opportunity to test it?
 
Last edited:
I'm looking at these screenshots on my phone and I can see a pretty clear difference especially in the last 2 shots between ultra and unobtanium. The higher setting has more shadows, the shadows are also more accurate and nicer looking. The other clear difference is detail in ray reflections. One looks like software based RT likely in place for the consoles and AMD GPUs in general until rdna4 when they finally get dedicated hardware.

I imagine the high ray count and more bounces used by unobtanium is also running the same way although it's entirely possible it's using the tensor cores on the nvidia side for performance gains and clarity but they are sharper reflections so they are definitely higher resolution plus they look more accurately placed and interact with the water better which also hints at more rays + bounces.

They could technically fake the effects but doing so in such a dense world would essentially cost the same as using ray tracing. I'm definitely gonna load the game up on my 4090 and try out the higher setting since fsr frame gen is definitely good enough especially since it's able to work with DLSS quality mode. I also imagine the already available and generic mods than can inject DLSS frame gen into fsr and vice versa should work by just dropping them in like I did with Calisto Protocol to get DLSS upscaling and frame gen working which definitely enhanced the 4k experience.
 
That doesn't really make sense. Sure, the RTX 4090 is over a year old but it's still the fastest gaming card that money can buy. I was using it as a case-in-point because if it can't run properly on an RTX 4090, then it can't run properly on anything.

If the RTX 4090 isn't enough, then nothing is and the game is broken.

When the game entered development the 2080 was the king of the hill. Devs plan for the highest settings based on what they think will be the hardware at the time of release.

Because of the pandemic, the GPU timelines got messed up. We probably should have had a 4090ti or 5xxx series already released or in the very near future in the case of the latter.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Avro Arrow
When the game entered development the 2080 was the king of the hill. Devs plan for the highest settings based on what they think will be the hardware at the time of release.

Because of the pandemic, the GPU timelines got messed up. We probably should have had a 4090ti or 5xxx series already released or in the very near future in the case of the latter.
Well, if the game entered development when the RTX 2080 was #1, they should've set the game up to require no more than that at 1440p. Some would say that the fact they didn't means this is a case of dev laziness but I don't think that's what happened. From what I've seen the root cause of pretty much everything that goes wrong with media releases is some clueless executive suit making a bad decision to try and cut costs. I've seen it in video games, movies, TV shows and printed content. The people who are knowledgeable and have passion are almost never the ones put in charge. The companies that do put people with knowledge and passion in charge benefit greatly from that decision.

Perfect examples of this are Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su. Having an actual computer scientist running everything paid huge dividends for those corporations because they inherently knew a bad idea or decision when they saw it. Sure, not everything they did turned out all that well but look what happened to Intel when they were led by "business scientists" instead of computer scientists. Look what happened when Lisa Su was put at the helm of AMD and look at the meteoric rise of nVidia under Jensen Huang.

I guarantee you that whoever was put in charge of AFOP at Ubisoft isn't a top-level programmer themselves. If they were, we'd be seeing something more like Baldur's Gate 3, a game that was done properly.