Today, we are going to take a deep look at what the Best Graphic settings for Escape from Tarkov are, by running two custom linear walking benchmarks in 4K (3840 x 2160). Unfortunately this game does not have a built-in benchmark tool and due to its single instance raid game mechanic, I could not test Texture Quality, as this required a game restart, which goes against how this game works and its random spawning per raid.
Tied in with this, the changing weather and daytime system of each raid instance, would have made it near impossible to recreate the exact same environment as the previous settings were tested under.
The textures are however very low resolution even at their highest setting, so don’t feel that they would have made much of a difference to any graphics card which already has 8GB or more VRam, compared to other games such as COD Warzone and Ghost Recon Breakpoint that have insanely high quality textures, and when turning them off, does give a noticeable fps boost.
Due to their low quality, I quite honestly wouldn’t recommend playing the game with them any lower than what their current highest choice is, unless your graphics card is really struggling.
With that said, let’s begin.
Escape from Tarkov Benchmark PC Setup
The Escape from Tarkov Benchmarks were done at 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution, using the following PC system specs:
- Graphics Card : Nvidia RTX 2070 Super ($525.44)
- CPU : AMD Ryzen 3700x ($205.00)
- RAM: Corsair CMW32GX4M2C3200C16 Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB ($113.98)
- Motherboard : Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi ($399.99)
- Storage Drive : Western Digital 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320 ($150.00)
- Recording Drive : Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB M.2 NVMe ($109.99)
- System Drive : Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB SATA ($139.00)
- Power Supply : EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G3 ($179.99)
- Monitor :
Samsung 49″ RU7300 – 4K Smart TV (DEPRECIATED)
PC Setup Extras
- Keyboard : Corsair K70 RGB MK.2 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard (Price not available)
- Keyboard Rubber O-Rings : Rosewill Mechanical Keyboard Rubber O-Rings (Price not available)
- Mouse : Corsair M65 Elite – FPS Gaming Mouse ($42.85)
- Gaming Controller : Microsoft Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 ($150.99)
- PC Case : Phanteks Eclipse P600S (Price not available)
- PC Case Fans : Corsair LL120 RGB, 120mm RGB LED Fan – Triple Pack ($69.99)
- PC Case RGB LED Strips : Speclux Computer Magnetic Addressable RGB LED Strip Kit ($16.99)
- PC Case RGB Controller : Corsair iCUE Commander PRO (Price not available)
- CPU Cooler : Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition CPU Air Cooler ($99.99)
Microphone : Rode NT1-A Anniversary Condenser Microphone (DEPRECIATED)- Microphone Stand : RODE PSA 1 Swivel Mount Studio Microphone Boom Arm ($98.50)
- Audio Interface Device : Steinberg UR22C 2×2 USB 3.0 Audio Interface ($194.99)
- Headphones : Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 80 Limited Edition Black ($200.00)
- NVMe Expansion : ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card V2 – 4x NVMe M.2 ($47.99)
- HDMI Switch : KVM 4K60p HDMI USB 4 Way Switch (Price not available)
- Stream Deck : Elgato 15 Key Stream Deck (No products found.)
- Monitor RGB LED Light Strips : GIDERWEL RGBW LED Strip Light,16.4ft SMD5050 ($15.99)
- RGB LED Light Strip Controller : GIDERWEL Home Smart Zigbee RGBCCT (Philips Hue Compatible) ($21.99)
- SATA Cables : 10 Pack 16 Inch SATA III 6.0 Gbps Cable (Price not available)
- Figurine (Storm Trooper) : Revoltech Star Wars Stormtrooper 6.7″ Action Figure ($181.64)
- Figurine (Darth Vader) : Revoltech Star Wars Darth Vader 6.7″ Action Figure ($64.36)
Escape from Tarkov Benchmarks
As with all my best graphic setting articles, I will start by first setting a Baseline benchmark figure, which will be done with all settings at the best Ultra/Extreme.
From here, each of the individual graphic options within Escape from Tarkov’s Video Settings menu, will be turned down to their lowest/off setting and benchmarked again, comparing it to the baseline, in order to determine how it influences performance.
This will allow us to then rank which individual graphic settings are most resource intensive and tone those down slightly, in order to get the most visual detail, for optimal trade off in frame per second (fps) performance.
I actually did the reverse for this benchmark as well (Hilltop Swamp Benchmark), which I haven’t done for my other articles, by creating a Baseline for the Lowest/Off setting, and then cranking each one individually up to their max.
I did this simply to see if it yields the same conclusive results.
Escape from Tarkov - River Valley Benchmarks
I created a custom Offline Raid in Customs, in order to be left in peace while I benchmark and to also be able to re-roll until I got sunny weather for the shadows, which was harder than you think, Tarkov is a very gloomy and cloudy place!
The first area I choose was done by the lower river valley in order to get a bit of everything in the shot, including water, foliage and buildings, together with a nice long view distance.
Right off the bat, we can see that individually, the majority of the Escape from Tarkov’s graphic settings offer very little difference in performance between the very highest and very lowest/off setting, except for the regular culprits that stand out in most benchmarks, being Ambient Occlusion and Anti-Aliasing.
Resolution Resampling
I did test the Resampling set to 0.5x of 4K, but it resulted in very poor visual quality, so I wouldn’t recommend playing with it on, even though it does give almost double the frame rate to 56fps.
The 0.5x resample of 4K, did however look better than native 1080p resolution, so if you are deciding between the two to get some extra frames out, then its actually best to go with the resample.
A better way to implement Resampling is via DLSS, which as you can see from my Mechwarrior 5 DLSS 2.0 Benchmarks, yield incredible results, giving a massive boost in frame rate while actually enhancing the quality of the original 4K image. This is effectively the same as the Resampling 2.0x setting under the same drop down menu, but without the performance hit.
Unfortunately DLSS isn’t available in Unity yet, so I understand the reason for it not being an option a tthe time being.
That being said, let’s get back to the other settings in the table below
Game Video Setting | Ultra (max) | Low/Off | Percent Difference |
Resampling (0.5x) | 31 | 56 | 25fps (81%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion OFF | 31 | 49 | 18fps (58%) Gained |
Ambient Occlusion HIGH | 31 | 37 | 6fps (19%) Gained |
Anti-Aliasing | 31 | 34 | 3fps (10%) Gained |
Screen Space Reflections | 31 | 34 | 3fps (10%) Gained |
Anisotropic Filtering OFF | 31 | 33 | 2fps (6%) Gained |
Z-Blur | 31 | 33 | 2fps (6%) Gained |
Object LOD | 31 | 32 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Overall Visibility | 31 | 32 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Shadow Visibility | 31 | 32 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Anisotropic Filtering Per/Tex | 31 | 32 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Chromatic Aberrations | 31 | 32 | 1fps (3%) Gained |
Shadow Quality | 31 | 31 | 0fps (0%) Gained |
Grass Shadows | 31 | 30 | -1fps (-3%) Lost |
V-Sync ON | 31 | 30 | -1fps (-3%) Lost |
If we put the graphs into a table, sorted from the most resource intensive to the least, we can see that besides the resampling setting, turning off Ambient Occlusion will give you the biggest boost in performance at 58%.
This is however the first game that I have ever seen a setting called “Colored Ambient Occlusion” because this doesn’t really exist and is most likely another lighting feature called Image based Lighting.
Let me explain.
Ambient Occlusion vs Image Based Lighting
Ambient Occlusion is a term designated to a method of faking Global Illumination by adding some additional soft shadow between objects, in order to give the illusion of darkness and extra depth.
Ambient Occlusions is it’s more of a post processing effect, than a real lighting effect, and because of that as it comes at a lower performance cost than what full blown Raytraced Global Illumination would, but still requires a fair amount of your GPU’s resources, as its calculating these intersections and corners every single frame.
In terms of their wording “Colored Ambient Occlusion“, sure, you can color your Ambient Occlusion to whatever color you desire as the game developer, but then every object’s intersecting shadows in the game world will globally become that color.
So if the Ambient Occlusion color was red for example, then you would have a red tint shadows around all the objects, making it look very weird indeed, so I doubt this is the case in Escape from Tarkov.
This is the reason that 99% of games just use a black/grey Ambient Occlusion, is because it replicates what we perceive shadows (darkened areas) to look like in the real world very well, and with very little effort.
Here is a screenshot of Skyrim showing the Ambient Occlusion overlay.
As you can see it’s simply a black and white image overlay that fills in the areas where objects in the game world are close to each other, giving us a nice but faked Global Illumination shadow effect.
What I suspect they mean by this “Colored Ambient Occlusion” is actually another method of faking Raytraced Global Illumination (as they don’t have any real Raytracing in Escape from Tarkov), called “Image Based Lighting” or “Skylight Based Lighting”.
They have however incorrectly labeled it as “Colored Ambient Occlusion” instead of “Image Based Lighting” also referred to as IBL.
All 3D environments (games and movies) are actually created inside a Sphere, that represents our planet’s round shape and is what you generally see as the sky in the games. In Escape from Tarkov, this would either be the night time stars or the blue sky during the day time (the clouds are on their own layer so they are a separate entity).
This sphere is textured with either a sky image or video, shot in a specific shape called an Equirectangular Projection Image.
Fun fact, the Earth’s atlas laid flat, is in fact an Equirectangular Image, as it’s a “texture” made to cover a sphere (Earth).
This Equirectangular Projection image or video is generally created in a 32bit Float HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) format for Hollywood CG movies, but it can also be 16bit TIFF or 8bit JPEG images, also known as LDRI (Low Dynamic Range Images).
HDR Image Based Lighting takes both the COLOR and HIGHLIGHT values and casts them onto the other meshes in game (guns, characters, vehicles trees etc), to create what is collectively called Global Illumination, while the latter two LDR (TIFF or JPEGS) offer less COLOR and HIGHLIGHT accuracy than 32bit HDR, but at the benefit of less resource requirements and better in game performance in some cases.
However, for HDR Based lighting to work as true Global Illumination, requires a lot of bounced Raytraced Light, and without a proper Raytracing engine (and a ton of heavy lifting from your graphics card), the game resorts to faking it using LDRI (Low Dynamic Range Images) instead.
As LDR images (TIFF or JPEGS) don’t really contain any highlight information (known as clipped highlights), they simply throw “good enough” colors onto the game world instead.
Here is another example from Skyrim, with Low Dynamic Range IBL turned OFF and then ON. As this is a day scene, IBL ON uses the blue color from the sky to cast a tint of blue lighting onto the world below it.
Therefore, Image Based Lighting (whether it be HDR or LDR) and Ambient Occlusion are two seperate things when lighting a 3d scene, as you can actually have both Ambient Occlusion and Image Based Lighting at the same time, as I have in my Skyrim Graphic Settings.
They can therefore work together in unison, and should not be under the same drop down menu in Escape from Tarkov’s graphic settings menu, as both bring something to the table in their own right.
Back to the benchmark results
Anyway, I went a bit off topic there, but just thought i’d try to clear that up to anyone trying to figure out what “Colored Ambient Occlusion” was. Regardless of the incorrect labeling, I benchmarked both.
“Colored Ambient Occlusion” (AKA. Image Based Lighting) was the setting for my Baseline MAX Benchmark (ie 31fps), so I benchmarked Ambient Occlusion OFF, which resulted in 49fps (58% gain), as well as Grey Ambient Occlusion set to “High”, which resulted in 37fps (19%) gain in performance..
The next resource intensive culprit is Anti-Aliasing, which also comes as no surprise, as this is common in most games I’ve benchmarked. Changing the Anti-Aliasing from “TAA High” (31fps) to “OFF” (34fps), resulted in a 3fps (10%) gain.
Inline with Anti-Aliasing, is SSR (Screen Space Reflections) which also provided a 3fps (10%) gain in performance when turned off.
The last notable setting here is Anisotropic Filtering, which contributed 2fps (6%) gain in performance when turned off.
All the view distance sliders have next to zero effect and I would highly recommend keeping these at their maximum value because of this, as they contribute to a massive amount of gameplay advantage, allowing you to see enemies further and in more detail for no loss in performance.
The two post processing effects, being “Z-Blur (Motion Blur)” and “Chromatic Aberration” also have almost no impact on performance, but I turn these off from a sheer gameplay perspective, as motion blur is a hindrance to any First person Shooter game where milliseconds count.
Chromatic Aberration is actually a phenomenon (flaw) that results from light traveling through a cheap camera lens glass, causing the color spectrum to seperate, so not something your eyes see naturally to begin with, and one of the reasons that photographers pay a lot of money for a camera lens, as they want to avoid it.
I thought “Grass Shadows” would have more of an impact, but there was also surprisingly very little so definitely turn it on.
Lastly, all above tests were done with V-Sync turned off, but as I’ve seen V-Sync cause big performance loss in games like Ghost Recon Breakpoint, I decided to make sure that’s not the case in Escape from Tarkov either. Fortunately there was only 1 frame difference.
- Powered by GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
- NVIDIA turing architecture & real time ray tracing
- WINDFORCE 3X cooling system with alternate spinning fans
Escape from Tarkov - Shoreline Swamp Benchmarks
The second and last benchmark I ran was in the Shoreline map, around the Swamp areas, within some thicker foliage, as this is where you will see your biggest drops in frames, not only in Escape from Tarkov, but the majority of games that you play.
As mentioned at the start of this benchmarking article, I did the reverse here compared to the above benchmark, as this time round, I made my baseline Standard using the lowest/off settings, instead of the Highest/On settings.
This time I left out Resampling (as explained above), as well as Vsync as it had very little impact in the first benchmark and causes input lag which we don’t want in a First Person Shooter either.
Game Video Setting | Ultra (max) | Low/Off | Percent Difference | Percent calc |
Ambient Occ. COLORED | 66 | 40 | -26fps (-39%) Lost | -39.39% |
Ambient Occ. VERY HIGH | 66 | 47 | -19fps (-29%) Lost | -28.79% |
Anti-Aliasing | 66 | 56 | -10fps (-15%) Lost | -15.15% |
Screen Space Reflections | 66 | 58 | -8fps (-12%) Lost | -12.12% |
Anisotropic Filtering OFF | 66 | 61 | -5fps (-8%) Lost | -7.58% |
Z-Blur | 66 | 61 | -5fps (-8%) Lost | -7.58% |
Object LOD | 66 | 64 | -2fps (-3%) Lost | -3.03% |
Shadow Quality | 66 | 65 | -1fps (-2%) Lost | -1.52% |
Chromatic Aberrations | 66 | 65 | -1fps (-2%) Lost | -1.52% |
Grass Shadows | 66 | 65 | -1fps (-2%) Lost | -1.52% |
Overall Visibility | 66 | 66 | 0fps (0%) Lost | 0.00% |
Shadow Visibility | 66 | 66 | 0fps (0%) Lost | 0.00% |
We see the same pattern in the results as the first benchmark here, with Image Based lighting (Colored Ambient Occlusion) giving the biggest hit in performance, followed by Ambient Occlusion HIGH, then Anti-Aliasing at TAA High, followed very closely by Screen Space Reflections (SSR) and Anisotropic Filtering.
Our Distance Sliders (Object LOD, Overall Visibility and Shadow Visibility) again had almost no performance hit, together with Grass Shadows so make sure to max those out for an edge over your opponent and to turn grass shadows on for some extra realism.
Once again Z-Blur (Motion Blur) and Chromatic Ambition had little to no impact and should be off in any case.
How to get 4K 60fps in Escape from Tarkov
“Ozarc, just tell us what the best damn settings for Escape from Tarkov are already!”
Alright you bunch of lazy Scavs, here are the Best Graphic Settings for Escape from Tarkov in order to achieve 60fps at 4K resolution on a RTX 2070 Super:
- Screenmode : FULLSCREEN
- V-Sync : OFF
- Texture Quality : High
- Shadow Quality : MEDIUM
- Object LOD Quality : 4 (MAX)
- Overall Visibility : 3000 (MAX)
- Shadow Visibility : 95 (MAX)
- Anti-Aliasing : FXAA
- Resampling : 1x OFF
- Ambient Occlusion (HBAO) : LOW
- Screen Space Reflections (SSR) : OFF
- Anisotropic Filtering : OFF or LOW
- Sharpness : 0.7
- Z-Blur : OFF
- Chromatic Aberrations : OFF
- Grass Shadows : ON
- Field of View (Under general Settings Tab) – Your Preference
Screenmode – You should always play any game at Fullscreen and not Borderless, as Fullscreen isolates you memory, whereas in Borderless mode, Windows sees it as just another application, so it shares more memory between your other applications and it.
V-Sync Off, for lowest possible input lag. Surprisingly I didn’t see any screen tearing in Escape from Tarkov with it off and below 60fps, so that’s a nice plus.
Texture Quality – As I said initially, I couldn’t test this, due to the nature of this game and how it handles time of day, weather and its randomized spawning per raid instance. Textures are already so compressed, I really couldn’t see myself playing anything below the highest settings anyway. I cover my opinion on the lack of high quality textures in more detail below
Shadow Quality – While this didn’t pop up as a major performance hog in my benchmark tests, it did when I combined all the settings together. This is due to it now being tied in with other settings on higher values. It wasn’t anything major, although there was about a 4fps drop to around 56fps when on ULTRA compared to MEDIUM. I thus found that the Medium Setting to be an acceptable quality level with a notable gain in performance.
Object LOD – Much like Overall Visibility and Shadow Visibility I cranked these sliders from left to right and back again, I couldn’t see any major performance difference in the benchmarks, so keep them on MAX.
Higher Object LOD (Level of Detail) meshes will give you more accurate details of your enemies and their surroundings when far away from you, gives you the advantage.
Overall Visibility – Just Like Object LOD, the more details you can see in the distance the better you map movement and spotting of enemies will be. You can’t shoot what you can’t see so this is a very important setting to have as max. This will also help you find your way around the map, as it helps show building markers in the distance as per the images below, where the factory is only shown at max view distance.
Shadow Visibility – Not as important as the above two slider settings, but seeing as it does not result in any performance loss, you might as well max it out as well for some extra clarity in your game.
Anti-Aliasing – TAA always uses more resources than either no Anti Aliasing or using a more basic algorithm such as FXAA. As I want the most detail I can get within my limits I found that there is no difference between turning AA off and setting it to FXAA which isn’t as good as TAA, but still better than nothing.
There is however a flickering issue with FXAA on a lot of geometry as you can see in the video below.
Ambient Occlusion – covered here in depth already, it’s the biggest performance hog of the lot, especially Image Based lighting (Colored Ambient Occlusion), followed by the HIGH setting. It does however make a massive difference to the realism in your scene and as Escape from Tarkov is a game focused on realism, I chose to at least have some Ambient Occlusion, going with LOW, which was actually came at a very small hit on performance, compared to having it OFF altogether.
Screen Space Reflections – While you might think that SSR is on water surfaces only, it actually plays a larger role in Escape from Tarkov than you think. It seems that a lot of surfaces have this in their settings, although you can’t really see it, so in my opinion it’s a waste of valuable fps. I also don’t really like how it looks even on the water surfaces, finding it to be of a very low quality in general compared to most other games.
It also has a lot of flickering in the distance, even when set to ULTRA.
Anisotropic Filtering – This was probably my most difficult setting to choose between, because it was the difference between having my frames hit a minimum of 60fps in the densest of forest scenes or around 56fps when turned on. The reason for my dilemma was because the graphic impact this has in Escape from Tarkov is huge.
Road textures are vastly better defined with it on, while having it off actually causes the textures about 4m ahead of you to constantly pop in, which I found to be a massive distraction.
“Once you see it, you can’t unsee it” situation.
I thus opted to turn Anisotropic Filtering ON, as I can deal with a 5fps drop when in some forest areas, which in all reality is a small part of the overall gameplay, for the added benefit of a more realistic experience.
The Z-Blur and Chromatic Aberrations I’ve already explained above, turn them off, they aren’t useful.
- Neodymium magnets and 40 millimeter drivers for powerful, detailed...
- Closed ear design provides comfort and outstanding reduction of...
- 9.8 foot cord ends in gold plated plug and it is not detachable; 1/4...
Best Escape from Tarkov Graphic Settings Conclusion
While I am fully aware that they game is still in Beta and that the Battlestate devs are currently focused on gameplay, balance and their servers at this point in time, at the same time they will need to address the graphic issues before final release, as this is a game that pursues realism in its gameplay, in which graphics are a big part of that immersion.
I am positive that their team isn’t as large as Ubisoft and Activision, but at the same time charging premium AAA prices for the game, going all the way up to $140, so there is a requirement to deliver on AAA graphics if they are going to be pricing themselves in this bracket.
The graphics aren’t in a bad place for an indie game, but there are the below mentioned areas that definitely need more attention to be a AAA game.
Texture & Model Quality
Beside the flickering issues mentioned above, the biggest eyes sore for me is currently the low model and texture quality, especially areas like doors, ramps/platforms and cars. Even from a few meters away it’s quite noticeable and makes the game feel very dated.
Many of the texture resolutions on these larger meshes make me think of games from the 90’s such as Quake II, where textures are so compressed that you can literally see the pixels on them.
An increase in polygons to their 3D models will go a long way, as well as offering much higher resolution textures.
If they want to keep their patch download sizes down, then I suggest offering an optional and separate high resolution texture pack, that some games like Call of Duty and Ubisoft games do, so that those that want it, can download and install it separately.
Again this doesn’t have to be now, but should be addressed sometime in the beta’s lifespan, as long as it’s sometime before official release.
Texel Density
A big part of the problem is also the mismatch in texture scale (aka. Texel Density), as some textures are really low resolution, while others are not.
They will also need to have a look at their Texel Density and make sure that textures are not all just at one set resolution, but are sized in relation to the object size they are assigned to.
Texel Density is the resolution of the texture, in relation to the physical size (cubic volume) of the mesh it’s covering in order to convey uniformity in the game world.
In other words, a large object like a car can’t have the same texture resolution as a much smaller object such as a tog-bag, which it seems is the current case. While the tog bag looks fine due to its size and distance from the character, the car on the other hand is extremely low resolution.
In order to keep the Texel Density uniform the tog-bag needs to have a texture resolution of say 512x512px and the car 2048x2048px. The same logic applies to polygon count. The car needs more polygons than the bag due to its size.
Here is another example in one shot, where you can see the smaller railing mesh being of a much higher texture quality than the car, as they most likely have the same resolution textures when they shouldn’t.
I have also recently spent 2 weeks modding Skyrim from the ground up and it’s blown my mind just how far modders have pushed a 10 year old game, so much so, that it now puts the majority of current games to shame in terms of its graphical beauty.
While I admittedly went all in (and a bit crazy hehe), having mostly 4K on everything and some 8K textures on my main character and very large meshes such as the mountains, as I wanted to see how far I could push it, together with very hi-res 3D mesh models and physics for hair and cloth.
Yes, I know Escape from Tarkov is First Person shooter where frames matter, and it certainly doesn’t need 8K textures, but it does need something more than some of the 256×256 textures it currently has on many large prominent 3D meshes.
Take a look at the wooden log textures as an example case. In Escape from Tarkov the you can easily see the actual pixels on the log texture, where as in Skyrim it looks almost life like.
Its a pity that that theses texture as being so compressed, as I can see that the texture artists actually put a lot of effort these textures when initially making them, by adding weathered effects such as mud and grease.
I know they used much higher resolution textures when they initially created them, because they used Quixel Megascan materials, which are the industry standard for very high quality, physically based materials and meshes.
In other words, they have the original hi-res textures and scenes stored somewhere on their hard drives, while currently in game they are using over compressed versions, making them pixelate, causing them to loose all that wonderful detail that the artists put into them.
If they just released these higher resolution versions (and make sure their UVW maps are following the Texel Density rules), it will already make a world of difference to the graphical quality of the game.
During my benchmarks, my RTX 2070 Super’s VRAM was only using 6.8GB of the 8GB available, meaning its not even maxing out its potential and they have room to add higher resolution textures.
Naturally they can keep the current LOD meshes and lower textures in game for those that have lower end cards or prefer frames over visuals, but currently the textures they have labeled as “HIGH” quality unfortunately are far from it.
- Innovative V-Nand Technology: Powered by Samsung V-Nand Technology,...
- Continuity tester/Wire tracer
- Secure encryption: Protect data by selecting security options,...
Weather Effects
While the audio of the rain and thunder in Escape from Tarkov is on point, the visuals could be more intense making it feel like heavy downpour and varied to bring not only more visual immersion to it, but also contribute to the gameplay, as it limits visibly, much like real life.
Currently the drops are very difficult to see and don’t interact with the ground and objects, except for the water in rivers and lakes.
Inclusion of puddles on the ground when it rains together with wet textures on the ground and meshes would really help bring another level of immersion.
In the video below you can see that there aren’t any wet materials on the roads, vehicles or rocks. The only wet looking instance I could find was that from a flood light around the military truck, although this was more of a specular highlight from the light than a wet texture material, becasue if it were raining with wet roads, there would still be reflections in the shadow areas, by its rear left tire as well.
As this is Russia, I would like to see some snow in the future as well. Much like Skyrim, this game is also set in a very cold environment, so snow storms are a part of life. Snow can also contribute to the playable environment in terms of visibility, as well as leaving trails in deep snow like Red Dead Redemption 2 or footprints for other players to track.
I am aware that the deep snow dispacement is a challenging aspect so it would be a nice to have for possible future purposes, but footprints are easy enough to do.
Night Time Lighting
The one part of the night time lighting that I feel needs some attention is the moon light.
A full moon is actually very bright at night, so much so that it casts distinct hard shadows. I’ve done many night time mountain hikes with nothing more than the moon light guiding me, and actually prefer it to usings a flashlight.
The times I’ve seen the full moon in Escape from Tarkov, I have noticed that it doesn’t take this into consideration, as it is lit the same way as non-moon scenes, both being very dark.
Even during a sunset, the light doesn’t cast onto the environment. This can be seen int eh video below together with how Red Dead Redemption 2 lights their moon light night scenes.
The light from the moon needs to be increased and have a blue tint to it. This will allow new players without flashlights or night vision can then also properly experience night scenes and also add some interesting gameplay as you see characters move between shadows and moonlight.
Wrapping Up
Not really relevant to the graphic settings, but just wanted to mention the audio design because it’s one of the most immersive audio experiences I’ve had in game. My only complaint is now that, whenever I play Warzone after Escape from Tarkov, the audio feels so average in Warzone 🙂
Well guys, that’s it from me I really enjoy this game and its unique gameplay designs, so my feedback might seem a bit critical, it is coming from a place of love, as I really want this game to visually be all that it can be.
If you enjoyed this content and found it useful, please share it on your favorite social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
Happy Gaming
Ozarc (¬‿¬)