Premise: every new graphics engine should bring balance to, and give a choice between, performance and quality! Who wants to play while enjoying the cinematographic beauty of the world he is in should be able to do so, and who wants to have extremely high framerates to compete in PvP activities while sacrificing the quality for visibility and quick reactions should also have settings that allow this to happen! And while doing all of this, a great graphics engine should also not require thousands of dollars in hardware to deliver a satisfying experience! That said, I want now to formally evaluate the state of D2’s revamped graphics engine that came with Beyond Light. Let’s start with framerates, the numbers I will report are from my system with an RTX 2080 ti and a Ryzen 9 3900XT, with the game at 2560x1440@144Hz and the Nvidia 457.30 drivers, here are the settings I have been using up until now: [url]https://ibb.co/8Ncs0GL[/url] [url]https://ibb.co/5LBT33D[/url] Despite me fine-tuning those settings to [b]never give me below 144FPS[/b] in every scenario in the old graphics engine (where the only completely understandable exceptions were raids and the tower clocking in both at never less than 90FPS), now those settings give me an average of 40FPS less than before in most places, going as far as just 84FPS in the EDZ where I previously was in the 150FPS! Here are some numbers from the current state of the game (same settings as before Beyond Light): [i]Bannerfall looking at the traveler from the dead tree: 190 looking away from the traveler from the dead tree: 110 unexploded bomb, looking the outside plaza: 158 right bridge, looking at the right spawn: 135 left bridge, looking at the left spawn: 138 inside heavys, looking at bomb: 137 left inside the building: 126 right inside the building: 130 Javelin yellow tubes spawn: 126 over inside heavys looking at rocket: 120 landing platform spawn: 140 turbines in the wall looking at puddle: 100 (where there is water on the ground, reflection are bad and eat frames like nothing) outside heavys looking at the rocket: 136 stairs looking at the yellow tube spawn: 180 EDZ church spawn: 86 in front of the church: 84 Devrim: 90 from Devrim, inside the church: 90 beginning of lake of shadows: 110 arriving at suburbs: 100 submerged islands spawn point: 110 swamp spawn point: 110[/i] This is what I can comment on those data: Inside buildings or caves, the framerate drops, despite me having ambient occlusion off, setting shadows from medium to the minimum gives 10-15 extra FPS, shadows are currently really badly optimized and lighting inside buildings from the oldest places (EDZ, Nessus, etc.) seems "foggy" due to colored smoke layer being present with no way of turning it off. In the javelin, where there is water on the ground, right from the landing zone spawn, frames per second drop by an extra 20 due to the reflections in the water when it is on the screen...did they implement raytracing for those reflections? Could be, next-gen consoles are built with an RDNA2 GPU inside which supports raytracing, that's not a completely absurd hypothesis... Still, about Javelin, the landscape outside is from the old Io, that gave me really high framerates and still does, more notably it doesn't seem to have changed in any way. Probably the lights that have been added everywhere to take advantage of the new engine play their role in reducing the framerate. Not to speak about stage lights that some times appear to come out of nowhere, take a look at the moon, during the Scarlett fortress assault, you can see at the beginning an orange-ish light coming from the ether above lighting a door. The EDZ has been treated the worst with terrible performances and the fog I mentioned above really being annoying! Extra graphic settings are really needed here! Only Europa and the Dreaming City seem to be fine, maybe because they are useful in this season and have been playtested more? (Update: Look for "volumetric effects" discussed in the comments for a better description of the problem) As I think is evident from my words, I under no circumstances justify this loss in performance for just the great looks of Europa, and I can not accept that there aren’t enough settings to allow the old framerates to still be achieved! Other graphical bugs have to be addressed, such as the scope of The Long Goodbye sniper rifle that shows a green shade all across the scope and renders aiming a "night vision" experience...that's how the hive sees I guess, but maybe I want to pull off some headshots instead of pretending to be Eris Morn... Now to address the raging community with a specific graphics card that is underutilized and gives less than 60FPS at 1080p, while should bring more than 120FPS, those with graphics cards like the GTX 1060, RTX 2060, 2080 super, 2080, 3000 series and others report extremely unexpected numbers and HUGE losses in FPS! This can’t indicate anything else except underutilization of the hardware and poor, poor, optimization of the new light system. This should be the number one priority to fix! Also, I'd like some data from Radeon users, since I bet the game has been optimized for the AMD GPUs of the new consoles, while a lot of PC users have Nvidia chips. (Update: As reported in the comments, Radeon users are doomed to the same destiny as ones with Nvidia silicon, so the bad news now is that even the next generation consoles won't be able to deliver the expected 4K@60Hz experience probably) (Update: I have received reports also from players who were using SLI, there seem to be a lot of issues with it too! "You can't run the game with an afr any more. And it seems however they coded snow on Europa does not play nice. All other zones are fine. But if you enable afr 2, their code is not properly handling the other frame off to the other GPU so snowdrifts flicker in and out.", "Artifacts on NvLink 2080 ti seems to be common. however just artifacts. No performance loss or flickering") (Update: on the topic of SLI, "every recent driver for the 980 has been tested. 441.12 through 457.30, all no good. No OC AFR 1 & 2 tried on each. side note 441.41 had the best performance in sli and non sli.", also Bungie acknowledged the problem here: [url]https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/257557170[/url], maybe sooner or later there will be a fix, too bad they didn't replay to me and everyone who complains about the engine issues under here...) IMPORTANT UPDATE: Going under %appdata% (appdata/roaming) /Bungie/DestinyPC/prefs to update cvars.xml with: [quote]<cvar name="hdr_output" value="0" ></textarea>[/quote] Instead of value="1" a bit of FPS back, not by any mean at before BL levels, but a few is better than nothing! As an example, I average consistently 3-4 FPS higher in bannerfall compared to what I reported earlier in the post, except for inside place like the buildings near the spawns, where the FPS remains the same as before... Then in the same .xml you can try: [quote]<cvar name="force_enable_multi_threaded_render_submit" value="1" ></cvar>[/quote] from value="0", this gives extra FPS but the tradeoff is between that and [u]really glitchy shadows[/u] all over the place...on some systems the shadows are worse than on others, I do not suggest using this setting, but it might be improved in the future! One more thing, the engine gives a new look to a lot of old stuff due to the way now lights interacts with things, so despite my evaluation wanting to be objective, not be based on habits, but more on improvements, I have to address the horrible sensation I have while having all those new lights shining through the monitor and in my eyes (for example, try Bannerfall, the map many, me included, love). Well, what I can state is that you can’t revolutionize a game that many have played for 3 years and expect them to feel at home as before, so every detail will count towards them having a good or bad impression on it! And let me tell you that this new lighting system is a total eyesore, and therefore not a good impression. The settings, as I already addressed, should allow dimming of those ambient, directional, and point lights independently of each others. In conclusion, this is the quick, easy and peaceful solution I propose to you, Bungie: [b]from now on, provide us with a switch that allows us to toggle between the new engine and the old one.  [/b]