Render Quality

• In a nutshell...

  • Each renderer has a RenderQualityConfig that can be used to balance visual fidelity vs performance. Setting Quality

Setting Quality

var renderer = factory.RendererBuilder.CreateRenderer(
    scene, 
    camera, 
    window, 
    new RendererCreationConfig { Quality = new RenderQualityConfig(BuiltInQualityConfiguration.VeryHigh) } // (1)!
);

renderer.SetQuality(BuiltInQualityConfiguration.Medium); // (2)!
renderer.SetQuality(new RenderQualityConfig(BuiltInQualityConfiguration.High) { // (3)!
    AntiAliasingMode = AntiAliasingMode.TaaBalanced,
    DepthOfFieldQuality = Quality.Standard
});

1. Creates a renderer using the VeryHigh preset. If no quality is given, renderers use RenderQualityConfig.SceneDefault (the High preset), or RenderQualityConfig.CanvasSceneDefault (the Canvas preset) for canvas scenes.

2. Changes an existing renderer's quality to the Medium preset. Quality can be changed at any time.

3. Starts from a preset and adjusts individual options. This is usually easier than setting every option yourself.

Presets

The six general-purpose presets. Most of the differences are in fine detail (see the comparisons for each option below).

Option	VeryLow	Low	Medium	High (default)	VeryHigh	Ultra
ScreenSpaceEffectsQuality	VeryLow	Low	Standard	High	High	VeryHigh
AntiAliasingMode	None	None	Fxaa	Fxaa	TaaBalanced	TaaIncreasedSharpening
InternalResolutionScalar	0.667	0.75	1	1	1	1
ShadowQuality	VeryLow	Low	Standard	High	High	VeryHigh
AmbientOcclusionQuality	VeryLow	Low	Standard	Standard	High	VeryHigh
BloomQuality	VeryLow	Low	Standard	High	VeryHigh	VeryHigh
DepthOfFieldQuality	VeryLow	Low	Standard	High	High	VeryHigh
HdrColorPrecision	VeryLow	Low	Standard	High	High	VeryHigh
DitheringEnabled	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

There are also two special-purpose presets:

• Canvas disables post-processing, shadows, anti-aliasing, and dithering, and sets the strength of ambient occlusion, bloom, and depth of field to zero. It's the default for canvas scenes, which need none of these effects.
• DebugAndDiagnostic is intended for debugging, where the raw, unprocessed output is often more useful and you don't need high visual fidelity. (It leaves InternalResolutionScalar at 100%; lower it as well if you need maximum speed.)

Quality Options

The following table shows the relative cost of each option at each preset's setting. Exact costs vary with hardware, resolution, and scene, so treat the following table as a guide, and measure your own application where it matters (see Measuring Framerate).

Option	VeryLow	Low	Medium	High (default)	VeryHigh	Ultra
ScreenSpaceEffectsQuality	None	None	None	Heavy	Heavy	Heavy
DepthOfFieldQuality	Moderate ¹	Moderate ¹	Moderate ¹	Heavy ¹	Heavy ¹	Very heavy ¹
InternalResolutionScalar	Saves	Saves	Full	Full	Full	Full
AntiAliasingMode	None	None	Slight	Slight	Moderate	Moderate
ShadowQuality	Moderate ²	Moderate ²	Moderate ²	Moderate ²	Moderate ²	Moderate ²
AmbientOcclusionQuality	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight
BloomQuality	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight
HdrColorPrecision	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight
DitheringEnabled	None	None	Slight	Slight	Slight	Slight

None (disabled) · Slight (under ~5% of a frame) · Moderate (~5-40%) · Heavy (~40-100%) · Very heavy (more than a whole frame) · Saves (reduces the cost of almost everything else)

¹ Only when the camera has a FocusDistance set; otherwise depth of field costs nothing.
² With a single shadow-casting light. The cost grows with every light that casts shadows, and can become heavy (see Shadows).

Screen-Space Effects

ScreenSpaceEffectsQuality controls effects calculated from what's already visible on screen (i.e. reflections + refractions). At High and VeryHigh it enables screen-space reflections, which add reflections of nearby objects to shiny surfaces and improve the look of refractive materials such as glass (VeryHigh traces reflections further and more accurately). At Standard and below, screen-space reflections are disabled.

A glass-topped pawn with screen-space reflections disabled (Standard), enabled (High), and at their highest quality (VeryHigh). With reflections enabled, the blue light reflected in the glass spreads across its whole surface.

This is the most expensive option at the default settings: Lowering it from High to Standard roughly halves the frame time, and raising it to VeryHigh adds around a further tenth. Its cost is the main difference between the Medium and High presets, and it applies to the whole screen regardless of how few reflective surfaces are visible.

It's enabled by default as some scenes/applications may rely on screen-space reflections to achieve their intended effect; but if you don't need them lowering this setting to Standard or lower can recover a large proportion of your frame budget for practically no perceived drop in quality.

Depth of Field

DepthOfFieldQuality controls the depth-of-field effect: blurring parts of the image that are outside the camera's focus. It only has an effect when the camera's FocusDistance is set (see Depth of Field); otherwise it costs nothing. DepthOfFieldStrength scales the amount of blur (0f disables it).

Out-of-focus highlights at each depth-of-field quality level, with the camera's FocusDistance set to 10cm (so almost everything in view is out of focus).

DepthOfFieldStrength at 0.5, 1 (the default), and 2, with the camera's FocusDistance set to 10cm. Higher strengths blur out-of-focus areas more strongly. Notice the DoF effect strength also depends on the camera's Aperture setting.

With a focus distance set, depth of field is by far the most expensive option at its highest setting:

DepthOfFieldQuality	Added cost
VeryLow / Low	Moderate (around a tenth of a frame)
Standard	Moderate (around a seventh of a frame)
High (default)	Heavy (over half a frame)
VeryHigh	Very heavy (around three whole frames)

VeryHigh calculates the effect at full resolution, which looks the best but costs several times as much as the rest of the frame put together; reserve it for offline rendering or screenshots. Standard gives most of the visual benefit of High at a quarter of its cost.

Internal Resolution

InternalResolutionScalar renders each frame at a fraction of the output's resolution, then scales it up to full size (using AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution). 1f (the default) renders at full resolution, and the minimum is 0.1f.

The scene rendered at 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25% of the output resolution.

InternalResolutionScalar	Frame time (relative to 1.0)
1.0	100%
0.75	~75%
0.5	~55%
0.25	~40%

This reduces the cost of almost everything else (most effects are calculated per pixel), so it's one of the most effective options for recovering framerate, especially at high resolutions. Values down to around 0.75 give an exceptionally good performance-vs-quality tradeoff, particularly on high-resolution displays. The VeryLow quality preset selects 0.667 which is realistically the lowest most users would want to go before the scene becomes too degraded; anything lower than this is extremely noticable and offers diminishing returns on frame budget.

Anti-Aliasing

AntiAliasingMode smooths the jagged edges and flickering highlights caused by drawing a smooth scene on to a grid of pixels:

• None disables anti-aliasing.
• Fxaa is a fast filter that smooths edges in each frame. Its cost is very slight, but it slightly softens the image and can't fix every kind of aliasing.
• The four TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) modes blend information from several frames, giving smoother results than FXAA, especially for fine detail and small, bright highlights. TaaBalanced is a good default; TaaReducedGhosting reduces faint trails behind moving objects, TaaReducedFlickering reduces flickering in fine detail, and TaaIncreasedSharpening gives a sharper image at a greater risk of both.

The edge of a glass sphere with each anti-aliasing mode (enlarged 2x).

The TAA modes cost moderately more than Fxaa (around a tenth of a frame). TaaIncreasedSharpening costs slightly more than the other modes.

TAA and Compositing

A renderer added to a compositor with RenderCompositionType.RetainPreviousScenes can't use TAA, as TAA relies on blending each frame with the previous one. TinyFFR automatically uses Fxaa instead for such renderers.

Shadows

ShadowsEnabled turns shadows on or off for every light rendered by the renderer, and ShadowQuality sets the resolution of each light's shadow map: Lower levels give blockier, blurrier shadows.

How a directional light's shadow detail is spread across the scene is set on the light itself; see Shadow Distance & Stabilization.

Shadows disabled, and at each quality level. Note the blocky shadow edges at VeryLow and Low.

The cost of shadows depends mostly on how many lights cast them, rather than on their quality. With a single shadow-casting light, shadows cost slightly under a tenth of a frame, at any quality level. With nine shadow-casting lights, they cost over half a frame (at the default quality), and lowering ShadowQuality all the way to VeryLow only recovers about a fifth of that.

So if shadows are expensive in your scene, first reduce the number of lights that cast them (see each light type's CastsShadows, e.g. Point Lights), and only then consider lowering ShadowQuality.

Ambient Occlusion

AmbientOcclusionQuality controls screen-space ambient occlusion, which is subtle shading in crevices and corners where surfaces meet (where less ambient light would reach in reality). AmbientOcclusionStrength scales the effect (1f is the default, 0f disables it, and larger values exaggerate it).

The scene with ambient occlusion disabled, and at three quality levels (with AmbientOcclusionStrength set to 2f, to make the effect easier to see). Note the darker shading in the carved grooves of the central pieces and where they meet the board.

AmbientOcclusionStrength at 0.5, 1 (the default), and 2, at the default quality.

Ambient occlusion costs only a few percent of a frame, and its quality level makes almost no difference to either its cost.

Bloom

BloomQuality controls bloom: A soft glow around very bright areas, like the glow you'd see around bright lights through a real camera. BloomStrength scales it (0f disables it).

Ceiling lights with bloom disabled, and at three quality levels.

BloomStrength at 0.5, 1 (the default), and 2. Note the glow around the lights at the far end of the station.

Bloom costs only a few percent of a frame, regardless of its quality level.

HDR Color Precision

HdrColorPrecision sets the precision of the high-dynamic-range color buffer the scene is rendered in to before being tone mapped to the output. There are effectively only two levels: VeryLow and Low use a compact 32-bit format (with reduced precision), and Standard and above use a 16-bit-per-channel floating-point format. Lowering it to Low can save around 5% of a frame by reducing memory bandwidth; but results vary depending on the target hardware. The difference in quality is minor (noticable as slight banding or color shifts in smooth, dark gradients).

Dithering

DitheringEnabled adds a subtle, constantly changing noise pattern to the output, to hide banding (visible steps) in smooth color gradients. It costs nothing measurable, so there's no reason to disable it except where you need exact, unmodified pixel values.

Post-Processing

PostProcessingEnabled turns off all post-processing at once (tone mapping and color space conversion, anti-aliasing, bloom, depth of field, dithering, and internal resolution scaling). This only saves a tiny amount of frame time (when those quality settings are all already calibrated down) and this setting is not really intended as a framerate recovery control; rather it's intended for canvas scenes and for diagnostics.

Recovering Framerate

Measured from the default High preset, these are the changes to try first, roughly ordered by their cost-to-benefit ratio (i.e. how much framerate they recover for how little visual quality they cost):

1. If you use depth of field, lower DepthOfFieldQuality. VeryHigh costs around three whole frames, and High (the default) over half a frame; Standard costs about a quarter as much as High and looks similar.
2. Lower ScreenSpaceEffectsQuality to Standard. This roughly halves the frame time, at the cost of screen-space reflections, which many scenes barely show.
3. Use the cheaper quality for transmissive materials. Glass and other transmissive materials using TransmissiveMaterialQuality.FullReflectionsAndRefraction (the default) are very expensive while they're in view, especially with screen-space reflections enabled; in testing, a few small glass objects added around 75% to the frame time. SkyboxOnlyReflectionsAndRefraction removes almost all of that cost. (For models loaded from a file, set ModelCreationConfig.TransmissiveMaterialQuality.)
4. Lower InternalResolutionScalar. 0.75 saves about a quarter of the frame time and is hard to notice; 0.5 saves almost half. Alternatively reduce the Window/RenderOutputBuffer size.
5. Reduce the number of shadow-casting lights. Each one adds to the cost of every frame. Lowering ShadowQuality saves comparatively little.
6. Use Fxaa rather than a TAA mode (saving around a tenth of a frame), if the TAA modes are in use.
7. The rest make little difference: Disabling ambient occlusion or bloom, or lowering HdrColorPrecision to Low, each save only a few percent; the quality levels of shadows, ambient occlusion, bloom, and dithering save almost nothing.

Switching to the Medium preset applies most of the first two steps at once (roughly halving the frame time), while keeping anti-aliasing and every effect enabled. Low and VeryLow add a reduced internal resolution, and disable anti-aliasing and dithering.

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