Atomic Coronary heart continues to dominate each my skilled time and my private brainspace; it truly is an interesting recreation, for causes good and horrible alike. Its most up-to-date twist got here within the full lack of ray tracing at launch, regardless of varied pre-release builds having been held up by Nvidia themselves because the expertise’s exemplars. Crispy critters, certainly.
Nonetheless, for all Atomic Coronary heart’s faults, visuals and efficiency are usually not amongst them. In distinction to different latest big-namers like Forspoken, Wild Hearts, and Returnal, Atomic Coronary heart can simply be made to hit 60fps on older/slower PC {hardware}, and scales properly into the 144fps area with extra highly effective equipment. Right here, we’ll look at how Mundfish’s born-in-the-USSR BioShock tribute runs on a number of totally different graphics playing cards, earlier than discovering the very best settings to mix for a perfect high quality/efficiency stability.
Atomic Coronary heart system necessities and PC efficiency
Even with out these traced rays, Atomic Coronary heart’s eager eye for aesthetics makes it a great looker, and one which’s backed up with excessive technical constancy. There’s the occasional spot of basic Soviet-style nook slicing, like how almost all of the corpses strewn round have the identical face and hair, however the environmental and enemy designs particularly are boldly drawn and extremely detailed.
However, Atomic Coronary heart doesn’t make outrageous calls for of your rig, the official PC specs beginning off with a easy GTX 960 or Radeon R9 380. The mega-popular GTX 1060 is listed as delivering 60fps at 1080p, albeit utilizing the Low high quality preset. Right here’s the complete checklist:
Atomic Coronary heart minimal 30fps system necessities (Low, 1080p / 30fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 / AMD Radeon R9 380
- CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
- RAM: 8GB (12GB advisable)
- Storage: 90GB HDD (SSD advisable)
Atomic Coronary heart minimal 60fps system necessities (Low, 1080p / 60fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon RX 580
- CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
- RAM: 8GB (12GB advisable)
- Storage: 90GB HDD (SSD advisable)
Atomic Coronary heart medium system necessities (Medium, 1080p / 60fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 / AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
- CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K / AMD Ryzen 5 1400
- RAM: 16GB
- Storage: 90GB SSD
Atomic Coronary heart excessive system necessities (Excessive, 1080p / 60fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
- CPU: Intel Core i5-7600K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- RAM: 16GB
- Storage: 90GB SSD
Atomic Coronary heart extremely system necessities (Extremely, 1080p / 60fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Tremendous / AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
- CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K / AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
- RAM: 16GB
- Storage: 90GB SSD
Atomic Coronary heart extremely 4K system necessities (Extremely, 4K / 60fps)
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 / AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
- RAM: 16GB
- Storage: 90GB SSD
I examined all my GPUs with an Intel Core i5-11600K, a gaming CPU that sits above a lot of the processors listed above, although the graphics card is the most important muscle to flex right here, and if something it seems just like the official specs are pessimistic. Utilizing a customized benchmark run throughout Atomic Coronary heart’s open world (a extra demanding surroundings than its inside halls and corridors), the GTX 1060 really averaged 103fps on 1080p / Low, not ‘simply’ 60fps. The Medium preset produced 74fps as properly, and Excessive averaged out at a wonderfully playable 49fps (although did drop to sub-40fps throughout heavy fight).
The GTX 1080, from the advisable spec for Top quality, additionally cruised to 83fps utilizing this preset at 1080p. It additionally had no huge issues on Extremely and even the best Atomic preset, scoring 76fps and 59fps respectively. It’s an honest card for Atomic Coronary heart at 1440p too, pumping out 61fps on Excessive and 46fps on Atomic.
Climbing all the best way as much as maxed-out 4K, the advisable RTX 3080 could also be a step additional than what you want. My RTX 3070 may common 70fps at 4K / Atomic, although did want DLSS on High quality mode to get there. Those that’ve handled themselves to one of many newest high-end GPUs received’t strictly want upscaling, because the RTX 4070 Ti scored 75fps on Atomic at native 2160p. with High quality DLSS, that rose to 103fps, which is superb for a model new recreation.
Atomic Coronary heart additionally helps FSR and DLSS 3 body era, the latter offering an extra FPS enhance on prime of the same old enhancement by way of upscaling. I solely bought a modest enchancment on the RTX 4070 Ti, although, with body era and High quality DLSS upscaling making for an 111fps common – simply 8fps greater than with upscaling alone. That’s nonetheless a velvety framerate however maybe not well worth the enter lag penalty that the AI frames incur.
Again down within the land of a budget and cheerful, the Steam Deck seems fairly adept at working Atomic Coronary heart. In my benchmark, the hand held PC managed 40-50fps on the Medium preset (with out FSR upscaling). Dropping to Low pushed that as much as 50-60fps, which grew to become a near-solid 60fps in most inside scenes. The one sudden technical difficulty got here on the recreation’s dying moments, the place an ending slideshow did not play (audio continued as regular) earlier than slicing to credit. This does want fixing, although for the reason that recreation is already over at this level… properly, there are worse locations to interrupt.
I didn’t encounter a lot else to watch out for, on desktop or on the Deck. I skilled stuttering exactly as soon as, briefly and several other hours into the story, which is comparatively good going for a contemporary Unreal recreation. So long as you look ahead to the shader compilation course of to complete after booting up or altering settings, you need to be dandy on any mixture of somewhat-recent PC {hardware}.
Atomic Coronary heart: greatest settings information
It could be lacking ray tracing (and and FoV adjustment, which is outwardly also coming in a later patch), however Atomic Coronary heart comes stocked with a good mixture of graphics settings to toy round with. I’ve examined all of them individually, to search out out that are the very best settings to tone down or crank up.
My management setup this time was the GTX 1080 working at 1440p, which I respect is a little bit of an odd mixture in 2023, however contemplating this GPU is simply advisable for Excessive-quality 1080p I used to be curious to see how excessive I may make it punch above its weight. Moreover, it’s an odd recreation. Sue me.
Anyhoo, with the GTX 1080 put in, my take a look at rig achieved 123fps on the Low preset, 93fps on Medium, 61fps on Excessive, 60fps on Extremely, and 46fps on Atomic. Since there’s solely a tiny efficiency hole between Excessive and Extremely, let’s use Atomic as our place to begin, and see how dropping every particular person setting to Medium-level can pace it up.
Depth of subject: An often distinguished place within the checklist for DoF, particularly as disabling it solely added a single body per second, placing the GTX 1080 as much as 47fps. Nonetheless, the impact doesn’t contribute a lot, so I’m inclined to chop it.
Movement blur: Disabling blur didn’t have an effect on efficiency in any respect, however then it’s additionally not remotely crucial in case your PC is working this far above 30fps.
Anti-aliasing: You may persist with the Atomic preset’s Excessive TAA right here. Medium TAA added 1fps to common efficiency, however the added sharpness of Excessive is extra worth.
DLSS Tremendous Decision: Completely value utilizing at 1440p and above, if in case you have a GeForce RTX card to reap the benefits of it. The GTX 1080 shouldn’t be one such card, although on the RTX 4070 Ti, enabling the sharpest High quality setting for this upscaler boosted 4K / Atomic efficiency by 37%. Totally free, basically.
DLSS Body Technology: That is solely accessible to RTX 40 sequence GPUs, and makes use of interpolated frames (just like the movement smoothing setting on a TV, however not offputting) to enhance efficiency. Nevertheless, it additionally provides enter lag, and on this case I don’t suppose it’s well worth the achieve: my RTX 4070 Ti solely went from 103fps with commonplace upscaling to 111fps with body era. And that is the weakest RTX 40 sequence GPU on the time of writing, so each it and any others (just like the RTX 4080) will run Atomic Coronary heart simply effective with out generated frames.
Nvidia Reflex: Not really a graphics setting, regardless of being within the graphics choices menu. Set this to On or Increase, offered your mouse helps it – Reflex cuts down on system latency for gratis.
FidelityFX Tremendous Decision: Hi there, FSR. That is your upscaler for any GPU that isn’t an RTX mannequin, and may produce smoother framerates immediately. Getting the GTX 1080 from 46fps to 63fps on FSR’s High quality setting, for example. Sadly, at 1440p, FSR is visibly blurrier than each native res and DLSS, so might be greatest stored for 4K until you’re keen to stay with the loss in sharpness.
Animation high quality: Hold this on Max. Decrease settings lower the space at which enemies use low-FPS animations to avoid wasting sources, however even on Medium, this distance is extremely brief, and the animation jitteriness is tough to overlook. Moreover, Medium nonetheless ran at an unchanged 46fps.
Shadows: In all probability top-of-the-line settings to scale back for improved efficiency. Medium shadows don’t look too unhealthy, and are a lot quicker in comparison with Max, propelling the GTX 1080 to 53fps.
Ambient occlusion: One other one to show down, as Medium netted me 51fps with minimal loss in visible high quality.
Visible FX: Regardless of some fights turning into laser reveals straight out of an Eric Prydz live performance, lowering this setting doesn’t do something in any respect for efficiency.
Variety of objects: There’s no Medium possibility right here, so I attempted Excessive – getting 46fps once more – and Low, which gave me 47fps. The Max setting is ok.
Supplies: There was a teensy 1fps achieve in reducing this from Max to Medium, although it received’t be crucial until your PC is actually struggling.
Volumetric fog: Altering from Max to Medium afforded the GTX 1080 a modest 2fps achieve. I’d take it, even when there’s a seen distinction as soon as you recognize the place to look.
Postprocessing: This setting gave a surprisingly spirited enhance after I lowered it to Medium, serving to the GTX 1080 to 53fps. One other one for the checklist.
Textures: Carry on Max. Medium makes Atomc Coronary heart much less fairly, and didn’t add a single common FPS.
Texture anisotropy: Anisotropic filtering by one other identify. And equally un-sweet as a way of elevating framerates: to get higher efficiency than the utmost 8x, you need to drop all of the all the way down to 2x, and that’s only for a measly 1fps extra.
3D mannequin high quality: That is yet one more setting the place reducing the standard doesn’t assist efficiency in any respect. Depart on Max.
Vegetation density: An eagle eye may spot the distinction in locations, however for me it was well worth the lack of Max high quality to spice up as much as 52fps on Medium.
Onerous drive pace: That is set to ‘SSD’ on greater presets and ‘HDD’ on decrease ones. Altering to the latter didn’t make a distinction on my desktop PC, by way of after I tried switching the opposite means – HDD to SSD – on the Steam Deck, it really ran barely slower. Due to this fact, set this to SSD in case you’ve bought a decently highly effective PC, and set it to HDD on lower-end {hardware}.
Shader cache: Unsure why you’d care to show this off, although for the report, doing so didn’t actively damage the RTX 1080’s efficiency – it nonetheless averaged 46fps.
On the subject of choosing settings your self, I’d counsel that the best solution to go about it’s to decide on the Atomic preset after which make the person adjustments under. This could present a sizeable jolt to general efficiency, although if it’s nonetheless not the place you need it, attempt the Extremely preset as a place to begin as a substitute.
- Depth of subject: Off
- Movement blur: Off
- Nvidia Reflex: On/Increase
- Shadows: Medium
- Ambient occlusion: Medium
- Volumetric fog: Medium
- Postprocessing: Medium
- Vegetation density: Medium
High quality-level DLSS can be value enabling in case your GPU permits it, although it’s disappointing how a lot worse FSR seems on its equal setting. The latter continues to be helpful at 4K, however at 1440p, the diminished rendering decision is perhaps a bit too low.
