Ubisoft has just released Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora on all platforms. The game is powered by the Snowdrop Engine, and it’s currently one of the best-looking games on PC. In fact, its open-world forest areas are so detailed that they will remind you of Crysis. Yes, Avatar’s forests feel like what Crysis 4 should look like.
In order to capture the following screenshots, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and an NVIDIA RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 546.29 driver. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora features RTGI, ray-traced shadows, and reflections. What’s interesting is that Massive used software-based Ray Tracing, kind of like UE5’s Software Lumen. This means that you can enable them even if your GPU doesn’t support hardware Ray Tracing. But, there’s a catch. In dark areas, you will notice some visual artifacts. Also, the game cannot scale well on older GPUs. Well, that is unless you use FSR 3.0.
Speaking of FSR 3.0, I’d also want to touch on it. In my previous article, I said that the game had some stuttery/tearing issues. So let me elaborate on this.
FSR 3.0 Frame Generation now supports VRR displays, and it does not suffer from frame pacing issues. You also won’t have to force V-Sync. This is amazing news. And yes, the FSR 3.0 implementation is better than the one in Forspoken or Immortals of Aveum. However, most of you will still notice numerous tearing issues. HardwareUnboxed has explained this issue. Apparently, FSR 3.0 Frame Generation is disabled for the game’s HUD elements. As a result of that, the game can feel stutter-y while moving the mouse. I was able to immediately notice this. So, for me, FSR 3.0 FG is a big no-no. Yes, it doesn’t have the previous frame pacing issues. However, I can’t stand tearing now that I’ve enjoyed the smoothness of G-Sync/FreeSync.
Our PC Performance Analysis for Avatar will go live tomorrow. Until then, enjoy the following screenshots. These screenshots are at Native 4K with DLAA on Max Settings. And while we’re not looking at a path-traced game, I believe we can all agree that it looks absolutely stunning.
I’ve also included a video with the official benchmark tool that Ubisoft added to the game. Just take a look at the third benchmark scene. In that scene, we have some incredible wind effects. These wind effects are as good as those showcased for the new Star Wars game. I know a lot of people questioned that gameplay video. But, after seeing this windy scene in Avatar, I’m almost certain that what Ubisoft showed was in-game footage.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I’ve read that it’s supposed to use hw rtgi if the hw is available is this not the case then and it’s just sw?
“Apparently, FSR 3.0 Frame Generation is disabled for the game’s HUD elements. As a result of that, the game can feel stutter-y while moving the mouse.”
But this means the whole game feels stuttery? Not just the mouse?
I’m playing with FG right now, put my monitor at 100hz and put vsync on in game. It feels pretty smooth, definitely above 60fps.
To see what John’s talking about, check out Hardware Unboxed’s latest video on the use of FSR3 FG in this game. If you’re sensitive to these things it can be egregious, but it seems like it doesn’t bother you in this case so you’re fine with FSR3 FG enabled.
The tearing happens in all refresh rates and framerates. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The tearing occurs because the HUD elements are at half the framerate of the game. So, if the game runs at 100fps with FSR 3.0 FG, the HUD elements are at 50fps. You’re lucky if you haven’t noticed them.
It’s a new shiny.
My early impression is that the game is probably just average when all things are considered. Certainly not mediocre but not enough value for $70 imo. It does check the box for really good graphics which is the most important consideration for the average gamer so it will probably sell pretty well anyway.
I honestly don’t think it looks very good. Everything looks very fake and rubber like.
I can’t stand those miserable blue bastards. How many avatar films are there now, 2, 3? My interest died when duke nukem lost in the first one
humanity first. mp4
There are two and I believe there are five movies planned for the total story. But it probably depends how they perform in the theaters.
Maybe this game will be on my radar if it gets released on steam and adds DLSS. Nice to see that it’s getting some good feedback.
It has dlss, just not dlss frame gen.
ok, good to know. thanks for the heads up
3d mark 2003 had better nature graphics lol
This game might look nice but after watching about one to two hours of it, I think it looks very boring to play.
and yet you watched someone play for 2h.. it seems to me like you liked it…
Ubisoft just makes the same game over and over and over with a different skin. Star Wars Outlaws will just be The Division with a Star Wars skin.
I honestly lost interest in this game when i found out you cant play as the good guys, i saw someone playing it for a while, they went hard on the blue catfaced indians trope, and then the pollution trope and cringe diverse hipster resistance humans, ewww, purge those traitors HUMANITY FIRST.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBS9pqboACI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKaSudooh0U
In the first five to ten minutes of the game, a woman with purple hair and tattoos appears.
yeah and it has hipsters as well.
Eradicate the blues!
i bet the map is recycled from farcry
John, who’s your dealer? This ubisht trash good for nothing rip off of their other IPs to be the best looking game? You’re just trolling with this article cause it’s been a slow week, admit it.
Replay Dead island 2 and pay attention to the UE details. For the love of god. This clearly is an oversight.
https://media0.giphy.com/media/AVuNRNK0hSmpEComKg/giphy-downsized-small.mp4
AFAIK, Dead Island 2 only has static lights, whereas this one is dynamic.
Right, John?
Yeap, that’s right. And as for Dead Island 2…
https://www.dsogaming.com/screenshot-news/dead-island-2-is-one-of-the-best-looking-games-on-pc/
so based on that title they’re both one of the best looking games so far lol
I hope he keeps covering this game in spite of you now.
lol ok mate whatever gets u hard at night.
Say what you want about ubisoft but their Snowdrop Engine is amazing.
It looks good and runs nice.
Doesn’t matter how it looks, what games do run on it, that is the problem.
it def dont look 16 YEARS ahead of crysis
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1de8bfa663164e6801183e452b67140f115ec776df3cdc1d4ebc1b5c05a180d4.jpg
It looks very normal… Very console graphics… Graphics stylistically look quite similar to older Call of Duty’s.
“Next Crysis” is a lame excuse for clickbait.
Looks worse then Metro EE, recent star wars games, in fact im currently playing older chinese game made on UE4, faith of dashant and guess what? looks better then avatar… I think you forgot how good Crisis looked and how many years ahead of competition it was, in fact it probably looks beter then avatar still.
Yeah the lighting looks crap compared to Metro.
Not surprising though it’s sw traced lumen crap.
NOWHERE NEAR WHAT CRYSIS WAS/IS!
who ever made an assumption that this plastic amalgamation of vomited colors is the next “Crysis” game, Gets a fart out 10 in my book.
Players should be allowed to be the humans in this game.
Did you press Q while doing the screens John?
I am growing so old I don’t even care how the games look anymore.
I wish we will go photorealistic sooner or later, so the focus goes back to writing good stories.
Also filtering SJW and pink haired ladies/thems would be nice. Why did they have to infect our hobby, I will never understand.
I wouldn’t support anything jubisoft, they peaked with fc2/3 and w the shenanigans with fc3 save encryption we could see how it just slid into always online for a sp game since then, still have denuvo on everything since 2017, never even patched it out on old game like origins. Read the steam discussions full of hate for always online req and problems.
And avatar is just more occult programming nonsense disguised as scifi as well as social marxism spreading fake history under other appearances. This awful dev even had the effrontery to have “history” mode in origins and odyssey like they were there and such. Obvious feminotseeism in odyssey or tranneeism, both really etc etc
F*k those blue monkeys, burn them all to a crisp and crack their whole evil hivemind planet for resources before nuking it from orbit to make sure nothing more grows from it!
I wouldn’t support anything jubisoft, they peaked with fc2/3 and w the shenanigans with fc3 save encryption we could see how it just slid into always online for a sp game since then, still have denuvo on everything since 2017, never even patched it out on old game like origins. Read the steam discussions full of hate for always online req and problems.
And avatar is just more occult programming nonsense disguised as scifi as well as social marxism spreading fake history under other appearances. This awful dev even had the effrontery to have “history” mode in origins and odyssey like they were there and such. Obvious feminotseeism in odyssey or tranneeism, both really etc etc
Thea isn’t the next crisis.
The lighting looks fake sw gi lumen crap look.
Hybrid shadows lmfao deffo AMD sponsored
GPU usage is strange John no? (on the bench)
Did you know you can unlock a graphics “Unobtainium” mode that cranks the graphics up even further? All you have to do is enter “-unlockmaxsettings” in the Add Launch Arguments menu in the Ubisoft Connect client
I guess it will really bring a 4090 to it’s knees but is basically futureproofing added for the next generation GPUs
Also every time you run the in-game benchmark it drops a CSV into C:UsersusernameDocumentsMy GamesAFOP folder that you can import into Excel and it gives you 26 datapoints (FPS, CPU %, CPU time, etc.) per frame for all 8070 frames in the benchmark. May have to consider adding some formulas for figuring average, min, max, 1% lows, 0.1% lows and perhaps looking for where bottlenecks are by looking times spikes in CPU or GPU rendering to figure out if it’s a GPU bottleneck (High GPU time, low CPU time) or a CPU bottleneck (High CPU time, Low GPU time)
Nah, doesn’t look any better than Crysis 3, a decade old game by now…