Posted January 18, 2020
Making The Surge 2 run and even look equivilant to The Surge 1 on a low-end PC is kind of rough. I just wanted to share my tips for anyone else playing this game on an older or mobile GPU.
1. Turn off "Dynamic Scaling" and instead of using "Resolution Scaling" just lower the base resolution instead. For example, you'll get better performance and visual quality running the game at 720p at 100% scaling than 1080p and 50 - 75% scaling. The biggest sacrifice here is the menus won't look very good.
2. You'll want to keep all the fancy extra settings disabled or on "Low" except the Textures. If you have at least 2 GB of VRAM you should be able to get away with using the "High" setting with "Texture Streaming" enabled.
3. Lower "Bloom", "Lens Flare" and "Chromatic Abberation" to at least 25% - 50%. These setings are personal choice, but I found the game looked best when these settings are much lower than the default. I always completely disable "Motion Blur" but that's up to you.
4. Do not use the "TAA" anti-aliasing setting. If you have low-end video card this option causes severe blurring on character models and other objects when they are illuminated. "SMAA" is probably the best setting for a low-end machine, but unfortunately it does a terrible job in general compared to "TAA".
5. Upgrade your video drivers. The game uses Vulkan, which is still a fairly young API and having the newest video drivers might help with performance.
1. Turn off "Dynamic Scaling" and instead of using "Resolution Scaling" just lower the base resolution instead. For example, you'll get better performance and visual quality running the game at 720p at 100% scaling than 1080p and 50 - 75% scaling. The biggest sacrifice here is the menus won't look very good.
2. You'll want to keep all the fancy extra settings disabled or on "Low" except the Textures. If you have at least 2 GB of VRAM you should be able to get away with using the "High" setting with "Texture Streaming" enabled.
3. Lower "Bloom", "Lens Flare" and "Chromatic Abberation" to at least 25% - 50%. These setings are personal choice, but I found the game looked best when these settings are much lower than the default. I always completely disable "Motion Blur" but that's up to you.
4. Do not use the "TAA" anti-aliasing setting. If you have low-end video card this option causes severe blurring on character models and other objects when they are illuminated. "SMAA" is probably the best setting for a low-end machine, but unfortunately it does a terrible job in general compared to "TAA".
5. Upgrade your video drivers. The game uses Vulkan, which is still a fairly young API and having the newest video drivers might help with performance.