AION 2 FPS Optimization & Full Breakdown Comparison

This is the full breakdown of AION 2 performance and image quality across 21 graphics settings. The sections run from the most impactful settings to the least impactful, starting with Quick Settings. Use the FPS charts and screenshot comparisons below to decide which options to adjust for your system.

Quick Settings

Quick Settings is the graphics preset option, and of course it should have the largest impact on performance.

Each step that you move down at slightly lowers the quality, mostly to do with lighting and foliage, with the largest jump between normal and low, as well as small steps in between. Pick a suitable preset for your FPS target and adjust down from there. I would recommend choosing anything above normal for a starting point, though.

Upscaling (DLSS)

Upscaling should give you a pretty big boost in performance as long as you’re GPU limited. On my system, I gained quite a few FPS by dropping to quality, however, anything below that, my system seemed to be CPU-limited or otherwise, and performance plateaued while quality continued to drop for each step that I moved down in upscaling. Add 2K or even 1080p, quality is a great choice and balanced at 4K. If you can play native, I’d highly recommend it as everything should be a lot sharper and look a lot better.

Optimize before enabling upscaling by leaving it on native and then after optimization setting it to quality or maybe balanced.

Upscaling (Native)

There is no way to truly disable upscaling, so you’ll need to choose native as the closest off option. For the most part, TSR and TAA look a little bit blurry compared to DLSS and FSR, which almost always have the edge. Here, DLSS seems to look the best, at least on my system, so I’d recommend choosing that on NVIDIA cards, otherwise choose FSR.

Effect Quality

Moving away from upscaling, the largest impact on performance, quite surprisingly, is effect quality. Even though just moving around in general gameplay, it’s very not noticeable at all. It’s mostly noticeable when you see particles from mounds appearing and disappearing, or maybe during combat, although the FPS impact is consistent and always, there’s a pretty big jump between normal and low. However, I would highly recommend playing on High and above, otherwise, a lot of useful, interesting particles vanish, like those when you mount, etc.

Below high there’s far fewer particles.

Cloud Quality

Performance wise the largest jump comes from very high down to high and everything below that is roughly the same even though setting it to low removes basically all of the clouds leaving nothing but fine wisps high up in the sky.

I’d highly recommend choosing normal or above.

Shaow Quality

Shadow quality with each step that you move down, shadows get slightly blurrier and smaller shadows removed. For the most part, if you like sharper shadows, push us up too high. Otherwise, low should be more than fine. However, very yellow shadows seem to become disconnected from the sources causing them, and they look just a little bit weird.

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient seclusion has only two options, NCAO and a GTAO. Either ways, they’re turned on. NCAO is the less performance heading one, although it has far less of an effect, it is still on no matter what you choose. So if you want performance, leave it at that. Otherwise, for a 10% FPS cost, you can get much deeper ambient occlusion at shadows, giving the world a ton more depth, however, performance takes a pretty big hit.

Reflection Quality

Reflection quality is pretty subtle for the most part and no matter what you choose, reflections will mainly be turned on. For environments, they appear all the way down to about normal, where hills and that seem to vanish from water reflections, whereas animal and peopled reflections seem to persist no matter what, I’d recommend choosing normal at lowest, although the only FPS gain comes from setting it to low or very low.

Volumetric Light Scattering

This one’s pretty tough to compare in-game visuals wise. There’s almost no change between these and setting this off results in a solid 8-10% FPS gain.

Water Reflection Method

Water reflections exist basically always and choosing performance removes a lot of the environment reflections which I definitely would not recommend. These are set to quality even though you can see a small FPS boost on performance.

Post-Processing

Post-processing has incredibly subtle impacts on bloom appearing between normal and very high, whereas low removes the lens distortion and some chromatic aberration around the edges of your screen, I would recommend leaving this option higher. And performance-wise, you shouldn’t really see a difference between these except for on very low-powered systems. The drop, I assume, has to do with more players appearing during benchmarking, things going on in the background, etc.

View Distance Quality

View distance quality at each step removes distant objects from view and throughout a general gameplay you won’t really notice a difference between any of these except for very low witcher moves objects which can be pretty close as long as you’re not struggling for VRAM I would recommend leaving this turned up however between very high and very low on my system there’s about a 600 MB saving dropping me from 10 to 9 GB VRAM.

Vegetation Quality

Vegetation quality mainly adds more grass and distant trees, with each step removing slightly more and leaving stained or coloured ground to replace the missing foliage. This effect works pretty well in the distance as visible between very high and high. However, when it comes a lot closer, like high to normal, it can be pretty distracting. I would recommend leaving this set all the way up to very high if possible, as there isn’t really a huge difference between these performance-wise. I would assume if you are struggling forward VRAM, this is something you should consider lowering.

Model Quality

Model quality has a very subtle impact on how objects look, and for the most part, it’s way more visible in foliage, surprisingly. With each step moving down distant foliage lowers in quality, leaves removed, and they become more transparent for the lack of performance impact. I’d recommend leaving this on high or very high.

Volumetric Fog

Volumetric fog is an incredibly cheap effect, performance-wise, and I’d highly recommend leaving it turned on as it adds so much more to the game.

Player Particle Effects

You can choose effects to only appear on your character or on other characters as well. Throughout a general gameplay, there’s lots of particle-based idle animations Which still play, however, a lot of the particles caused by them don’t show at all. During combat, this will be more noticeable, and I’d only recommend turning this off if you’re in huge group raids or things like that. And during combat, your FPS struggles, consider setting it to party or self only.

Shading Quality

Shading quality has an incredibly subtle effect on how things look, mainly visible in the sky, I would think, and for the lack of performance impact, I’d recommend leaving this at whatever your presets chosen, if not high or very high.

Anti-Aliasing

Anti-aliasing is mostly handled by upscaling, so it’s surprising that this option still exists. However, with the lack of change visually and performance-wise, it might be broken or otherwise offset by your upscaler of choice and is either broken or not fully implemented. Right now, there’s not a difference between these options.

Texture Quality

Texture quality is a freebie, and I’d highly recommend raising this if you have a graphics card with more VRAM available from 9.5 to 8.9 gigabytes of VRAM used, it should raise the quality of the environments, characters, and more by quite a bit. So I’d recommend leaving this at your preset chosen option, otherwise higher if VRAM allows.

Global Illumination

Global illumination adds that warmth and glow to the world which persists all the way, stepping down from very high to normal, where a lot of the illumination vanishes from normal to low, and finally down to very low, darkening the environment a lot and making it a lot less visually pleasing to look at. While very high and high might appear a little bit blown out compared to normal, I personally like how they look and for the lack of performance impact, this option is really based on your taste. From high to very high, I moved from 10 to 9.5 gigs of VRM used, where it had a further 400MB drop from Normal to Low.

Mass Combat Quality

Finally, mass combat quality is difficult to quantify visually as there’s basically no change between them throughout its general gameplay, at least that I noticed. And I’d only expect huge raids and parties to have FBS jobs when this option is raised, unless that sounds like you, leave this option at whatever your preset chose, if not high or very high.

Otherwise, throughout general gameplay, there’s no FPS difference, even during combat and small group combat.