The Blood of Dawnwalker
Overview
Ultra+ for The Blood of Dawnwalker focuses on improving performance as well as improving the visual issues relating to flat interiors and tonemapping/local exposure causing haloing around the character.
Game Tips
- By default, Ultra+ will significantly improve performance across the board
- Suggest turning skylight and moonlightintensity down to around 0.6
- Reminder that epic settings will naturally be much more expensive than in game epic for example
- Medium Lighting Resolution is almost indistinguishable from higher options
- Use low and medium presets for maximum performance if needed
- LightingVRAM setting will reduce VRAM consumption if needed
- Set CutsceneFPSTarget to unlock FPS in cutscenes
- Enable Ultrawide Fix to remove black bars from cutscenes
FAQ
- Do I need to change anything? No you will get performance boost and some fixes from installing Ultra+, but it is recommended to explore the mod options for the best experience.
- Why does my game flicker? It happens, this game has unstable frame times which can be visible with OLED + VRR. Clearing shaders and using high post processing is an option that may mitigate some flickering problems. Otherwise, recommend using a frame limiter and capping to ~20% of your maximum FPS. See the Performance and Upscaling guide for suggestions.
- Why does the city still run poorly? The developers implemented a custom population system with expensive NPC assets that all rely on the CPU. This causes CPU bottlenecks. No further improvement can be made without reworking their custom systems.
Regrade
- The goal of the Ultra+ regrade is to fix the poorly implemented lighting and tonemapping across the game - constant glowing around the character, extremely flat and overbright interiors, and reducing the amount of flashing when you exit an interior.
- There are multiple options, typically CustomGrading and CustomInteriorControl darker/darker or darker/local exposure will provide the best result.
- It is still a work in progress as every type of interior has to be individually tuned
Add-ons
- ShadowStepFix: Requires Ultimate ASI Loader as version.dll or winmm.dll - this addon fixes shadow step costing approximately 1 million fps, only compatible with patch 1.0.5
Configuration
| Setting | Options | Keybind | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| AutoApplyConfig | off,on | automatically reload settings when config changes - primarily to be used with the UPM overlay | |
| BetterReflectionSDFs | game,off,on,on_epic | Increases the resolution of meshes in global software lumen space, most noticeable in reflections | |
| Bloom | game/0-3 | Bloom intensity (0.0 = off, 1.0 = default, 2.0 = double, game = use game default) | |
| CPUOptimizations | game,on | reduces amount of dynamic data in scene, reduces distant shadows, and may cause some shadows to become static sooner | |
| CPUOptimizations_City | game,on,on_max,on_no_npc_change | allows toggling CPU optimizations that will optimize NPC movement and animations and will also slightly simplify some background NPCs and distant NPC animations for a further gain - on_max enables an additional optimization that may be less stable | |
| CharacterLightIntensity | game/0.0-1.0 | multiplier for fake character lighting intensity | |
| CharacterLightIntensity_Cutscenes | game/0.0-1.0 | multiplier for fake character lighting intensity inside of cutscenes and dialog | |
| ColorGrading | game,off | allows disabling the ingame color grading, which changes only contrast per-area, if a more neutral and consistent level of contrast is desired | |
| CustomGrading | game,lighter,moderate,darker | EXPERIMENTAL - custom tonemapper and local exposure settings to go along with DisableFakeLights and CustomInteriorControl | |
| CustomInteriorControl | game,brighter,darker,local_exposure | EXPERIMENTAL - local_exposure preserves authored interiors except local exposure from CustomGrading and fixed skylight leaking of 0.02; inactive when CustomGrading=game | |
| CutsceneFPSTarget | game/30-240 | changing an active target requires a game restart | |
| DebugLogging | off,on | enable verbose logging and optional native UObjectCache profiling (10s reports, measurement overhead) - ALT+D toggles at runtime | |
| Denoiser | game,none,none_temporalgihigh,temporal,temporal_high,rayreconstruction,rayreconstruction_temporalgihigh | F2 | Changes global illumination and reflection denoising - allows enabling ray reconstruction - temporal high settings increase the amount of temporal information to reduce noise at the cost of ghosting |
| DepthOfField | game,off,on,on_less_blurry | depth of field control - off reduces noise in cutscenes | |
| DisableFakeLights | game,on | Enabling takes effect immediately; disabling needs a game restart - disables fake emissive lights - fixes overlapping shadow artifact on heads and makes interiors less flat. | |
| EnableKeybinds | off,on | Enables individual setting keybinds if they are available, does not change global keybinds | |
| ExtendedDrawDistance | game,on | disables distance based culling for minor foliage | |
| ExtendedShadowQuality | game,veryhigh,epic,insane | epic matches in-game epic, insane is higher quality | |
| FilmGrain | game,off,on | film grain effect control | |
| Fog | game,off,on | Turns fog on or off, if on_with_lumen is provided then it allows enabling fog in lumen space (GI and reflections) | |
| GPUOptimizations | game,on,on_max | disables one (of three) forms of far-distance shadowing, on_max also simplifies Lumen bounce lighting from the ground outdoors | |
| HDR | game,off,on | HDR output control | |
| HighQualityTracing | game,off,on | CTRL+F8 | More accurate tracing of meshes for reflections and global illumination |
| InteriorFogEmissiveIntensity | game/0-1 | interior fog emission multiplier while CustomInteriorControl is active; preserves colour and time-of-day curves; 0 disables emission | |
| LODBias | game,off,minuspoint5,minus1,minus1point5,minus2 | Forces textures to be higher resolution, -0.5 is the safest, more can cause frequency patterns to appear, some games benefit from more than others | |
| LightingAO | lumen,lumen_alternate,ssao,gtao | F7 | Changes ambient occlusion method between Lumen, SSAO, or GTAO - lumen_less_noise is the safest default as full lumen may introduce shimmering/noise |
| LightingCompatibility | off,on | fixes edge cases with lighting RGB artifacts, such as in splitscreen or when using odd resolutions | |
| LightingMode | game,uplus | F8 | lighting mode - uplus for default enhanced lighting |
| LightingNoiseQuality | game,standard,high,veryhigh,epic,insane | Higher noise quality reduces noise at the cost of performance, but costs less than increasing lighting quality | |
| LightingQuality | game,medium,high,veryhigh,epic,insane | CTRL+F10 | Standard lighting quality is the recommended default, higher lighting qualities will reduce noise and increase the detail of lighting in the scene particularly around smaller object |
| LightingResolution | low,medium,high,veryhigh,epic,insane | F6 | lighting resolution quality - higher quality is more accurate lighting at the cost of performance - standard in-game epic (the same as epic in this setting) is typically x16 downsampling which is usually not necessary, medium (x32) is the minimum recommended |
| LightingVRAM | game,on | reduces radiance-cache VRAM usage independently of LightingQuality | |
| LumenDiffuseColorBoost | game/0-5 | Increases diffuse lighting especially from local lights | |
| LumenTraceDistance | game/20000-100000 | Maximum distance of objects traced in the lumen scene | |
| MoonLightIntensity | game/0-1 | reduces moonlight intensity, reduces peaks more than low values | |
| MotionBlur | game/0-1 | Ultra+ improves motion blur quality in every game by default, recommend a small amount of blur ~0.2 | |
| ReduceInputLatency | game,off,on | reduce input latency at potential FPS cost if not GPU bound | |
| ReflectionBias | game/0-1 | Adds smoothing to reflections to make them more mirror like, a small amount is usually beneficial | |
| ReflectionQuality | game,medium,high,veryhigh | F10 | Allows more surfaces to be included in reflections, in some games increasing this can cause some noise |
| Sharpness | game/0-1 | Control UE tonemapper sharpness - recommend setting this to 0 and using RCAS through reshade | |
| SkylightIntensity | game/0-3 | Skylight is a flat amount of light added to the scene, it mostly effects outdoors unless a game uses it to light interiors | |
| SkylightLeaking | game/0-1 | How much of the skylight is allowed to leak into indoors or occluded areas | |
| SunLightIntensity | game/0-1 | reduces sunlight intensity, reduces peaks more than low values | |
| TextureQuality | game,high,veryhigh,epic | increase texture pool size and streaming speed | |
| TuneLightSources | game,on | modify light sources to increase radius and indirect lighting and improve issues with overdark corners | |
| UltrawideFix | off,on | auto-detected ultrawide camera fix; activates only with a verified viewport wider than 16:9 | |
| Upscaler | off,dlss_4.5,dlss_rayreconstruction,dlss,other | select your active upscaler to auto-configure denoising - dlss_4.5 uses Denoiser none_temporalgihigh, dlss_rayreconstruction uses the rayreconstruction Denoiser variant, both force MegaLights no-temporal variants; other upscalers use temporal Denoiser and MegaLights variants. off leaves Denoiser/MegaLightsQuality under manual control | |
| Vignette | game,off,on | F3 | vignette effect control |
| VignetteIntensity | game/0-2 | Vignette intensity scale (0.0 = off, 1.0 = default, 2.0 = double, game = use game default) | |
| VolumetricFog | game,off,on,on_disable_emissive | F5 | Turns volumetric fog on or off, if on_disable_emissive is provided - it disables the emissive component of fog which can cause fog to be overly intense and washed out |
| WeatherFogEmissiveIntensity | game/0-1 | scales fog emissive across all weather presets; 0 disables emission, 1 preserves authored intensity, game restores originals | |
| WeatherIntensityNormalization | game/0-1 | lifts ordinary weather and selected outlier sun, moon and skylight curves toward a Clear-weather floor; light multipliers apply afterward; game disables normalization |