Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

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Improve graphics and disable unnecessary settings
By Myztkl©-Kev
this is an engine.ini tweak to disable useless graphic options that for some reason don't have an in-game toggle like motion blur and depth of field.

It also improves the shadows (mostly NPC self-shadows), volumetric fog, reflections and lighting (by forcing hardware lumen to reduce the noise)

Enabling hardware lumen, and increasing the shadow and fog resolution is quite a performance hit, only use if you have the hardware for it.
   
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Engine.ini
Copy and paste everything (or just the lines you want) below the line into the bottom of your engine.ini located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Bloodlines2\Steam\Saved\Config\Windows

The first 7 disable motion blur, depth of field, bloom, lense flares and chromatic abberation. Can copy just the ones you want to use if you like these settings.

the 2 volumetric ones improve volumetric fog resolution (this one really bothered me). This is the biggest performance hit. You can set pixel size (lower number, better quality, less fps) to 3 for even better volumetric, but even more performance loss (I lost about 50fps with it set at 3, and only 20 with it set at 4 and it looks good enough). Default grid size is 128, you could experiment with the 2 settings and find the best quality to performance ratio for you. GridPixelSize set at 5 still looks decent (as long as the other one is left at 256) and doesn't have that much of a performance hit. I have switched to this due to frame drops in some areas of the city (default is 8)

The lumen and reflection ones are for lumen and reflects (duh).
Lumen does not handle reflections on rough/dull surfaces well and there is a lot of noise on them by default, I tried fixing this and ended up using r.Lumen.Reflections.MaxRoughnessToTrace=0.5 to do it. I was told .4 was default, but .4 is not what they are using in this game, it seems like they are using 1.0, I set it to .5, it reduces noise a bit at the cost of reflection quality loss, but they are rough surfaces anyway so the reflection quality can't even really be seen, setting it to .4 or lower basically got rid of reflections altogether, completely illiminating the noise, but also completely removing reflections on these rough surfaces, which made them look flat. There is still some blotchy-ness and noise, but to my eye it doesn't look as bad. If you really don't like all the noise on these surfaces try 0.4 or lower.

Everything else was related to attempting to fix the extremely pixelated character self shadows on NPC's, it does fix it (well makes it better anyways), however I'm not entire sure WHICH command/s actually did it, because I threw a bunch of them in there at once and I was too lazy to test every one individually like I did for the lumen ones so I just left them all in there. I didn't really notice a performance hit on anything besides the volumetric fog setting. I'm running at 1080p with maxed settings, DLAA with a 13700k and a 5080 and getting consistently over 100 fps (in most areas, it actually drops to 70 in some outdoor locations), so good enough for me.
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[SystemSettings]
r.MotionBlur.Max=0
r.MotionBlurQuality=0
r.DefaultFeature.MotionBlur=0
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0
r.BloomQuality=0
r.LensFlareQuality=0
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize=4
r.VolumetricFog.GridSizeZ=256
r.Lumen.HardwareRaytracing=1
r.Lumen.Reflections.MaxRoughnessToTrace=0.5
r.HighQualityLightmaps=1.0

[/script/engine.renderersettings]
r.Shadow.Virtual.ResolutionLodBiasDirectional=-1
r.Shadow.Virtual.ResolutionLodBiasLocal-1
r.Shadow.Virtual.SMRT.SamplesPerRayLocal=8
r.Shadow.Virtual.SMRT.TexelDitherScaleLocal=8

[TextureStreaming]
LightmapStreamingFactor=0.0
ShadowmapStreamingFactor=0.0
comparisons
Steam compresses screenshots so some details are already lost, but you can see some differences.

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