This is the official optimization guide for Estranged: Act II, describing how to get the game running smoothly on lower end computers and laptops which Estranged doesn’t directly support.
Screen Percentage
Changing the screen percentage of the game allows you to play with all graphics settings on Epic, with the trade-off of things looking a bit blurrier.
It is perferable to changing the screen resolution, because all of the UI elements will render at your native resolution, it’s just the game viewport that will be upscaled.
Technical Information
When used with TXAA the screen percentage reduction is less noticable than with FXAA, due to the upscaling technique being able to use data from from TXAA algorithm.
The above screenshots show the same piece of the same scene with the screen percentage at 50 percent, with different anti-aliasing options.
You’ll notice that the images get blurrier from left to right, with no AA being the sharpest but the most pixellated, and FXAA being the blurriest. TXAA provides a balance between the two.
The screen percentage option lives in Options → Screen. Lower it from 100%, and click “apply” to see the results. Keep lowering it until you see a good balance between performance and sharpness.
The below benchmarks were performed with an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 (very low end card) at a resolution of 1920×1080. All other graphics settings were on Epic.
Screen percentage combined with TXAA yields the highest quality upsample, however FXAA and no AA perform much better.
Graphics
The graphics menu contains a list of options which can be tweaked to Epic, High, Medium and Low. These settings control various parts of the rendering engine, and if you’re looking to increase performance by a few frames per second, this menu will help you.
The Post-Process, Effects and Shadows settings have the most impact depending on the scene, whereas the Draw Distance and Textures generally have the least impact. This all depends on the hardware your computer has though, and the scene being rendered.
The graphics options live in the Options → Graphics menu.
Auto-Detection
The game can guess the best settings from your hardware. This adjusts the screen percentage and graphics settings to increase the performance automatically.
For my low-end integrated graphics card, using this option increased the frame rate from 14 FPS to 36 FPS.
This option lives at the top of the Options → Graphics menu.
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