Video Options (tune for performance)

First of all, I'd appreciate the effort of the SoTA team to tune up the performance a lot ever since the last release (long ago).

The observation or 2 cents from me is, withness from the previous experience, there are at least 2-3 more things which we can further fine-tune, I'm not entirely sure how much effort for it, but if we can further tune the performance significantly, there are a lot of benefits.
- lower the entry-level h/w to play this game, means more potential players
- increase the portability of the game to more platforms, e.g.: mobile/ switch?

The bottom line is getting merely 20-30 FPS (in town), and 50-60 FPS in the adventure scene) in 1080p from RTX 2060 is unacceptable, if let's say comparable with PUGS with all ULTRA settings still maintaining 60+ to 70 FPS consistently.

Suggestions:
- firstly, the current "Level of Details" (LoD), doesn't do much except reduce a few leaves of the tree (at least that's what I can observe with my eye); whereby there's much to it to tweak, e.g.: texture quality, increase or decrease the polygons count of objects
- also I think the "Field of View" (FoV) is kinda "useless", because, by the human eye, there's only one type of FoV, why would you want to switch to a bird-eye-view for example, it's kinda making it unnatural and unnecessary. For example, if you refer to the Fig.1.2., if in the actual world, something that far away will be either covered in fog or rendered blurry, and one of the old school techniques we use is to discard those rendering which are outside the hemisphere skybox, and that's fine. We can still preserve this mode and called it the "infinite" viewing distance (still using a gauge control).
- So instead of FoV (I'd recommend dropping it and replacing/ adding something like "Near Far clipping distance" so that we only draw what the human eye can see (logically) the furthest instead of an infinite view of drawable distance and hence burden the GPU load dramatically.

References:
- Figure 1.1. Video settings

- Figure 1.2. viewing distance

- Figure 1.3. Ultima Ascension (Video Settings - Viewable Distance)

 

FoV is a really important setting for lots of players - especially if you suffer from motion sickness when gaming with too tight a FoV