There are Pros and cons of every PC port of the game as most of them can be tweaked to our liking and Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet is no exception. Here we will discuss all the Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet Graphical Tweaks that you can do and how to do it.
Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet is developed using the Unreal Engine 4 which itself is a very flexible game engine that allows users to tweak graphical settings from outside the game itself.
Here we will discuss how you can tweak the graphical settings of the game to your liking and what graphical settings can be tweaked.
Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet Tweaks
Before we start with the Tweaks, first let us take a look at how we will be tweaking the Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet.
To make changes or tweaks to the game, you will need three files which will be located at “%localappdata%\SAOFB\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor”.
In this folder there will be a lot of .ini files but, you only need three of them which are “Scalability.ini”, “Engine.ini”, and “GameUserSettings.ini”.
Scalability and GameUserSettings are user level options while the settings in “Engine.ini” are specific to the game engine.
Before we start, let me explain how you will be making changes using “Scalability.ini” and “GameUserSettings.ini”.
First, open the “GameUserSettings.ini” in a notepad and search for ScalabilityGroups.
There will be a few settings below this header which are as follows.
[ScalabilityGroups] sg.ResolutionQuality=100.000000sg.ViewDistanceQuality=3
sg.AntiAliasingQuality=3
sg.ShadowQuality=3
sg.PostProcessQuality=3
sg.TextureQuality=3
sg.EffectsQuality=3
sg.FoliageQuality=3
These settings have values from 0-3, with 0 being the lowest or off and 3 being the ultra. Most of the settings here can be changed through the in-game menu.
Now each of the settings listed under ScalabilityGroups has a group of settings under it and just changing the value of one changes the values for every setting under it.
For example, sg.ViewDistanceQuality=3 affects a group of settings related to the game’s View Distance.
Also, it is possible to change just one setting while retaining the values of the rest and that is achieved with the help of “Scalability.ini”, as it allows us to scale or tweak individual setting of “ScalabilityGroups”.
In simple words, it would allow us to customize how in-game options menu behaves instead of just overriding everything.
For example, open “Scalability.ini” in a notepad and set the following.
[TextureQuality@3] r.MaxAnisotropy=16Now the above setting is stored in “Scalability.ini” and the way it works is that if sg.TextureQuality is set to 3 in “GameUserSettings.ini” then the value for the anisotropic filtering will be 16 which is the highest and there could be another setting under [TextureQuality@3] which could have a different value.
Furthermore, for the above example to work, the value for sg.TextureQuality has to be set at 3 in “GameUserSettings.ini” otherwise it won’t take effect in-game.
If you still having a hard time understanding it, just follow the following steps for each of the settings and you will be able to tweak the settings to your liking in Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet.
Temporal Anti-Aliasing
Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet uses FXAA as an antialiasing option which causes a slight performance hit.
However, it not as effective as Temporal Anti-Aliasing which you can enable in the game.
Open “Engine.ini” in a notepad and add the following, as it would allow you to enable Temporal Anti-Aliasing.
[SystemSettings] r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.2
r.TemporalAASamples=32
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.8
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1
The settings “TemporalAASamples” will determine the quality of the anti-aliasing. Vales for this particular settings are 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64.
The higher the value the fewer jaggies there will be in the game but it will come at the cost of a slight performance hit.
Scalability Settings
For scalability settings you must edit Scalability.ini and follow it up by adding a new header for every group of your desired modification, with the @ mark and the level of quality you want to apply for the setting:
Just keep in mind that for saving the applied in-game changes, set the corresponding scalability group to the same quality level in GameUserSettings.ini
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient Occlusion is one of the settings that have a big performance impact due to the fact that it creates soft shadows for literally everything in the game from body parts to the smaller details in the environment.
At the same time, it also impacts the performance of a weak GPU along with a high-quality GPU.
To tweak this setting open “Scalability.ini” and add the following:
[PostProcessQuality@2] r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=0 [PostProcessQuality@3] r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=40 is the lowest value while the 4 is the highest, tweak the setting to your liking.
Also, for these settings to take effect, “sg.PostProcessQuality” should be set either at 2 or 3 in “GameUserSettings.ini”. If sg.PostProcessQuality is set at 2, then Ambient Occlusion will turn off and if it is set at 3 then it will be set at the highest quality. You can change the values if you want.
Anisotropic Filtering
To tweak this setting in Anisotropic Filtering, open the “Scalability.ini” and add the following.
The values for this graphical setting are 0,2,4,8, and 16. Tweak it to your liking.
By default, this setting is set it at 8 but setting it at 16 will improve the appearance of textures, making them less blurry since the game by default has 8x anisotropic filtering, and using a higher AF impacts the appearance of the visuals from different angles.
Chromatic Aberration
Chromatic Aberration is a graphical setting that can be useful when implemented properly.
The Chromatic Aberration in the game is enabled through default at Quality Level 2, 3 so including them is necessary.
However, in Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet it adds pixelation. So turn it off open the “Scalability.ini” and add the following.
[PostProcessQuality@2] r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0 [PostProcessQuality@3] r.SceneColorFringeQuality=00 and 1 are the only values with 0 meaning off and 1 meaning on.
Blur Graphics Buffer
Blur Graphics Buffer produces some high-quality results in the game but, in the case of Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet it is hardly noticeable but, has a huge performance impact. To disable this setting open the “Scalability.ini” and add the following.
Screen-Space Reflections
Screen-Space Reflections adds a little extra to the overall image quality, however, this graphical setting is quite taxing, especially on weaker GPUs. To disable this setting open “Scalability.ini” and add the following.
Value for this setting start from 0 and stop at 4 and by default, it is set at 3.
Depth of Field
Depth of field is another one of the taxing graphical features in the game that simulates the camera blur, but SOA: FB uses this feature as a Bloom Shade on certain elements in the game.
Therefore, to tweak this setting open “Scalability.ini” and add the following.
[PostProcessQuality@3] r.DepthOfFieldQuality=00 is the lowest value while 2 is the highest and by default, this setting is set at 2.
Shadows
Shadows are an integral part of the games nowadays and add more depth to a scene, however, these can be very taxing on weak GPUs. Shadow setting has two qualities, quality and resolution.
Each of the values is independent of the other meaning resolution can be turned down without messing with the quality or quality can be reduced while keeping the resolution. open the “Scalability.ini” and add the following.
[ShadowQuality@2] r.ShadowQuality=3r.Shadow.MaxResolution=512 [ShadowQuality@3] r.ShadowQuality=4
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=2048
The quality ranges from 0-5 and 5 is te default value while resolution starts from 4 and the default value is 1024.
