Diablo 4 Scalability

Diablo 4 Scalability

– with Samuel Delmont, senior graphics engineer

Diablo IV has been built to run on Windows PC and two generations of consoles. To support this, multiple systems have been implemented to make the engine scalable and able to maintain quality, while respecting the required framerate of each device to deliver the best gameplay experience possible.

Considering the capabilities of PCs and consoles, such as memory constraints and CPU and GPU processor power, Diablo IV will perform at a level that best suits the device running it. For example, assets such as meshes and textures can be loaded at a lower level of detail, and the same treatment can be applied to shaders, visual effects, post effects, and other systems—tweaking each of these settings allows you to prioritize image quality over performance or vice versa.

Understanding the PC Options

Diablo 4 Diablo 4 Quality Preset

The engine of Diablo IV will automatically select the most compatible graphics setting for your PC’s hardware. There are four presets to choose from: Low, Medium, High and Ultra, along with an option to select a different preset to fine-tune the quality and framerate to your exact liking. But it is important to understand the impact each different setting has on constraints such as memory usage and processing cost.

Diablo 4 Gold, Items, Boosting

  • Diablo 4 Items for Sale (6% off coupon: vhpg). Fast and Safe Diablo IV Items. 5-star service, nice discount, instant delivery.
  • Buy Diablo 4 Items (6% off coupon: z123). Cheap Diablo 4 Gold, Items, Boosting Services. Payment: PayPal, Skrill, Cryptocurrencies.

Resolution

One of the main factors of performance is the resolution at which the game is rendered. When playing on PC, the world can be rendered at a lower or higher resolution based on the Resolution Percentage slider, and then rescaled to match the final resolution of the monitor or window the player is using.

Diablo 4 Resolution

Decreasing the Resolution Percentage reduces the internal resolution of the game, yielding better framerate at the expense of a blurrier image. On the other hand, increasing Resolution Percentage increases the internal resolution, which decreases performance as more pixels are rendered, requiring more memory. Doing this offers greater quality and a more detailed image, while also reducing aliasing.

As an alternative to the default upscale method, several upscaling options are available for PC, including NVIDIA DLSS 3, to achieve a higher resolution for the final image while rendering the world at a lower resolution with only minimal quality loss. Whereas consoles leverage a combination of upscaling and dynamic resolution management to maintain high frame rate and visual quality at all times.

Optimizing Settings to Your Experience

The texture quality option is one of the settings with the biggest impact on memory usage and seamless gameplay. There are four quality options to choose from in total, but we’ll focus on two: Ultra and High. Ultra, the highest quality, requires the High-Resolution Assets to be selected via the install options menu within Battle.net and requires at least 32GB of memory installed in the system. The Ultra quality is best used when playing on a 4k monitor, but the game will use more memory to do so. The High option is suitable for 1440p and 1080p resolution displays. Decreasing texture quality makes the game load lower resolution textures and increases performance, while reducing the memory used by the game at the cost of softer looking textures.

Diablo 4 Texture Quality

The shadow quality also has a big impact on memory usage. Reducing this setting will decrease memory usage while increasing performance, but the shadows will look less sharp for both sun and local lights shadows.

If memory is a concern, we recommend decreasing both texture quality and shadow quality. Some of the other settings have relevant memory impact (like Geometry Complexity), but most have little to no impact. For more information on each individual option, visit the settings menu.

D4 Guides & Tips