Pacific Drive is a fantastically atmospheric game set in the Olympic Exclusion Zone, where players have to drive to survive. But in a game where your reaction time can mean life or death in the Zone, poor hardware performance can be frustrating. Here are ten settings you can tweak in Pacific Drive to recoup some performance without losing quality.
Motion Blur: 10
Motion blur enhances the realism of a game by making movements feel more realistic. It can also improve the look of a game that's running at a low framerate. Decreasing the motion blur setting to 10 or less will help if you have low FPS.
View Distance: Medium
The view distance setting determines the farthest distance that the game’s rendering engine will draw 3D objects from the player. Increased view distance can make graphics seem higher quality at the expense of FPS. In Pacific Drive, setting the view distance to medium will save your FPS without sacrificing your graphics.
Post Processing: Low
Post processing is a setting that applies various video effects and lighting filters to a frame after that frame has been rendered. This can have an impact on performance for little noticeable benefit. If you're having trouble with low FPS in Pacific Drive, try turning the post processing setting to low.
Shadows: Medium
The shadows setting sets the level of shadow cast by objects in a game, making games more immersive. Shadows are rendered from every light source in every scene and are in sync with display resolution. Lowering your shadows setting to medium will increase FPS without giving up too much quality of gameplay.
Headlights Cast Shadows: Off
Like the shadows setting, Pacific Drive has another setting for the shadows that your car's headlights cast. This can add realism to the game environment but is heavy on the GPU since the shadows can be complex and render dynamically. You can turn the headlights cast shadows setting off to increase your framerate.
Screen Space Shadows: Medium
Screen space shadows is an effect that adds shadows based on visible objects on the screen, and can add shadows to places that shadowmaps can't. Like the other shadow-related settings, this increases the immersion of a game at the cost of your framerate. Be sure to turn this setting off to increase performance by reducing what your GPU needs to render in a scene.
Mirror Detail Distance: Medium
Mirror detail distance determines the distance to render 3D objects so that they're visible in your car's mirrors. This is a nice touch and creates an immersive experience, but cranking this setting up to ultra is expensive. If you set mirror detail distance to medium or lower, you will see an increase in performance since the game has less to render.
Foliage: Low
The foliage setting determines how far to render plants from the player. Pacific Drive takes place in abandoned woodsy areas, so a higher foliage setting really makes you feel as if you’re there. Unfortunately, this setting is resource-heavy, so turning foliage to low should speed up your FPS.
Textures: Medium
Textures are high-quality bitmap images that have been applied to the surface of objects and environments in a game. These need a lot of processing power and memory to render into a game, but add a sense of realism to the game. Turning the textures setting to medium will reduce the strain on your hardware without giving up too much visual fidelity.
Shaders: Medium
Shaders control how objects and meshes render and behave, making games seem more realistic. Your graphics card renders these shader scripts dynamically as you play. Because this can use a lot of processing power, you can turn the shaders setting to medium or low for a faster framerate.
Pacific Drive is developed by Ironwood Studios and is available now on PC and PS5.
