Dying Light: The Following PC Performance Review – AMD VS Nvidia

Conclusion

When Dying Light was released in 2015 it was an all new standard for Zombie games, having great graphics and fantastic parkour gameplay while at the same time making the Zombies suitably challenging, especially at night. If you haven’t played the game before I would advise you all to try out the game’s free demo on Steam, especially now since the Enhanced Edition has been launched.  

From a gameplay perspective The Following is more of the same, with a better story and the fun gameplay addition of vehicles, which is a nice twist on the established mechanics of the original game. 

Graphically this game looks great at it’s lowest and highest settings, with the major differences being in shadow quality/ Ambient occlusion and the games draw distance. Eve at the lowest settings the games draw distance is good, showing us everything the we need to see with not much visual pop-in, this game does draw distances right, though moving the slider up to max does have a nice visual effect.

With our mind range GPUs, the GTX 960 and the R9 380 we were able to play the game at max settings at 1080p with an average of over 60FPS, which is exactly what we would want the performance to be, giving the mid range GPU users the ability to play the game at max settings with a good framerate.

Moving to the higher resolution of 1440p we see both the GTX 980Ti and R9 Fury X maintain an average framerates of over 60FPS at the highest settings, which is performance which is outstanding given how graphically impressive this game is. Most other modern titles need a turn their graphics way down in order to get these kinds of framerates, so it is great to see Techland showing how a PC port is really done.  

The only problem that I can really see with the game is it’s use of Chromatic Aberration, which is an effect which has been known to give some people headaches during long playing sessions. The ability to disable this would be greatly appreciated by the community and has been mentioned on the Steam Forums many times. I have not had any issues with this myself, but you should be able to tell for yourself of you are affected by simply playing the game’s free demo on Steam. 

At 4K both the GTX 980Ti and the R9 Fury X move below the magical 60FPS mark, but when we only disable Ambient Occlusion we see  the average an minimum framerates leap to playable levels, which is a fantastic feat given that plenty of PC titles are downright unplayable at 4K at anything close to max settings. 

Being a Warner Brothers PC game most people really didn’t expect much from Dying Light’s PC release, with the recent releases of Arkham Knight and the issues with Mortal Kombat showing exactly what is wrong with the attitude towards the development of PC games in some of the biggest companies. Techland have shown a love for the PC platform and produced a great PC version of Dying Light, showing us that the best place to make a PC version of a game is with the original developers, not farmed out to the cheapest bidder like Mortal Kombat X and Batman: Arkham Knight. 

 

You can join the discussion on the Performance of the PC Version of Dying Light: Enhanced Edition/ The Following on the OC3D Forums.