Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide
Optimised Settings
Optimising Avatar Frontiers of Pandora
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a demanding game. Like all games, creating optimised settings for Avatar requires a lot of testing. We tested almost all of Frontiers of Pandora’s graphical settings, and we found that ray tracing takes up most of this game’s performance budget. When looking at the performance readouts from the game’s PC benchmark, it is clear that ray tracing is the backbone of Frontiers of Pandora, even if the game can run without bespoke ray tracing hardware.
The importance of ray tracing is why most of this game’s graphical settings appear to have no performance impact. When ray tracing takes up most of this game’s performance budget, lowering non ray tracing settings only has a limited impact on performance.
The only non-raytracing settings that had a notable impact on Frontiers of Pandora’s framerates was Volumetric Fog. Lowering this setting to medium increased average framerates by over 7% while having a minimal impact on image quality. With results like this, we recommend lowering this setting to Medium.
The two other high impact settings are Diffuse Reflections and Specular Reflections, both of which deliver performance gains of over 7% when set to Medium. Again, these settings has a relatively small impact on overall image quality. Well, unless you are looking at reflections and bounce lighting very closely.
OC3D’s Optimised PC settings for Avatar Frontiers of Pandora
Our optimised settings for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora are simple. Just lower Volumetric Fog, Volumetric Clouds, Specular Reflections, and Diffuse Reflections to medium. At 1440p on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, we saw our average and minimum framerates increase by 25.45% and 27.27% respectively. Those increases happened without changing draw distances, geometry quality, or shadow quality. For most gamers, Frontiers of Pandora will not look any different to before in motion. If you want larger performance gains, you can enable DLSS or FSR.
On an RTX 4070, we can use optimised settings at 1440p with FSR 3 set to Ultra Quality with Frame Generation enabled to get a smooth 120 FPS experience. Yes, we are using generated frames, but this is a single-player game, so a minor change in game latency doesn’t make a big difference.
