Dying Light 2 im Technik-Test : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

After a long delay, Dying Light 2 Stay Human has been released. The parkour run is a lot of fun, but there are also many annoying elements. Regarding the technology, it can be said: On the PC, the game requires a very fast graphics card, but the optics are only good average even with (a lot of) ray tracing.

Dying Light 2 Stay Human has had a problematic development. It is obvious that a postponement for an indefinite period of time almost always points to major problems. And the fact that the end product often doesn’t reach the quality that the player would like to have is something of a tradition. That’s what happened with Dying Light 2, which has some issues both gameplay and technically, but in the end can be fun nonetheless.

Before the impressions of the test are written, one more note: ComputerBase had access to the uncut and the cut version of the game, which is only sold in Germany. All screenshots and videos were created with the cut version.

Graphic with good approaches, but also problems

Techland has implemented Dying Light 2 with its own C engine, which supports DirectX 11 as well as DirectX 12 and, as a version that can be activated separately, DirectX 12 Ultimate. Compared to the predecessor, which is now seven years old, the graphics have been significantly improved, but Dying Light 2 has not become an all-round nice game. The graphics are better than average for current AAA titles, but nothing more.

The action game can look really chic and, above all, convey atmospherically dense impressions with the lighting. However, this only applies if ray tracing is active, because without it the sequences, which are actually pretty, tend to appear optically flat.

Away from the highlights, you always come across areas that look pretty ugly. The often simply detailed textures are not very helpful. In addition, the LOD works very aggressively. Sometimes even the shading changes completely, the animations are notchy and the NPCs are sometimes quite successful, but often not.

It’s also worth mentioning that Dying light 2 craves pixels like no other game. Modern games don’t all look nice in Full HD (there are simply too many details in the picture now), but Dying Light 2 goes one better. In Full HD, the display is very muddy, which is much better in WQHD, but the picture only becomes really clear with Ultra HD. If possible, a rendering resolution of at least 2560 × 1440 should be targeted for good graphics quality.

Raytracing, FSR und DLSS

Aside from ray tracing, the scaling technologies AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and Nvidia DLSS have made it into the game as a treat for the PC version in order to improve performance with the least possible optical loss. And so much can already be revealed: This is also necessary in Dying Light 2. High resolutions in particular are otherwise often not well playable, even with high-end graphics cards.

Dying Light 2 has a plain graphics menu on PC. There is a decent number of individual options, but apart from that there are only a few graphic presets and the setting option for upscaling or upsampling (AMD FSR, Nvidia DLSS and an in-game solution in three quality settings each) – and that’s it . Downsampling, an FPS limiter, example screenshots, help texts or similar are not available.

The graphics presets have three different settings on board: “Low”, “Medium” and “High”. In addition, there are two other presets, “Raytracing” and “Raytracing High Quality”, which also activate raytracing. DirectX 12 Ultimate is selected for the last two, while DirectX 11 is selected for the simple presets.

The effects of the presets are mediocre

The “Medium” and “High” presets have little effect, both in terms of speed and graphics quality. Anyone who is unhappy with the performance on “High” will not be satisfied with the “Medium” level either. “Low” brings a bigger performance boost, the FPS boost is then around 50 to 60 percent above the high preset. However, the graphics look a bit worse.