Elex 2 in the technology test – ComputerBase : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

Elex 2 by Piranha Bytes and with it another spiritual descendant of Gothic has been released. The test of the PC version shows that the technology is unfortunately no longer up to date. Not only that the graphics have little to offer and cause problems, the demands on the graphics card are also much too high (for that).

With Elex 2 another spiritual successor to Gothic has been released. The German development team Piranha Bytes wants to build on the virtues of the first part and improve the predecessor Elex (technical test) in all respects. There is again a large open world that does not reveal its secrets by itself, many edgy conversations, an increasingly powerful main character, numerous factions and much more.

The technology is simply (too) getting old

The in-house genome engine, which was properly drilled out for the predecessor from 2017, is also part of the party. For Part 2, however, there was apparently little more than fine tuning. Yes, Elex 2 looks better than its predecessor, but the differences are not huge. Game graphics in general have evolved a lot over the past four and a half years. Accordingly, Elex 2 no longer looks good. Sometimes it’s even downright ugly.

Big issues abound: Animations are stiff, faces look waxy and lacking in detail, there’s no camera movement in conversational sequences, lighting barely highlights, textures are mediocre at best, and that’s not all.

One of the biggest problems can be attributed to the level of detail (LOD), because in the game even large objects appear out of nowhere, even from a medium distance, while others happily and visibly change their level of detail. In addition, some mostly large buildings or trees from a long distance like to lose all detail and shape and then remind more of the original Doom than a game from 2022.

Anti-aliasing is also not very helpful, as it simply cannot handle the situation with flickering. Even in Ultra HD, the vegetation flickers properly, and things only get worse in lower resolutions.

In addition, there is – so much can already be revealed – an astonishingly low frame rate. The aging DirectX 11 renderer simply seems overwhelmed with the task, be it with a generally low frame rate or a presumably massive API or drawcall limitation on Radeon GPUs, so that reducing the resolution hardly brings any performance because the GPU is very bored even in UHD and is not the bottleneck.

Nobody demands high-end graphics from a relatively small development team like Piranha Bytes. But what worked just fine for Elex in 2017 just isn’t appropriate for Elex 2 in 2022. The weaknesses can no longer be ignored.

Hopefully the developers won’t try the same engine again in Elex III without at least doing a massive rebuild. The zenith of the in-house technology seems to have been clearly exceeded.

There are also small bright spots

But sometimes there are bright spots. Elex 2 can look reasonably nice when the sun is just right and you happen to be in the right region. Sometimes that makes for a good atmosphere. And some objects are also successful and fit well into the future fantasy world. Unfortunately, such scenes are just far too rare.

Not surprisingly, Elex 2 does without ray tracing and there is also no upsampling or upscaling in the form of AMD FSR or Nvidia DLSS.

Elex 2 offers a simple graphics menu on the PC. There are several individual options as well as in-game upscaling and downscaling. The render resolution can be changed in 10 percent increments between 50 and 200 percent compared to the set resolution.

And that’s it. There is no FPS limiter, and the game even does without graphic presets. You won’t find any descriptions or sample screenshots of the individual options, or a VRAM utilization indicator. And otherwise there is nothing exciting in the graphics menu.

Instead, there are plenty of anti-aliasing options on board. Elex 2 offers FXAA, SMAA, TFXAA and TSMAA, but none of the choices are good. TSMAA is still the best choice, since the blur is low in this mode and flickering is prevented most effectively. “Most effective” is still a long way from “good”. In terms of performance, there are only small differences between the four options.

The graphics options primarily affect the view range

There are no graphic presets in Elex 2, but there are individual options. They primarily affect view range in one way or another. For example, if you refrain from the maximum details and instead set all options to “high”, you will get a simpler shadow display and at a greater distance, no shadows will be displayed at all.

From now on it gets complicated. If you set all options to “Medium” (Ambient Occlusion to “Low”, “Medium” is not available in this case), you already have to accept a high loss of graphics quality. Even at medium visibility, many objects no longer cast shadows, some simply disappear entirely. The green on trees already becomes a “mud mass” at a medium distance and the same happens to some buildings. Some just look as ugly as the tower on the right side of the picture. Because no: This is not a graphic error, but should look like this!

Elex 2 can also do Doom graphics: There are pointless graphics options

It gets really funny with low graphics details, because then the graphics of many buildings compete with those of Doom. So the first-person shooter from 1993, not the 2016 reboot. That changes when you get close to them, but that doesn’t make the situation any better. In addition, more shadows are missing and some objects show almost no details at all.

Simply setting all graphics menu items to “Medium”, let alone “Low” is not an option in Elex 2. Instead, it is advisable to leave the “Texture Quality” and “Object View Distance” items on “High”, otherwise the game will show the ugly buildings. This hardly affects the GPU anyway; the CPU is probably primarily affected by the options.

Possible FPS gains are small

Not much performance can be gained with the Elex 2’s graphics options. At least if the graphics card is the limiting hardware. The Radeon RX 6800 XT in WQHD with all graphics options on “High” instead of “Ultra” only achieves 4 percent more FPS, with the GeForce RTX 3080 it is at least 9 percent. The “Medium” option level, which is already no longer pretty to look at, brings another 9 percent each and “Low” another 7 percent each. With the Radeon, the performance can be improved by a maximum of 20 percent, with the GeForce it is 26 percent. Unplayable only becomes playable in a few cases.