Shadow Warrior 3 in the technology test : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

Shadow Warrior 3 by Flying Wild Hog is just as crazy as the second part. In the technology test, the PC version makes a decent impression, because the pretty look meets good performance. Those looking for more FPS will find help in AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS.

With Shadow Warrior 3, the crazy first-person shooter series enters the next round. The game was developed like the predecessor of Flying Wild Hog and the team has remained completely true to the concept. ComputerBase took a closer look at the technology of the PC version, which makes a good impression even if it is not yet running optimally.

A decent graphic with the Unreal Engine 4

Shadow Warrior 3 isn’t a graphic hit, but the game looks quite impressive. It’s become very colorful overall, the enemy design is really innovative in places, the textures look decent, and the lighting can create a lot of mood. The fact that neither the level of detail nor animations and some other aspects are not at the absolute top level is less of a concern.

But one thing is striking: Shadow Warrior 3 requires a lot of resolution. Among other things, because the anti-aliasing is simply not particularly successful. There is still some flickering even in Ultra HD, and on top of that the picture is quite blurry in low resolutions. In addition, the entire optics benefit significantly from more render pixels, in Full HD everything just looks washed out.

Flying Wild Hog realized the project with the Unreal Engine 4. Unlike the predecessor, the Polish studio no longer relies on its own engine. However, there is no low-level API such as DirectX 12, Shadow Warrior 3 was implemented exclusively with DirectX 11. One looks in vain for ray tracing. However, the upscaling technologies AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS are also on board. Reflex to reduce input lag is also supported.

Shadow Warrior 3 offers a decent graphics menu on the PC. There are graphic presets with individual graphic options. In addition, there is a simple FPS limiter that only allows two fixed limits with 30 and 60 FPS. The render resolution can be set in 1 percent increments between 25 and 100 percent, but there is no downsampling. And then AMD’s FSR and FidelityFX CAS as well as Nvidia’s DLSS plus optional Reflex can be switched on and off separately. What is completely missing are example screenshots of the individual options and example descriptions.

Game Presets and AMD FidelityFX CAS

With “Low”, “Medium” and “High”, Shadow Warrior 3 offers three different graphic presets, with “High” corresponding to the maximum possible details. The optical differences between “High” and “Medium” are small. At High, some objects show more detail and the shadows are more detailed. In addition, small differences can be seen in lighting, vegetation density and screenspace reflections.

The Low preset, on the other hand, looks completely different than “Medium” because with the lowest setting the lighting is completely different and this has a massive impact on the overall look – in a negative way. With “Low” the optics are significantly worse, the setting should be avoided accordingly.

The presets differentiate between AMD and Nvidia

The Shadow Warrior 3 graphics presets have a different impact on the frame rate on AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. For example, if you switch from the high to the medium preset, you get a frame rate boost of 14 percent on the GeForce RTX 3080, while the Radeon RX 6800 XT gets a higher 27 percent. The low preset then brings a massive boost of 65 percent on the Radeon, but it’s suddenly a higher 97 percent on the GeForce.

Since “Low” is not recommended for visual reasons, Shadow Warrior 3 has very little tuning potential. But that’s not so tragic, since the speed is very good even with maximum graphic details.

AMD CAS makes a big difference

Shadow Warrior 3 supports AMD’s sharpening filter FidelityFX CAS, which can be activated in the levels “Low”, “Medium” and “High”. Its visual impact is large, because even with CAS set to “Low”, the graphics appear sharper and more details are revealed. However, since sharpening can also be accompanied by graphic errors, the function should be used with caution.

The editors recommend using CAS on “Low” in Ultra HD in any case, as this results in a large visual gain. CAS on Medium is also possible, but the difference to Low is too small to justify the potentially larger graphical glitches. The editors also recommend setting CAS to “Low” in WQHD, even if the graphic errors are more evident in 2,560 × 1,440.

Although Full HD could really use the sharpening, it causes the biggest problems with so few pixels. The recommendation here is to leave CAS switched off – but there’s nothing wrong with at least trying it out. If the graphics problems don’t bother you, you should also use FidelityFX CAS on “Low” in 1,920 × 1,080.

Of course, CAS also costs some GPU power, but the performance loss is only around 2 or 3 percent, which is definitely worth it.