What a great remake the Spyro Reignited Trilogy is. All of my childhood levels, brought up
to the present day by a competent team that knows when to remain faithful to the original.
It’s been a lot of fun for me to make this video, going through the graphics options
and seeing how they all compare. There are general GRAPHICS QUALITY presets
for people who don’t have the time to learn and to adjust each of them individually. The
presets are LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH, ULTRA, and it’ll say CUSTOM if you’ve been messing
with the options individually. Here is how LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH and ULTRA compare.
If you stick to LOW, you’ll get very high framerates, and perhaps ignorance is bliss
and you won’t know what you’re missing out on, graphically. But bumping it up to
MEDIUM is a BIG leap up, and I strongly recommend you do it if your computer can handle it.
Suddenly, everything looks like it’s lit correctly, shadows now come from every item
in the game, reflections look right and there’s enough grass and detail littering the floor
to make the world look alive, instead of being flat and sparse. And it enables anti-aliasing
for a nice smooth image. But jump up to HIGH and you’ll see how everything
was MEANT to be lit. Shadows are now dark enough to be called shadows, and everything
blends together nicely. Plus, there’s even more stuff decorating the ground.
And ULTRA spams the floor with even more stuff. The highest and second highest settings are
generally so similar, I don’t think that both are needed.
It’s kind of hard to test framerates for 3 games sporting over 100 levels, so I just
booted up a home hub and a level from Spyro 1 and tested framerates while stood in the
most demanding spot that I could find within about 30 seconds of playing. I used a Ryzen
2200G- which is the slowest gaming setup I think it’s reasonable to have in 2019. Compared
with LOW settings, MEDIUM gives you 70% the framerate, and HIGH and ULTRA are super similar
at 60%ish. In other words, I was left with 60% of the performance by jumping from minimum
to maximum settings. Your choice is simple: if your framerate is struggling, choose LOW
preset. Otherwise, you might as well game at ULTRA because it looks so much better,
with MEDIUM as a fall-back option if Ultra doesn’t run quite fast enough for your liking.
High is kind of irrelevant. They should have simplified the options by removing the 2nd
highest of everything in my opinion. I was able to game smoothly on ULTRA at 720p,
or on LOW at 1080p. By smoothly I mean somewhere between 40 and 60 FPS most of the time, which
I felt was perfectly playable on this kind of game. I will warn you that at these resolutions,
the image will either be very jagged, or extremely blurry depending on whether you have AA off
or on. By the time you reach HIGH the game takes
on a lovely pixar-esque look and it’s hard to imagine a Spyro game looking much better
than this, so I’d try and aim for that. Let’s go through all of the graphics options
in order. Motion blur is obvious enough- anything moving
gets blurred. It can make the game look smoother when at lower framerates, and applies not
just to the scenery but to every object in the game. I normally hate motion blur but
it’s done so smoothly in this game I think it adds to the pixar-esque quality of the
graphics. It would be nice to be able to adjust the strength of the effect, but I have no
problems keeping this one on. Vignette darkens the edges of the screen.
That’s it. Up to you if you keep this on or not. I spotted a 1 FPS drop by having it
enabled. BLOOM makes things look brighter by adding
a glow to them- this is an effect which spills across to whatever’s around. Upping the
Bloom setting makes the effect stronger. I wouldn’t have expected more bloom to slow
your PC down more- and even saw my framerates becoming marginally better the higher this
setting went- though oddly, the game’s set graphics presets indicate that higher bloom
should be reserved for higher graphics options. Maybe an oversight on the developer’s behalf
here. Regardless, treat this as personal preference- off for absolute best performance, or high
for not much less. Antialiasing smooths the pixels out by blurring
edges. This game uses TAA, which gets data from previous frames to make future ones smoother.
This can sometimes result in a smeary effect when things are in motion, but if you’re
using motion blur any way then you probably won’t notice this. Your choices are to have
no AA, or to have low or high TAA. I would suggest having it on, as it does a good job
of hiding jagged edges and I think complements the cartoony style nicely. I couldn’t spot
much difference between low and high setting. And there wasn’t much difference performance-wise
either. If you game at higher resolutions I think that low should be enough.
And there’s another reason to enable TAA, as well: it allows for lovely reflections
such as this one here. This only applies to some bodies of water. The rest of the reflections
are controlled by another graphics option. Which I’ll cover now!
Screen Space Reflections are as close to raytracing as you’ll get in this game, and determines
how reflections are done. With it disabled, shiny things will resort to pre-baked cubemaps,
reflecting the scenery or sometimes just the background sky of whatever level you’re
playing. But with SSR enabled, it will reflect anything drawn on-screen that it thinks should
be reflected there. Some water in the game, like the stuff at the start of Spyro 3, didn’t
change even with SSR off. But other bodies of water really looked better with it enabled.
The other place these reflections can be seen are on the reflective pots in the levels.
These are absolutely beautiful and I think are some of the best examples of SSR I’ve
ever seen- it’s bordering on raytracing, and only breaks if you’re really trying
to break it. LOW on reflects the world and Spyro, while MEDIUM and HIGH settings reflect
items as well and look extremely similar… and slow the PC down by the same amount- so
I’d say you might as well set it to HIGH. The effect is worth it in this game.
As mentioned previously, if you’re not seeing nice reflections where you think you should,
make sure you have TAA enabled. Ambient occlusion is the shading where objects
meet. I noticed this most in shaded corners and walls- having it on makes all the individual
objects making up the level blend together better and more realistically. I recommend
having this enabled- it doesn’t have to be a high setting, either. As long as it’s
on low then you’ll get the bulk of the effect, and you’ll save some FPS compared with the
MEDIUM and HIGH setting. Shadow quality matters. The lowest quality
preset may say low, but at this setting there are pretty much no shadows. It looks horrible,
please don’t play the game like this. At medium, they appear, but the objects in the
world still don’t look right. High is where it’s at. If there’s one setting to raise
to High then it’s this one. Do it. And Ultra makes the blur of the shadows a bit smoother,
but it’s not essential. Of all the graphics options, I found this one impacted framerates
the most, but again the difference in FPS between MEDIUM and ULTRA wasn’t much.
Even on Medium, your flame casts shadows across the world. I love this effect and expected
it to be something reserved for higher qualities. But it also nicely shows the quality difference
between the different shadow settings. At Medium, the edges of shadows are grainy. At
High, they look nice, and at Ultra there’s a bit more definition to the shapes again.
Having shadow quality on at least medium also enables another advanced graphical effect.
You’ll be able to see shadows cast through his wings and other thin parts of his body.
I don’t know many games where I’ve seen this effect in action… though I also don’t
know many games where you play as a purple dragon made of rubber. I want more.
And lastly it also decides the distance that water caustics can be seen- which is that
nice shiny reflection from the water’s surface that you can see in examples such as this
one. ‘High’ is significantly better than ‘Medium’ in this regard.
Foliage chooses the amount of grass and flowers on the floor. The higher up this setting you
go, the fewer bald patches there will be in fields and the like. And it gets a bit prettier
because flowers look nice and you get more of them as well.
View distance… doesn’t do as much as you might think. It only seems to change how far
away details on the ground are drawn from, like grass and small rocks. In an older game
you’d expect low view distance to turn distant scenery to mush, or to disappear completely.
But not so in this game! Enemies, gems and the like remain visible right into the distance.
This was also a strength in the original PS1 games so it’s nice to see it carried across.
I didn’t find foliage or view distance affected my FPS that much. But together, they make
more of an impact. Turning both up to maximum will make the worlds look a lot prettier,
but if you want to save FPS then you can opt for lots of grass close-by, or less grass
but to a greater distance, and either option won’t cost you much on their own.
Also: one problem I encountered on lower settings was that Spyro would slide along the ground.
It seems to be tied with high framerates, so if you’re lucky enough to be in a situation
where your framerate is TOO HIGH then enable Vsync. Hopefully these bugs will be patched
up soon- I’m not alone in having them. It is lovely to see the original Spyro trilogy
so faithfully recreated for a new generation of gamers. And for me, it has been an utter
treat to revisit all of my favourite levels and to be endlessly impressed with the facelifts
that they’ve been given. All three games for the price of one is incredible value for
money that has been more than worth it for me. I couldn’t have asked for a better revamp
of one of my favourite childhood game series.