Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - PC optimised settings and graphics comparison vs PS5

Avatar is a beautiful game that pushes technology hard to enable some truly amazing visuals - but how can we scale that experience down to a solid 60fps experience that still looks good on older and slower PCs? To figure out optimised settings, I'll discuss the game's PC user experience, compare the game against the PS5 version for some performance optimisation hints and evaluate some of those 'Unobtainium' settings intended for future hardware.

Before I get into the settings themselves, let's talk about the user experience on PC - as it's a highlight of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The first thing you'll notice is that the game doesn't have a noticeable shader pre-compilation step when you play it for the first time, but it does occur according to my conversation with developers. When playing the game, it's easy to notice that there are no frame-time issues with the game - and indeed the frame-time graph is smooth. With good settings for your GPU, you'll have a fluid experience in Avatar - something a lot of modern games get wrong.

The graphics menu also offers a wide range of tweakables to make the experience your own with a classic Ubisoft-style menu - similar to those in Far Cry and Assassin's Creed titles. The descriptions here explain what each setting does, how it affects VRAM usage, how many setting there are based on the visible pips and how each visual change will look with a preview image.

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