No More Heroes 3 – Improving Shadows, Draw Distance and Much More

There are a lot of variations of .ini tweaks going around, so I decided to compile the relevant commands into one place!

Where and What?

Please note: all credit goes to Somewhat Viable !

Unreal Engine 4 games are very easy to tinker with, with a multitude of commands that do a million different things. These go beyond the “Graphics Settings” menu, and offer a lot more options.

As you may have noticed, NMH3 on PC has an extremely short draw distance, both for objects and shadows. Thankfully, mitigating these graphical shortcomings is extremely easy! (NOTE: Don’t be afraid to play around with the values! See what works best for you in terms of quality/performance)

The following commands need to be pasted onto Engine.ini, located under:

  • %LOCALAPPDATA%\No More Heroes 3\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor
[SystemSettings]
r.MaxAnisotropy=16
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=4
r.bForceCPUAccessToGPUSkinVerts=1
r.FastVRam.EyeAdaptation=1
r.ViewDistance=5
r.ViewDistanceScale=5
r.LandscapeLODDistributionScale=3
r.LandscapeLOD0DistributionScale=3
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.01
grass.CullDistanceScale=4
grass.DisableDynamicShadows=1
foliage.LODDistanceScale=4
foliage.ditheredLOD=0
foliage.MinimumScreenSize=0.00000001
foliage.MaxOcclusionQueriesPerComponent=128
foliage.MinInstancesPerOcclusionQuery=65536
r.HLOD=1
r.HLOD.DistanceScale=3
r.MipMapLODBias=0
r.MaxQualityMode=1
r.DetailMode=2
r.MaterialQualityLevel=1
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=-2
r.SkeletalMeshLODRadiusScale=0.03
r.LandscapeLODBias=-3
r.TrueSkyQuality=1
r.SkyLightingQuality=1
r.VolumetricCloud=1
r.VolumetricCloud.SkyAO=1
r.VolumetricCloud.SkyAO.Filtering=1
r.VolumetricRenderTarget.Mode=1
r.SkylightIntensityMultiplier=0.4
r.SkyAtmosphere=1
r.SupportSkyAtmosphere=1
r.SkyAtmosphere.LUT32=1
r.SkyAtmosphere.FastSkyLUT=0
r.SkyAtmosphere.MultiScatteringLUT.HighQuality=1
r.SkyAtmosphere.AerialPerspectiveLUT.FastApplyOnOpaque=0
r.SkyAtmosphere.TransmittanceLUT.UseSmallFormat=0
r.SkyAtmosphere.AerialPerspectiveLUT.Depth=96
r.SkyAtmosphere.AerialPerspectiveLUT.DepthResolution=16.0
r.SkyAtmosphere.SampleCountMin=64.0
r.SkyAtmosphere.SampleCountMax=128.0
r.SkyAtmosphere.DistanceToSampleCountMax=128
r.RefractionQuality=3
r.LightFunctionQuality=1
r.AllowLandscapeShadows=1
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=2
r.AmbientOcclusionMaxQuality=100
r.AmbientOcclusionRadiusScale=0.03
r.HighQualityLightMaps=1
r.LensFlareQuality=4
r.ShadowQuality=5
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=5
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=10
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=4096
r.Shadow.MinResolution=4096
r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=4096
r.Shadow.MinCSMResolution=4096
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.001
r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=6
r.BloomQuality=4
r.EyeAdaptationQuality=3

Optional: Super-Sampling (SSAA)

Tired of all those jaggies and FXAA blurring your game up? Try this command:

  • r.ScreenPercentage=###

With it, you can render the game at a different resolution than what your monitor can offer (Base value being 100 percent). For example, if you have a 1080p display and set the “###” to “200”, this would make so that the game renders internally at 4K, then downsamples to 1080p, producing a sharp image with a lot less AA. This, of course, is incredibly taxing on the hardware, so you might want to play around with the percentage, or try TAA instead.

For low-end users, you can upsample too, by setting “###” to something below “100”!

Optional: Temporal Anti Aliasing (TAA)

NMH3 uses FXAA by default, with three presets in the graphics menu. FXAA is a really cheap but ineffective solution, blurring the living hell out of the game.

In comes TAA, a more sophisticated solution, although not perfect by any means. If SSAA is too taxing for your hardware and still want a decent form of AA, try these commands:

  • r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
  • r.PostProcessAAQuality=6
  • r.TemporalAASamples=8
  • r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.12
  • r.TemporalAAFilterSize=1.0
  • r.TemporalAACatmullRom=1
  • r.TemporalAAPauseCorrect=1

Optional: Screen Space Reflections (SSR)

Here comes a big one. Want nicer reflections? Then you’re kinda not in the right place. You see, NMH3 wasn’t designed with SSR in mind, and so while a lot of areas can look great, others… not so much. I personally recommend against enabling SSR, but if you want to see how it looks or genuinely prefer it, then try these:

  • r.SSR.Quality=4
  • r.SSR.MaxRoughness=1
  • r.RefractionQuality=3

Mega Optional: Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI)

This is a primitive form of ray-tracing, making so that the lighting looks more realistic, with crazy bounce shadows and the sort. However, this is extremely taxing. Not only that, I also don’t think it looks that great most of the time.

If you are an absolute lunatic and/or have a good enough PC to handle SSGI, try this command:

  • r.SSGI.Quality=4

Optional: Texture Streaming Commands

UE4 is pretty infamous for its texture streaming system. Here are some commands to help with making it look less bad:

  • r.Streaming.Boost=4
  • r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=0
  • r.Streaming.DefragDynamicBounds=1
  • r.Streaming.MipBias=0
  • r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1

Alternatively, you can disable texture streaming outright. Sounds great, don’t it? Well, unfortunately this extends loading times considerably:

  • r.TextureStreaming=0
Volodymyr Azimoff
About Volodymyr Azimoff 15057 Articles
I love games and I live games. Video games are my passion, my hobby and my job. My experience with games started back in 1994 with the Metal Mutant game on ZX Spectrum computer. And since then, I’ve been playing on anything from consoles, to mobile devices.

10 Comments

  1. Hey guys just wanted to give you guys a quick tip on how i got rid off the annoying stuttering most of us are getting in the open world,so all i had to do was to create a custom pagefile,im pretty sure most of you guys know how to do that,if not just google it its pretty simple.What i did was multiply the amount of ram i have by 1,024 so for example i have 16gb of ram multiply that and youll get 16384 put that number in,apply and you are good to go or at least it worked like magic for me.Id like to get more in depth but english is not my native language so it would be difficult for me to do so but anyways hope it helps.

  2. Played around with it a bit and removing “r.Streaming.PoolSize=0” seemed to fix the texture issues I was experiencing earlier with the Naomi tree and stuff. Hopefully this helps anyone experiencing similar issues.

  3. From what I’ve been able to gather so far, at least on my PC, there’s really only stuttering with those texture streaming commands in Santa Destroy.

    Perfect World is flawless for me, and given how most other areas in the game are about as sparse, or even moreso than Perfect World (besides Call of Battle which destroyed framerates on Switch), I’m willing to bet it’s more just an issue with how much stuff is jammed into Santa Destroy to render. Santa Destroy was also kinda heavy in terms of performance on Switch from what I recall.

    Until maybe things are better optimized in a patch (doubtful), or we find some better optimized settings, if you don’t mind it stuttering in maybe what I can guess will be 2/6 locations (Santa Destroy and I assume Call of Battle), I’d say the texture streaming section is fine.

  4. Is there a way to limit the framerate? I can’t power up in Naomi’s lab with an unlocked framerate because it gives me 1500+ fps, and it won’t accept the input. Setting it to 144 fixes that but I’ve got a 240hz monitor, so I’d like to lock it a bit higher. The text adventure part(s) seems like it has the same bug.

  5. I have tried these setting. I notice it in game, but in cut scenes the field of view is not changing. So it leave those weird scenes where the background is super pixelated.

    Would there be a setting to effect the cutscenes FOV or Draw distance?

  6. Thanks for the help making this awesome game even better, but just a warning that the level 2 bike mission crashes with these edits. Note that I’m only using the main commands, none of the optional ones, and I did manage to play that mission just fine after temporarily deleting the new lines. Does anyone have any idea which specific line could be causing this?

    • I haven’t had any crashes with the bike missions, but to be fair, I don’t play them often. Is the mission that crashes in Santa Destroy or Call of Battle?

    • Interesting, it did stop crashing now that I tried to replay the mission. I started the mission 4 times to be sure and none of them crashed. I even checked to see if my Engine file was still modified and indeed it is, as was already clear just by looking at the game. Yesterday the mission crashed the game 3 times in a roll while loading until I gave up and temporarily reverted the Engine file back to it’s original state, today it clearly isn’t crashing anymore with the edits. Maybe for some reason it only happens if the mission wasn’t played before? Or maybe only if it’s played before clearing chapter 3? Or it could be that there was a patch between the time I played yesterday and now which fixed the issue.

  7. Thanks a lot friend! my games looks amazing.
    Just i have a question, my game has NPC and objects fade on a very low settings because some of the before mentioned stuff just appears in front of me instead of rendering from far, it doesent bother me, because first 2 games renders things right in front of your face, but i wanted to know is there is a setting to improve that
    Sorry for bad english, my main lang is spanish

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