Assetto Corsa Competizione Graphics Settings (Patreon)

Recommendations for graphics settings based on their visual impact/performance cost. No-nonsense, carefully tested engine.ini tweaks

Updated 1 Oct 2025: added useful info for "Post Processing" setting. Updated UE4SS script - optimised so that it isn't looping indefinitely. Attached latest video settings json files

Here are my notes on video settings, engine.ini tweaks etc after lots of testing and trying things in other guides. Mainly from a VR performance perspective but should apply for any setup.

My setup is 7800x3d + 4070ti, quest 3 set to 4864x2592 72hz via wired link.

Not detailed here, but FOV cropping is a valuable tool to gain headroom, I'm using 0.93, 0.73.

Video settings

My settings json files attached (Documents\Assetto Corsa Competizione\Customs\VideoSettings) the DLSS method looks much better

DLSS4 (there are plenty of guides how to force DLSS4 w Preset K so I won’t detail that)

• DLSS Quality: Quality (lower is not sharp in motion)

• Sharpness sliders in ACC video settings don't work with DLSS4, Advanced sharpen filter is too aggressive, so some sharpening must be forced, see “Additional UE tweaks not possible via engine.ini” section

• Pixel Density 130 gave similar clarity to 150 in my “DLSS Off” settings

DLSS Off

• Resolution/Pixel Density/Sharpening: Lower Resolution to 70-80, enable temporal upsampling and increase pixel density. Setting of resolution/pixel density/sharpening is headset dependent to find a sweet spot. 80/150/150 is good for me. Going too low on resolution scale causes too much shimmering

Common

• Fullscreen may give performance boost, but janky with oculus if have to alt tab

• View distance: High/Epic

• Shadows/Shadows Distance: Epic. To avoid floating car look at low sun angles in sunny weather. High is almost OK. IMPORTANT: Epic performs abysmally in some situations e.g. around 9pm, so need to optimise via engine.ini

• Effects: Low or Medium. High adds SSR (Mainly affects reflections in rain and is expensive)

• Post processing: Low or Medium. Medium adds ambient occlusion (AO) giving shadows under cars in overcast/rain but is expensive, can restore some performance via engine.ini. High adds sun lens flare which can break immersion in VR, especially as it can shine through rear view camera on some cars as if it was a mirror.

• Foliage: Medium gives 3d grass, making the tracks feel less bland

• Texture: High. Doesn’t seem to be much difference between low and epic, maybe only affects texture streaming

• Mirror Quality: Medium. Epic adds dust in mirrors

• Mirror Framerate Limit - anything other than “off” seems to cause frame time oscillation

• Materials: High. Any lower means skidmarks are not clear. Epic looks marginally different

• Bloom: Medium/High/Epic - finetuning brake lights, some cars have small lights and therefore almost no bloom, so epic is best, but then cars with big lights end up looking bad. High seems a good compromise

• Volumetric fog: Off. Too expensive. Makes distant landscape look better, and gives nice effect for brake lights at night

• Foliage LOD Quality: Epic. fixes bad pop in with 3d tree at brands hatch (alternatively can be set lower and foliage.LODDistanceScale tweak mentioned later fixes)

• HLOD: Disabled. Apparently enabled can cause stutter, and doesn’t seem to improve performance. Tried benchmarking with capframex over a lap of nords, enabled seems slightly better, but causes grandstand pop-in on Silverstone

• Advanced sharpen filter: can give similar clarity to increasing pixel density by 5% at less cost, but introduces some artifacts that didn't seem worth it

• Without AO (Post Processing Low)

  • Tone Mapping: Default

  • Saturation: 105

  • Contrast: 0.6

  • Exposure: 0.2 (a bit lower for overcast)

• With AO (Post Processing Med/High/Epic)

  • Tone Mapping: Default

  • Saturation: 105

  • Contrast: 0.45

  • Exposure: 0.35

Engine.ini

Many of the commands that are shared in various ACC guides are invalid (not recognised by ACC UE console), others are valid but seem to make little or no performance impact, most of the commands that improve performance can be managed through the in game video settings, so forcing them via engine.ini is a bit pointless (e.g. r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=0 - same can be achieved by setting Post Processing to Low, r.SSR.quality=0 - same can be achieved by setting Effects to Mid or Low)

After a lot of time testing the various commands, these are the only ones that I think are potentially useful

[ConsoleVariables]

r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.15

r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=2

r.Shadow.MaxResolution=2048

--r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=2048--only use if desperately need more performance

r.AmbientOcclusionLevels 1--only use if AO is enabled (Post processing set to medium or higher)

[/script/engine.renderersettings]

r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1

First one allows fine tuning of the sharpness of TAA (assuming not using DLSS/FSR), also affects ghostMany of the commands that are shared in various ACC guides are invalid (not recognised by ACC UE console), others are valid but seem to make little or no performance impact, most of the commands that improve performance can be managed through the in game video settings, so forcing them via engine.ini is a bit pointless (e.g. r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=0 - same can be achieved by setting Post Processing to Low, r.SSR.quality=0 - same can be achieved by setting Effects to Mid or Low)

After a lot of time testing the various commands, these are the only ones that I think are potentially useful

[ConsoleVariables]

r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.15

r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=2

r.Shadow.MaxResolution=2048

--r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=2048--only use if desperately need more performance

r.AmbientOcclusionLevels 1--only use if AO is enabled (Post processing set to medium or higher)

[/script/engine.renderersettings]

r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=1

First one allows fine tuning of the sharpness of TAA (assuming not using DLSS/FSR), also affects ghosting depending on your res/fps/AA settings. I found increasing it from the 0.1 default helped a bit with ghosting in rain. Can be tuned instead of or alongside the sharpening slider in video settings.

Second and third reduce how demanding shadows on Epic can be e.g. at 9pm at certain points of the track, but avoids floating car look the rest of the day.

Fourth can be used to claw some more performance but degrades shadow quality a lot

Fifth restores some performance if you are using AO (Post processing set to medium or higher)

Sixth avoids texture pop in (noticeable on adverts on gantries on Nurburgring)

My notes on the various commands: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Jq-_F0FTictWXkZ3TDgQqoUY5ftVu4ysBe6VCJDmheE/edit?usp=sharing

Additional UE tweaks not possible via engine.ini

• DLSS4 has some nice benefits, but lacks sharpness, this can be fixed with     r.Tonemapper.Sharpen 1.4, but this only persists if using the method detailed below

• Shadow distance can be improved beyond what is possible via video settings using r.Shadow.DistanceScale, doing can reduce the crawling effect that can be distracting in VR and maybe large screen setups. It will soften up nearby shadows a bit

• Some tree models change their LOD as you turn your head in VR, creating a very obvious visual issue, this can be mitigated with the foliage.LODDistanceScale command but can be expensive (so only use if you have spare headroom)

Install

• Install UE4SS in next to your ACC AC2-Win64-Shipping.exe: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Engine:Unreal_Engine_4#Unreal_Engine_4.2F5_Scripting_System (I used the v3.0.1 release from the github page)

• Unzip cjk28 ACC tweak.zip next to your ACC AC2-Win64-Shipping.exe

• Additional tweaks (r.Shadow.DistanceScale and foliage.LODDistanceScale 6) can be enabled by uncommenting (delete the “- -” before them in Mods\ACC_cjk28\Scripts\main.lua)

  • foliage.LODDistanceScale 6 can be expensive, can try 5 or 4 (ACC default is 3)

Comparisons

https://acstuff.club/u/comparison/wq6 

https://acstuff.club/u/comparison/xh1

Tree LOD before/after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gjUbArvnxQ (play at 50% speed)