Bellular's Forever graphics tests: lighting and fog cost the most, water almost nothing

A 28 October video from the Bellular channel set out to find which of Forever's new graphics settings are worth what they cost. According to its automatic captions, most of the testing ran on a PC with a 9800X3D processor and a 4070 Ti Super graphics card, with an entry-level 2020 MacBook Pro as the low end. The video's biggest costs came from lighting and fog. Fog is largely handled by the compute effects setting, and moving it up to high and then ultra reportedly knocked off dozens of frames per second. Secondary lighting, the effect behind a torch lighting up a dark forest, was harsher: going from high to ultra cut the frame rate by "upwards of 50", while the difference was "very hard to see" in most circumstances. Ultra-high shadows were described as a frame eater too, with a step or two down returning about 10 frames or more.

Water was the surprise. The video says the reflections and animations survive even at low liquid detail and that the new water came at no notable cost, so it can stay on high. Its overall verdict is that the new settings on Good give the best balance. Render resolution was the biggest single lever: dropping from 1440p to 1080p almost doubled the frame rate in some situations, at the price of visible blur.

These are one channel's results on its own machines, read from automatic captions without watching the footage. Other hardware, drivers or the launch client may give different numbers.