Atomic Heart on PC has great performance out of the box, and that is incredibly refreshing given the sad state of certain ports released in the past months. However, that doesn’t mean there are no improvements to be made to the game.
Visual Enhancements
As mentioned in the review, the game does not support High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays, and Windows 10/11’s AI-based algorithm AutoHDR doesn’t work with it either. That’s doubtlessly a shame for everyone equipped with a display that can get much brighter than allowed by the Standard Dynamic Range (SDR).
There are two ways to attempt HDR injection into Atomic Heart. You could add the following Unreal Engine 4 parameters to the Engine.ini file:
r.AllowHDR=1
r.HDR.EnableHDROutput=1
r.HDR.Display.OutputDevice=3
r.HDR.Display.ColorGamut=2
The last two parameters can be tweaked as described in the Unreal Engine 4’s document, so you can freely experiment with that. It is unlikely that the result will be satisfactory, though, as forcing HDR through the UE parameters tends to provide an oversaturated image.
The other (and superior) HDR injection option requires using SpecialK, a tool created by Kaldaien to improve PC games in various ways. SpecialK was originally made to fix issues and add features to games like NieR: Automata, Dragon Quest XI, NieR Replicant, and Monster Hunter: World. However, since 2018 SpecialK was also updated to ‘retrofit’ HDR support for games that do not include an official implementation.
With Atomic Heart, an extra step is required. Before launching SpecialK, you’ll have to replace the default sl.interposer.dll file with the one pinned by Kaldaien in SpecialK’s Discord channel (specifically, in the Lobbyspecial-k subchannel). At this point, launch the game through SpecialK and open up the interface with Control + Shift + Backspace. Select HDR, then scRGB HDR, and tweak the peak white luminance setting until you reach a satisfactory result. Personally, I maxed the luminance (after calibrating the Windows HDR app), deactivated Perceptual Boost, and enabled Full HDR luminance. While by no means an optimal result, it retains the game’s atmosphere while enabling much brighter highlights.
As we covered in a previous article, there’s a wrapper called DLSSTweaks that lets users try to force NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA) in games that only support Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) by default. Atomic Heart is one such game, and since it runs so well by itself, using DLAA instead of DLSS is enticing for gamers with high-end PC rigs.
This is doubly useful because, by default, the game doesn’t support downsampling techniques like NVIDIA’s DSR/DLDSR (you can select the higher-than-native resolutions in-game, but they won’t actually be applied). As such, DLSSTweaks is the only option to obtain the cleanest image quality in Atomic Heart. The setup requires you to extract the dxgi.dll & dlsstweaks.ini files into the game’s Win64-Shipping.exe folder (Atomic HeartBinariesWin64), then open the dlsstweaks.ini file and edit ForceDLAA from false to true.
Unfortunately, DLSSTweaks and SpecialK HDR do not play well with each other for the time being; when I tried to enable them both, the game just crashed. I’ve informed Kaldaien; hopefully, he’ll be able to figure out a workaround.
Field of View (FoV) Increase
First and foremost, as confirmed by Mundfish founder and Atomic Heart Game Director in an exclusive pre-release interview with Wccftech, the game doesn’t feature any Field of View (FoV slider) on PC or consoles. While the developers deemed it high enough that it wouldn’t be a problem, the default FoV is set to 80, which is less than ideal for many PC gamers. Mundfish actually tweeted that the slider will be added to the game in a future patch, but in the meantime, there are a couple of ways around this shortcoming.
The first is to use Flawless Widescreen, a known software tool originally conceived to fix issues with widescreen and Ultrawide/SuperWide implementation in games. There’s already a plugin that enables FoV increase (as well as fixing aspect ratio and culling where needed).
The other option is the Custom Field of View mod on Nexus Mods. In this case, you’ll have to download the file, select the desired FoV (the available options range from 90 to 140), and extract that file to the AtomicHeartContentPaks folder.
Quality of Life Atomic Heart Mods and Tweaks
There’s a bunch of Atomic Heart mods that can make your life easier in the game. Firstly, the Buffed Weapons mod enhances the damage dealt by all weapons by a factor of 1.5 or 2, and that includes appropriate scaling for each weapon upgrade.
Want to get more resources to craft upgrades and new weapons more easily? Koinonos has you covered with options ranging up to 4x increased resources. Do you feel bad about being unable to collect loot because you’re full? The Increased Inventory and Storage mod by Sidiusz can change the available slots up to 500 for both inventory and storage or just one of them if preferred. Beware, though, as the author of the mod warns of saves potentially being broken; back up your saves before installing it.
Easiest Piston Lock mod does exactly what the name implies, making one of the lockpicking minigames less frustrating (although this one is arguably already easy).
On the other hand, if you want to make things harder for Mayor Nechaev, the Sparse Ammo mod increases ammunition scarcity by halving the original amount found in caches.
If you’ve got subtitles enabled, you might be squinting to read them, depending on how far you are from the display. That’s another fix the developers confirmed to be coming in a future patch, but in the meantime, the Larger Subtitles mod increases their size by 20%.
Gamers interested in taking screenshots of Facility 3826 may be glad to find out about the Toggle HUD mod, which allows you to disable the game’s heads-up display with a single button press, though you’ll have to install ReShade.
To round up this overview of Atomic Heart mods and tweaks, the skip intro trick is particularly useful here due to the long introductory videos and disclaimers. To avoid seeing them every time you boot Atomic Heart, head to this folder (Atomic HeartContentAtomicHeartContentMovies) and delete the following files:
Launch_FHD_60FPS_PC_Steam.mp4, LaunchVideo_WIndows_4k_60FPS.mp4 and LaunchVideo_WIndows_Low_30FPS.mp4.
The post Atomic Heart Mods and Tweaks Roundup – Inject HDR, Force DLAA, Increase FoV, and Improve Quality of Life by Alessio Palumbo appeared first on Wccftech.
