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Intro:
After two reruns and more than 130 hours to this game I can finally be happy with this games graphics and performance. My third rerun is now more beautiful looking and runs like butter 60+PFS constantly. I was totally fine with reshade and the ingame settings until the recent patch 1.11.1, which screwed up everything. I made some research and the conclusions are quite weird actually. Please read on and I'll show you how you can achieve best performance with best graphics for this game. You will be amazed by what you need to change, believe me.

Research and testings:
I read on various forums and sites that HZD has an odd way to render the graphics. Some forums said that TAA is better while others said that SMAA or even TXAA are better. It got weirder when there was talk about Nvidia DLSS vs AMD fidelityFX, mixed feelings there really. But there was one comment that really made me wonder. Changing texture quality from medium and up does nothing except for increasing the sharpness. Which in turn will screw up various upscaling. I needed proof but there was none so the only way was to test it myself.

I have provided a picture with my tests. The screenshots are made with no external shaders. Only ingame settings. Changing nvidia control panel does nothing, I reverted it to default anyway. The tests are made in fullscreen 3840x1080 with vsync. Download the picture and watch in fullscreen so you can zoom in and compare while reading.

First row:
The settings I used to use the most, max everything. FFX render Aloy perfectly and the background is sharp. DLSS however, render Aloy little weaker if you look at her face. Then I noticed the tall grass, looks blurry but that's because it got more details. Seems like FFX tall grass got less leaf. Moving around with DLSS looks blurry but detailed somehow. With FFX it looks sharp. My conclusion here is that FFX renders with sharpness and less details while DLSS render with details and less AA. Look at the fur on Aloys breast plate.

Second row:
Here I test DLSS only. Changing between texture quality did nothing quality wise, don't know why. But with medium textures I got more frame rate. Conclusion here is you might as well go for medium quality textures and gain some frame rate as it does nothing to quality.

Third row:
I tested DLSS max quality with medium textures vs DLSS balanced with medium textures. Interestingly no quality drop but FPS boost. Also tested against FFX at balanced with medium quality. And it is here that AMD fidelity FX died quality wise. Poor sharpening and bad antialiasing. Conclusion here is if you gonna use AMD FFX you need to have it maxed otherwise you might as well use Nvidia DLSS. Visually better with same performance. I also tested DLSS on performance and it gave better performance with no visual change.

Final test:
I also tested the game without upscale. Ow darn the performance just dropped to the lowest, got 40+FPS. Using simple upscale wasn't better. Visuals was ok but framerate never reached 60 ever. No matter if I use TXAA, SMAA or TAA. Feels like it's software rendering, not sure. Non the less it's not good, use Nvidia or AMD upscale, best performance and great visuals.

Edit: I did some more tests here. Read the comments below.

Total conclusions:
No i didn't forgot the fourth row, I'll explain later.
With the above testing are the following conclusions. Having texture quality above normal does nothing visually except impacting performance. It just rendering things for nothing. AMD fidelity FX does better anti alias and sharpening at the cost of quality. While Nvidia does the opposite. Nvidia also upscales for nothing on balanced and higher DLSS. AMD fidelity FX upscales best on ultra quality, otherwise it's better to use nvidia DLSS.

The settings:
I have Nvidia RTX 2060 card. I imagine that this should apply to AMD radeon as well since all graphic settings are ingame only and it totally taken over your graphic card. Put your card to default anyway in your graphic card control panel in windows. If you use Geforce experience, just let it do its thing once. Then follow the steps below and don't let Geforce experience change your settings again.

1. Reduce texture quality to medium. You'll get performance boost with no visual impact. Use low if you really want performance. It barely lowers the visuals.
2. Depending on what you do. If you are running around or taking general screenshots of the environment, use Nvidia DLSS performance. If you gonna take closeups on Aloy use AMD fidelity FX ultra quality.
3. That's it!

Bonus fourth row:
I also tested ultra quality AMD fidelity FX with medium textures against ultra textures. Medium textures gave those extra precious FPS. Can you see which is which?

Thank you for reading!

Edit:
I forgot about the black border that some will get depending on what graphic cards they use. I got the border and to remove it I can ether turn off upscaling which is boring or use my now favorite Nvidia DLSS on performance. Also need to change ratio from auto to my screen ratio which is 32:9. I got the border on other settings including DLSS balanced and up.

/Frezzno