Delta Force: Black Hawk Down is a remake of the original from 2000. Built on the Unreal Engine 5, it features cutting-edge visuals, including Lumen Global Illumination, Virtual Shadows, and more. As you can imagine, the performance is far from ideal. We dig into the game’s graphics settings, benchmarking and comparing the available options to find the optimal results.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
Enable Resizable BAR.
Turn on Game Mode.
Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
Black Hawk Down shows decent scaling, averaging 31 FPS at 4K, 59 FPS at 1440p, and 85 FPS at 1080p using the Ultimate-quality graphics preset. Like most Unreal Engine 5 projects, the game is completely GPU-bound.
Test Setup
CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Black Hawk Down shows mixed scaling across its numerous graphics presets. The game averaged 55 FPS at 4K “Ultimate” with DLSS quality mode. Stepping down yielded the following results:
Extreme: 104 FPS (+89%).
Ultra: 109 FPS (+98%).
High: 137 FPS (+149%).
Medium: 140 FPS (+154%).
Low: 141 FPS (156%).
Graphics Presets
Much of these gains are associated with Lumen Global Illumination which is toned down at the high quality-preset and below.
Reflections & Effects Quality
Black Hawk Down uses Lumen reflections for onscreen and offscreen reflections. Although they’re performance-friendly (-4%), the results are quite noisy. At the high quality (and below), the reflections lose most detail and can be essentially considered disabled.
Effects Quality multiple shaders, including lighting filters, glare, refraction, and translucency-related settings. The performance hit ranges from 4-5% at ultra quality and above. Anything lower isn’t noticeable.
Effects
Shaders & Global Illumination Quality
Shader Quality is among the more complex graphics settings, adjusting a range of effects. Luckily, the performance hit is trivial (2-3%). Lowering it from “Ultimate” results in the following changes:
Extreme reduces GI coverage and disables removes turf-related materials like flowing cloth.
Ultra further reduces GI coverage, producing unneeded contact shadows.
High reduces material detail which removes finer surface detail from certain objects.
Medium reduces GI coverage, leading to loss of color bleeding on intermediate-distant surfaces.
Low further reduces GI coverage, almost completely eliminating it from distant interiors.
Shaders
Global Illumination (Lumen) is the most taxing setting in Black Hawk Down. It sets the lighting quality, including scattering, bleeding, and ambient shadows. The ultimate quality (55 FPS) is 40% slower than extreme (91 FPS) and 40-45% slower than the ultra quality option (97 FPS):
Extreme reduces GI resolution and range (MDFs->GDFs). It disables opaque surface light permeation. This results in slightly darker interiors, fewer ambient shadows, and reduced light penetration.
Ultra further reduces GI resolution and range. It disables light color bleeding. This results in loss of sunlight color scatter, even darker interiors, and loss of most contact shadows.
High disables Lumen. Light scattering is limited, and nearly all contact/ambient shadows are lost.
Medium and Low use distance field AO and Screen Space AO.
Global Illumination Quality
Lumen Explained: Is it Ray Tracing?
Lumen, by default, uses software ray tracing. This implementation includes Screen Tracing, Mesh Distance Fields, and Global Distance Fields, each used on different sections of the scene. The Final Gather is resolved by the Skylight, combining atmospheric and local lighting.
Screen Tracing is the first step in the Lumen pipeline.
It is conducted against objects in the depth buffer or screen space.
It is primarily used for object boundaries and crevices as a higher quality SSAO replacement.
Objects missed are served by the distance fields.
Mesh Distance Fields are 3D representations of an object (or set of combined objects).
Each point in an MDF stores the nearest distance to an object surface within the volume.
This is computed offline, and allows skipping the empty space in the MDF when ray marching.
Ray marching is an optimized form of ray tracing used to calculate diffuse lighting.
You march along a ray’s path in small steps.
At each step, the distance to the closest surface is calculated using an MDF.
Shading is applied if a surface is detected in the ray’s proximity.
The amount of shading applied depends on the distance to the object.
Upon intersection, shadow, diffuse, and reflection rays are cast outwards towards light sources or probes.
Mip-maps: High resolution MDFs for nearer objects, and scaled down variants for the rest
Global Distance Fields are abstract volumes obtained by combining all the MDFs in the scene.
The result is a bare-bones geometrical representation with minimal per-object detail.
The GDFs are used for large-scale or “global” lighting.
GDFs are cached and updated only when required.
Surface Cache forms Lumen’s backbone:
It stores the material and lighting data for various surface points, called cards.
Upon intersection (see SDFs), the lighting at a point is referenced from this cache.
It is calculated, cached, and updated gradually over frames.
Up to 12 cards per mesh/object
Indirect Lighting is calculated using light probes placed in the scene. The distribution is scant (1 per 4×4 tile). For each texel, data is interpolated from the four closest probes and from previous frames.
The Final Gather backs the software ray-tracing results. It is based on the Screen Space Radiance Cache.
It uses screen probes that are placed on pixels (screen space).
Screen Space Radiance probes operate at 1/16 the resolution.
Their results are interpolated spatially and temporally.
Using importance sampling, the lighting from the previous Screen Radiance Cache is reprojected into the current frame.
The Cache indexes the direction and the position of each frame’s rays, assisting temporal reprojection.
When it fails, the World Space Cache is used.
A separate, low-resolution World Radiance Cache is used for distant lighting.
They are placed in world space and operate at 1/256 the resolution.
They utilize temporal acumulation with gradual updation.
The World Space Radiance Cache has higher directional resolution but lower spatial resolution.
It works well in situations where all of the lighting in a room is coming from a small distant window.
The Screen Space probe rays are shorter, falling back to the World Space Cache upon misses.
Areas with detailed geometry use a denser probe grid, and ambient occlusion is added to the temporally sampled lighting for a refined result.
Light tracing is optimized by prioritizing sections with luminance in the last frame.
Shadows & Post-Processing Quality
Black Hawk Down leverages Virtual Shadows at ultra and above. While the performance hit is minor (2-4%), the VRAM usage spikes by 300-400 MB.
High uses Virtual Shadows, minus the soft edges.
Medium and Low use low-quality blocky shadows.
Shadows
Post-processing adjusts various late-stage shaders, including motion blur, ambient occlusion, depth of field, lens flare, eye adaptation, tonemapping, etc. The performance hit is trivial (2-3%).
Tonemapping is disabled at ultra.
Depth of field is disabled at ultra.
Eye Adaptation is disabled at low.
Post Processing
Upscaling & Frame Generation
Upscaling is a necessity in most Unreal Engine 5 games. DLSS grants a massive 78% boost over native 4K in quality mode alone. Balanced mode is 110% faster, while performance mode is 140% faster than native. Black Hawk Down uses DLSS 3.7. Upgrade to DLSS 4 using our guide.
DLSS PDLSS QFSR 3 PXeSS B
Frame generation may not be suitable for a co-op shooter, but it grants lofty performance gains. When paired with quality upscaling, the resulting frame rates are 75% higher, dropping to 70% with performance upscaling.
Black Hawk Down: VRAM Usage
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down uses over 12 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Ultimate” quality mode. The usage drops to 9.5 GB at 1440p and 8.2 GB at 1080p.
Upscaling reduces the peak VRAM usage to 10.1 GB at 4K “Ultimate,” with lower quality presets using less than 8 GB. Anyone with an 8 GB GPU (or higher) shouldn’t have trouble with this game.
Black Hawk Down: CPU Bottlenecks
Delta Force, like most Unreal Engine 5 titles, is predominantly GPU-bound regardless of your setting or configuration.
Black Hawk Down Performance Summary
Set Global Illumination to “Ultra” for a massive >75% boost.
Set Reflections, Post-Processing, and Shadows to “Extreme” for a 5-10% gain.
Set Shaders and Effects to “High” for another 10-15% uplift
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