vermintide 2 performance guide

vermintide 2 is very CPU intensive as the CPU needs to handle a large amount of enemies, in the launcher you can alleviate this by enabling more CPU threads to be utilized by the game (the more the better) which is highly recommended to do, this will increase the stress on your CPU and cause it to heat up more, so make sure your cooling is good enough to handle it

below are all the in-game settings explained, which component (CPU or GPU) drives them and what kind of performance related impact you can expect from them, next to the categories I have listed recommended settings for systems similar to mine

system used for reference: i5 2500k @ 4.5GHz (2 worker threads), 8GB of RAM and a 3GB GTX1060
performance: 60 fps for the most part, during hordes it might drop to 50, at worst to 40 and sometimes stays at 60

textures: high/high
- character texture quality (GPU, very low impact): controls the quality of textures on characters
- environment texture quality (GPU, very low impact): controls the quality of textures on the environment
- you need at least 3GB of VRAM to use high quality textures, less than that and you should use low quality textures

particles: medium/high/100%/100
- particle quality (GPU, very high impact): controls the amount of particles on the screen, must be on medium to see blood splatters during combat from hitting enemies
- transparency resolution (GPU, medium impact): significantly changes the appearance of particles, low setting will make sparks look like large white pixels for example, highly recommended to set this on high
- scatter density (GPU & CPU, very low impact): controls the amount of grass/rubble on the level, very noticeable on the wheat fields of against the grain
- blood decal amount (GPU, very low impact): controls the amount of blood splatters on walls/floor/character models, extreme preset has it at 100 but you might prefer 0 for better visual clarity

lighting: off/off/1/medium/low/off
- local light shadow quality (CPU, high impact): controls the quality of dynamic shadows cast by local lights such as lamps and torches, sometimes these shadows have a very short draw distance and you can see them pop-in as you turn around or move forward
- sun shadows (CPU, very high impact): controls the quality of dynamic shadows cast by the sun and moon, low/medium have low quality shadows at a short distance, high/extreme have high quality shadows at a medium distance, like with local light shadows these have a low draw distance which can be jarring to look at but usually it's hard to notice, sun shadows do impact some indoor areas as well
- max shadow casting lights (CPU, high impact): controls the amount of shadows cast by lights, or something, after testing it turns out that the higher this setting is the more draw distance shadows (local only?) will have, if you use local light shadows then consider increasing the value of this setting considerably
- volumetric fog quality (GPU, high impact): adds depth to the image with volumetric fog, the difference between each setting depends on the map, in some cases it will make the fog extend further away into the distance, sometimes the difference between them is nonexistent, and in some cases it will add more fog to the scene and make it harder to see, an example of this would be in convocation of decay where the door puzzle is, medium seems to be the most efficient as low barely adds an effect and the higher settings don't do much but always impact your performance more
- ambient light quality (GPU & CPU, medium impact): controls static lighting, very apparent indoors, for best results use low if your sun shadows are off, and high if your sun shadows are anything but off, otherwise you will end up with awkward scenes where the lighting doesn't match, if indoor areas ever look too bright to you it's because this setting isn't on high
- high quality fur: anything to do with high quality hair in games is a major performance killer so turn this thing off

post-processing: TAA/on/medium/on/off/on/off/on/on/off/on
- anti-aliasing (GPU, none to high impact): off looks very sharp but then your edges will be jaggy, fxaa does a poor job of blurring them out for basically no performance impact, TAA does a good job of blurring them out along with the whole screen for a rather large performance impact
- sharpness filter: applies a filter that makes the entire image sharper, highly recommended to have this on if you use FXAA or TAA
- SSAO (GPU, low to very high impact): or screen space ambient occlusion, you know what just google this it's hard to explain, either have this on medium for a subtle effect and minimal impact, extreme for the complete opposite, or off if you don't care for it, for some reason high looks really bad
- bloom: gives light sources a subtle shine
- skin shading: honestly I have no clue what this actually does, haven't seen any difference between on and off
- depth of field (GPU, medium impact): makes objects and scenery in the distance look out of focus
- screen space reflections (GPU, high impact): enables reflections on reflective surfaces such as water puddles, reflections are always big performance killers, hardly noticeable due to the lack of reflective surfaces but despite that the performance impact is significant
- light shafts: AKA god rays
- lens flare: cannot be turned off as far as I know
- color and lens distortions: adds a very small but strange "fish eye" effect that makes the image distort around the corners, also adds subtle chromatic aberration which can cause motion sickness for some people but it's not as bad as it usually is in games
- motion blur (GPU, low impact): makes things look blurry in motion, very cinematic and arguably makes lower fps look smoother

other: off/0
- I haven't been able to figure out what these settings even do, everything seems the same whether you have them on or off

if you want much nicer visuals without sacrificing too much fps (still 60, but around 10 less during hordes), consider bumping up sun shadows and ambient light quality to high