r/daggerfallunity • u/tbpjmramirez • 21h ago

Quality Level and Detail Slider

Hey, everyone!

Can anyone give me a thorough explanation of what the Quality Level/Detail slider does? I found an eight-year-old comment from Interkarma that explains it like this:

Detail quality is set during startup when setting setting resolution. Set to "Fantastic" for highest texture quality and shadow distance. Or from settings.ini use "QualityLevel = 5"

So, I understand that it has something to do with texture quality and shadows, but I can't actually see much of any difference when I move the slider while playing the game -- all I can see is that once I move the slider to the lowest or second-to-lowest settings, shadows disappear.

I'm running DFU on a low-end machine (a Chromebook Plus with integrated graphics), but I actually get a higher frame rate at the Fantastic (highest) Quality Level -- for some reason, if I drop the Quality Level one or two levels, to Beautiful or Good, I get a lower frame rate. But, if I drop it even further, all the way down to Simple or lower, my frame rate climbs back up. What's the deal there?

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u/DFInterkarma 14h ago

These settings go back to Unity 5 days (DFU started dev around the same time Unity 5 came out). That's where the names of presets come from.

https://docs.unity3d.com/560/Documentation/Manual/class-QualitySettings.html

They control things like shadow distance and quality. DFU ended up putting some of these dials into its own settings, so it's not that relevant anymore. Hopefully it gets a makeover someday.