Avatar Frontiers of Pandora - PC Performance Review

ign.com:

Avatar made a big splash when it hit screens in late 2009, and Ubisoft Massive is aiming to continue the momentum of its sequel, The Way of Water, with the new open-world action-adventure game Frontiers of Pandora. A clear showcase for both PC hardware and Ubisoft’s own Snowdrop engine, the game is already proving to be both a visual treat and rather demanding to run, so let’s open Pandora’s box and see what happens.

A Frosty Reception

Ubisoft Massive’s Snowdrop Engine was a big hit back in 2013 with its impressive E3 demo for The Division. Although that game never quite hit those heights, it was a technical pioneer on the eighth-gen consoles and PC, offering full time of day, dynamic precomputed irradiance, dynamic weather, dense volumetrics, complex AI, and online integration.

Snowdrop has evolved over the years, and although many of those core elements have remained, the team has embraced the current generation with new features as well. The current big-ticket item is ray tracing, which is now included on the toolkit. Supporting ray-traced global illumination and reflections is a core pillar for the game’s visual requirements, delivering bounce lighting with diffuse color, which is critical to the art aesthetic of the Avatar movies and games.

The solution enables light to react inside caves, across flowing flora fields, and into dense wooded overgrowth, giving the game a striking and organic look. This is backed up by the game’s shifting time and weather patterns, which rely on volumetrics. Be they clouds, lights, or fog, it adds depth and solidity to the world of Pandora. Some sections can see you wading through heavy fog during battle, or flying high through the clouds as the stratospheric water volumes engulf your