Conclusion

In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, players embark on a magical journey as a Na'vi character trained by the RDA on the moon Pandora. The game's narrative unfolds through a mix of main quests and side content, showcasing the lush and visually stunning world envisioned by James Cameron. The story combines character-focused segments with exhilarating action sequences. As expected, there are some character development choices in the form of skill trees, gears and crafting. Unfortunately the game reminds too much of a rehash of Far Cry (despite the different game engine used). There's the same "liberate outposts" concept that we've seen in countless Ubisoft titles, and the main story is somewhat lackluster, possibly also due to generic characters. The gunplay is very simple actually and gets tedious throughout the game, because the core game loop is very basic. There's some slightly more interesting quests that involve following puzzle clues, but their main difficulty is that you can fall off various platforms. On the other hand, if you always wanted to experience the world of Avatar first-hand, then this movie adaption did a great job. You get to explore beautiful landscapes that are full of plants to discover, ingredients to collect and materials to improve your gear.

The graphics in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora showcase an impressive level of detail in the environment. The textures are highly detailed, contributing to a visually rich and immersive gaming experience. The game succeeds in portraying the alien moon of Pandora, featuring dense vegetation that adds depth and realism to the landscapes. From staggeringly dense forest areas to picturesque open plains and imposing mountain ranges with waterfalls, the environments are crafted with fantastic attention to detail. Inside "human" bases things look different, everything is quite bland there and there's a definite lack of geometry and texture detail, the Na'vi bases look better, because of their more organic design, offering a better visual experience.

The quality of most NPCs is "great" or "good," the main characters look gorgeous, especially in cutscenes. However, there is room for improvement in the depiction of human faces, especially in dialogue scenes, where they appear somewhat rigid or wooden. Snowdrop Engine works very well to create dynamic lighting effects that make the world of Pandora come alive. The level artists did a great job here, with carefully crafted lighting and shadow effects.

Unlike other games, which use ray tracing as additional "beyond ultra" settings option, this next-gen version of the Snowdrop Engine relies on ray tracing at all quality levels. Interestingly, they are not using the typical ray tracing that we know from recent games, but a more hybrid approach that's similar to what Unreal Engine 5 does. Ray tracing is used for lighting, reflections and shadows (sun shadows only). Each of those effects has a software shader fallback, to ensure the game will run correctly on older hardware, too.

I really like Massive Entertainment's approach for reflections, which are a hybrid of screen-space reflections and RT reflections. The RT meshes are much more coarse and are lacking lots of vegetation, to ensure good performance. Screen-space reflections are then blended over the RT output, to produce additional detail, which includes all the vegetation. Another interesting technique is "shadow proxies," which can be enabled optionally. When active, objects casting a shadow will not consider their full-resolution mesh with all the fine details, but rather a less complex model is used for shadow calculations, which comes with a lower performance cost—the actual rendering of the object will always use the high-def mesh.

Hardware requirements of the game are pretty high, similar to other titles that we saw this year. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with highest settings you need a RTX 4060 Ti, RX 7700 XT or faster. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RX 7900 XT, RTX 3090 or RTX 4070 Ti. 4K60? That won't be easy. Only NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 can achieve more than 60 FPS. AMD's best, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX reaches only 39 FPS—which is much less than what we usually get out of this card. It seems that despite being AMD-sponsored, the game actually runs a bit better on NVIDIA GPUs. AMD did a good job with their 23.12.1 drivers, which bring significant performance optimizations for their cards—roughly +10%, especially for RDNA 2. While Avatar does include an in-game benchmark, we opted for our own test scene, like we always do. The integrated benchmark consists of a lot of flybys, which are not really representative of what to expect from actual gameplay.

The performance scaling is pretty good though. You can gain roughly 50% extra FPS with just settings. Interestingly, there isn't that much of a visual difference between "Ultra" and "Low," check out the comparisons on page 4. In the past, AMD-sponsored titles lacked support for NVIDIA DLSS, but it seems that after the Starfield DLSS drama, things have changed. In Avatar you have access to upscaling using AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS. The game ships with DLLs for Intel XeSS, too, but that option is missing in-game. AMD recently released their FSR 3 frame generation technology—Avatar is the third title with FSR 3 support and it's working very well. While it is easy to spot visual errors at a base framerate of 50 FPS and below, especially around the HUD elements, things look much better at higher FPS. Once you go beyond a base FPS of 50, everything runs very well with FSR 3 and there's no visible artifacts or errors. Good work! Unfortunately there is no support for NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation, so direct comparisons can't be made, but I have to say I'm quite happy with the way things are progressing for FSR 3, we just need A LOT more games with support for it.

Our VRAM testing would suggest that Avatar is a VRAM hog, but that's not exactly true. While we measured over 15 GB at 4K "Ultra" and even 1080p "Low" is a hard hitter with 11 GB, you have to consider that these numbers are allocations, not "usage in each frame." The Snowdrop engine is optimized to use as much VRAM as possible and only evict assets from VRAM once that is getting full. That's why we're seeing these numbers during testing with the 24 GB RTX 4090. It makes a lot of sense, because unused VRAM doesn't do anything for you, so it's better to keep stuff on the GPU, once it's loaded. Our performance results show that there is no significant performance difference between RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB and 16 GB, which means that 8 GB of VRAM is perfectly fine, even at 4K. I've tested several cards with 8 GB and there is no stuttering or similar, just some objects coming in from a distance will have a little bit more texture pop-in, which is an acceptable compromise in my opinion.