Introduction

Dying Light 2: Stay Human is the sequel to the 2015 original, an action survival RPG in a post-apocalyptic setting. A pandemic that turned humans into mindless, feral zombies nearly wipes out mankind before it is contained to a city with a vaccine. Scientists still continued researching the virus, and a deadlier strain escapes their lab, wiping out much of civilization and confining humans to isolated pockets. "Stay Human" is set 22 years after the events of the original, around mankind's last remaining metropolis in Europe named Villedor, an open-world controlled by factions.

The protagonist is a "Pilgrim," a human brave enough to travel between human settlements, facing the horrors between them. A key gameplay element with "Dying Light" has been Parkour, which enables navigating the post-apocalyptic urban landscape with the same speed and instincts as the zombie horde. Our protagonist learns that he is survived by a sister who lives in Villedor and embarks on a quest to find her. Things get complicated when he is bitten by a zombie and infected.



Developed by Techland, "Dying Light 2" is based on an in-house technology by the developer called C-Engine, and it's technologically advanced, supporting DirectX 12 Ultimate, including real-time ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS, and AMD FSR. We took advantage of these settings and tested the game in a variety of renderer configurations. In this performance review, we're checking on the benefits of using DirectX 12 instead of DirectX 11, what Async Compute brings, and how those affect VRAM usage. We have comparison screenshots for the various settings profiles, including ray tracing. Our main performance testing is done across a wider selection of graphics cards, using a custom test scene.