Introduction

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is an open-world game developed by Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment, based in the universe created by renowned filmmaker James Cameron. Set on the moon Pandora, the game follows a standalone story in the Avatar universe. Players control a Na'vi character navigating the stunning landscapes of Pandora, with the game emphasizing exploration, survival, and engaging combat.


Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora leverages the Snowdrop engine, developed by Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment, to deliver a visually impressive and technically advanced gaming experience on PC. The engine supports DirectX 12, harnessing the latest graphics technologies to enhance visual fidelity and overall performance.

The game takes advantage of ray tracing, a cutting-edge rendering technique that simulates the behavior of light, providing more realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows. This feature contributes to the overall visual quality, creating a more immersive and lifelike environment within the game.

Thanks to being an AMD-sponsored title, Avatar FOP has support for AMD Fluid Motion Frames (FSR 3) and also FSR 2 upscaling. Unlike other AMD sponsored titles, the game does have support for NVIDIA DLSS, but only for upscaling (not for DLSS 3 Frame Generation).

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what's required in terms of VRAM usage.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at maximum settings, with upscaling and frame generation disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• On the "Video" settings screen you get to choose the usual monitor-related settings
• Avatar supports running windowed, borderless and fullscreen
• The "Temporal Upscaler" menu has three options: "Temporal Anti-Aliasing," "AMD FSR" and "NVIDIA DLSS"
• As mentioned before, there's support for FSR 2 and DLSS 2 upscaling, and FSR 3 Frame Generation (but no support for NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation or Reflex). I did check the game's files, there really is no support for Frame Generation, the required DLSSG DLL does not exist in the game folder.
• Once you enable "Temporal Upscaler: FSR3," the Frame Generation menu becomes enabled, letting you activate AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation
• "Scaling Quality" is the DLSS/FSR upscaler quality mode. You may choose from "Ultra Performance," "Performance," "Balanced," "Quality" and "Ultra Quality"
• "Scaling Mode" lets you pick from "Off," "Fixed" and "Biased," which adjusts the resolution depending on your FPS rate
• V-Sync can be disabled, there is no hidden FPS cap
• You may set an FPS cap between 30 and 300 FPS. When FSR 3 Frame Generation is enabled, the actual FPS will be double that value

• There's three quality presets "High," "Medium" and "Low"
• In our build changing the preset didn't change the Post-Processing Quality, which defaulted to "Low." Make sure to change that
• Besides that there's many options to improve performance and fine-tune everything