What on God’s green earth is this?

The various tarkov special effects are somewhat anemic, or completely missing (e.g. shooting ground with grass generates no impacts at all). HollywoodFX is a mod that represents the wholesale engoodening of special effects. Think EFT RAID. Think the Lobby Scene from The Matrix. Think John Woo movies. If your target isn’t covered in smoke, debris and sparks after emptying a mag into them, we aren’t doing it right. That being said, I don’t want to go overboard and turn it into a complete joke. The idea is to strike a nice balance.

Screenshots really don’t do this mod justice, check out the videos on the Media tab. NB: the videos will invariably get a bit outdated over time, but they are representative of what the mod does.

• High definition muzzle blasts taking into effect the muzzle device, porting, bullet powder amount, barrel length, etc.
• Tracer effects that put the New Years Eve fireworks to shame.
• High resolution, artisanal and handcrafted impacts for every single material type in the game
• Bullet energy based impact composition. The bigger the bullet, the bigger the oomph.
• Cinematic explosions with confinement simulation
• Artisanal tonemapping, hbao, lighting & bloom in a bundled HollywoodGraphics mod
  • Incompatible with Amand’s Graphics mod - turns itself off to avoid issues
• Suppression & concussion effects
• Battle Ambience: lingering smoke, dust, etc for that authentic RAID vibe.
• Fully compatible with FIKA but doesn’t require it. Only installs into player setups, not the dedicated host.
• Presets (you can click a button to configure everything to my settings for example)

For even more CinemaTM, use together with my immersive and gameplay tuned 3rd Person Camera Mod.

There are too many to list, the whole SPT and FIKA modding community helped make this happen. Without the respective dev teams, neither SPT or FIKA would exist. To name perhaps the most influential individuals (in no particular order):

• ssh (without his SDK this mod would not exist)
• Asailant for the awesome mod icon & logo
• Fontaine
• Hazelify
• Goofbol
• EpicRangeTime
• jpdarkone
• RetroLogic
• Amand for the inspiration to improve Tarkov’s graphics
• A dozen or so concerned horses

…and many others who made suggestions and took time to provide feedback.

Impacts

Basic Impacts

Metal Impacts

Wood Impacts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx5vI_uKBWM

Tracers

Dust & Ambience

Muzzle Flashes & Smoke

First Person

Third Person

Suppressed

Gore

Explosions

In (Semi)Open Space

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iYNABmdx5s

Confined

Atmospherics

HollywoodGraphics

Simply extract the zip file into your SPT game folder.

DrakiaXYZ’s gif for installing a mod:

There are two main components in the mod:

1. HollywoodFX: replaces, adds and enhances the various special effects in the game.
2. HollywoodGraphics: improves the graphics and lighting fidelity, along with a few bells and whistles like lens flares.
   1. Note: HollywoodGraphics will turn itself off if Amand’s Graphics mod is installed to avoid compatibility issues

Each of these components has it’s own F12 menu to add a bit of structure. I tried to put reasonably descriptive tooltips over every configuration setting, so I’m not going to repeat things here (it’d get out of date fairly fast anyway).

A notable feature is the configuration templates, which allow you to quickly reset everything to defaults, or use the settings that I personally prefer:

NB: Ignore the reset button, it does nothing in this particular case.

HollywoodFX in and itself isn’t particularly performance intensive. I took a lot of care to write efficient code, I religiously avoid allocations andcarried out a significant amount of profiling**.** Some impact is inevitable due to the multitude of high fidelity effects. In practice I observe no more than a couple of % during firefights. If you have noticeable performance issues, it is likely to be overly ambitious graphics settings for your hardware, mod conflicts, hardware issues, OS issues, driver issues, etc. People successfully run HollywoodFX on GTX 1080ti cards and 6-7 year old CPUs, albeit with appropriately low quality settings.

That being said, there are quite a few avenues to alleviate problems. Generally, there are two main issues that crop up:

1. VRAM bottleneck. You don’t have enough VRAM available for the texture quality and screen resolution you have picked.
2. CPU bottleneck. You have a potato CPU, it has throttling issues, you are running too many computationally intensive tasks, etc.

We’ll deal with each of these in turn. Note, I’m not going to offer generic advice like using process lasso, tuning your bios, etc - just pointers at how to diagnose things in-game and what settings have the biggest impact.

VRAM Issues

This is by far the most common problem, as Tarkov is not good at managing the VRAM budget. It is driven by two settings: the Screen Resolution and Texture Quality you configure in-game. If you set these too high and run out of VRAM, the game will have to start copying data between RAM and VRAM all the time, causing stutters.

As a guidance, you should have at least 16gb VRAM if you intend to run Texture Quality at “high” with a Screen Resolution of 1440p and above. If you have less than 12gb VRAM, pick medium or low Texture Quality.

The first step to diagnosing VRAM issues is the open the command console with the ` key and run the command “fps 3” without the quotes. The game will show a little diagnostic panel on the top right like this:

The important lines you want to look at are: VRAM Budget and VRAM Usage. If your Usage gets to within 80-90% of the Budget, your texture quality settings are likely too high. Try dropping them down a notch and see if the Usage improves. You really want this number no more than 70-75% of the Budget to avoid hiccups. Note, this number is likely to be heavily map dependent. Don’t test it on Factory, that’s the least problematic map. Test it on Shoreline or Streets even.

Dropping the Screen Resolution should be a last resort, but can also help as the game picks texture sizes dynamically to maximize the fidelity at your Screen Resolution.

CPU Issues

The effects with the highest CPU impact are explosions and finisher gore (volumetric blood and particles created during a killshot). These create a fair amount of particles and explosions require some upfront computations. While modern CPUs should be able to process these without a hitch, older Intel models can struggle. If you get consistent stutters during explosions and when enemies die on-screen, these might be causing problems. People with AMD CPUs with 3d cache and top of the shelf Intel CPUs should not struggle, and if you do, the issue is elsewhere.

The sliders to concentrate on are these:

In particular, I recommend decreasing Smoke & Dust Density to 0.5 (or even lower). If you still have issues, try decreasing Compute Fidelity to 0.5 as well. Note, very low Compute Fidelity values will compromise the accuracy of confinement detection and you might see stuff going through solid walls.

The section in question is this:

Try decreasing squirts, spray and finishers to 0. The default values are quite conservative and should be fine even on older hardware, but exceptionally old CPUs might struggle.