These are the new Mortal Kombat X graphical options

Having now downloaded Mortal Kombat X‘s gargantuan 15.8GB patch, here’s a look at the new graphical options the game offers on PC.

Firstly, this apparently required the PC menus to be rejigged and rearranged, just to confuse me and make it a little harder to tell what’s new. Here, though, are a pair of screenshots showing both the PC Video options, and the Advanced Settings of the same.

There are a grand total of two new options: VSync and Frame Smoothing. VSync can be set to Off, Adaptive, Fixed, Nvidia Adaptive, or Nvidia Half-Rate Adaptive, and I have absolutely no idea what most of those options are. Nvidia’s Adaptive VSync apparently turns VSync on when the frame rate is high and turns it off when the frame rate drops, which is quite nice, but I don’t know what Half-Rate Adaptive is or how any of this differs from regular Adaptive. I think Half-Rate Adaptive locks VSync on at 30FPS instead of 60FPS, but don’t quote me on that.

As to how well it works… um. Well, I played a grand total of one match, pitting Sub-Zero against Sub-Zero (solely to look at the new, free, Klassic Sub-Zero costume) and the performance seemed marginally worse than before. This was with VSync set to “Fixed” because it was before I actually looked at the options, so that might have contributed to it; I didn’t touch the options because I wanted to see if it was as smooth as before on the same settings. What I got was something that occasionally suffered from slightly weird lag and sudden massive frame rate drops, which caused an incredibly uneven experience. Very odd, considering that pre-patch the frame rate was basically fine barring the pre-fight banter.

I imagine it might be better if I either turn VSync off or set it to Adaptive, but don’t quote me on that. I’ll have a play around and see how it works.

The Steam forums also seem to reckon that Mortal Kombat X‘s online play is significantly worse after this patch, although this could just be a vocal minority. Again, I haven’t had the chance to try that out just yet, but my own online performance was horrific around the time of the game’s launch so I’d be sorta surprised if it had somehow dropped further.