MEA's shadows have a disgustingly high impact on the GPU. I would suggest lowering these first in either or both of your "... little to no impact to visuals" or "... moderate impact to visuals" categories.
I would rarely recommend lowering terrain quality too much in video games, especially open-world ones; lower settings of these (and textures & lighting) make the world spaces look like butt -- and you spend at least half of your time & effort looking at the world itself.

Thank you for the comment! But from reviewing the slider section of article above, it seems that altering the shadows was left off of that concluding section of the guide by its author because the difference between lower settings and higher settings there is much more immediately-noticeable and stark than the difference between lower and higher terrain quality settings (while being no less omnipresent in the gameworld).

I understand, but from what I played, there's not much of a visual difference. More than half the game is set in darker or outright dark environments, some of which have so much shadow that yiu don't notice any particular shadow. It's just dark without being visually obscured or shrouded.

Just FYI to any new readers coming here from Google research like I did:
I have a GTX980 regular from MSI and an i7-6700k CPU ($1000 CAD set-up at the times I bought them). I set lighting to high, shadows to medium, post-process to high, everything else to ultra; at 1080p with no scaling, and am clocking 60 fps steadily most of the time. More, actually, but my monitor only has a 60Hz rate. Haven't looked back, and I'm particular about gfx assets being set highest first (resolution be damned; quality assets matter more).

Strangely enough, nVidia optimization recommended shadows to high and lighting to medium, and meshes to medium. Don't change meshes; BioWare meshes aren't as good as they should be (better than Bethesda's TES and Fallout games though), so leave them at ultra-level.

Well thank you again for your insight; it may definitely be helpful to readers.

i'm Playing MEAndromida on my RX460 Nitro 4Gb And AMD FX8320 10 Gb Ram - The Game On Ultra Setting 1080p with no Scaling -- ( Medium Shadows - HBAO only not full ) -- the Game Playable on 24 to 30 Fps So i changed one thing Texture Filtering to High not Ultra And The Magic Happens the game is Stable up 31 fps to 43 with no shuttering at all i relly love this Game

Glad you like the game! Due to your GPU you won't get great FPS on maximum settings, but seems like you've worked that out.

i Know but we trying to have fun and play Games i will not make my Slow GPU hold me back

Good attitude!

Hi, i play with gtx 1060 6gb and i5 4460 with 8gb ram ddr3. Can you tell me if there is much different trought 8gb and 16gb of ram?

8GB should be enough for this game in most cases, but they do reccomend 16.

Agreed. Andromeda using 6,5 GB RAM in-game. Recommend 12-16GB.

For those interested

Using a MSI 1070 gtx // I7 2600k (OC to 4,4) // 12Gb 1800Mhz RAM // SSD Crucial M4 (2011)
Basically my whole setup is from 2011 except the GPU

Game runs 1080p@60fps in ultra (vsync on) and gpu is usually on 75%-85% and cpu on 40%-50%ish
VERY RARELY drops below 60fps to 50+ ish

One even rarer example is shown on the pics, this happens near the nexus, when i can see it on the window

http://imgur.com/a/2nCkz

Only tweaked two things:
1. removed motion blur, hate it. (Check reddit for more info about that, theres no specific setting)
2. and hbao on (not full)

Everything else is on ultra, hope it helps

Thanks for the info!

Hi Klyze Jr, thanks for your feedback on your own performance :) Nice to see an older cpu still rocking it well. Motion blur is a love or hate thing for most anyway, so most remove it as it tanks performance. For the record, even on standard ultra preset it only has HBAO just on and not full. Pretty much reserved for those with gtx1080 and above really I think.

Having people post their own performances though is a great way for us to adjust our tables for builds over time, mainly as we won't see any more benchmarks now that the game is out and gpu manufacturers have released drivers. There's new information coming on 4th April about the future of the game (improvements and dlc) so will be good to see what's coming :)

NP, glad i could help :)
btw i forgot a detail, i took those screenshots before i removed motionblur already had played the game for 20-30 hours (total) and i could not stand the headaches.

HBAO is just on in ultra? didnt notice that, i thought i had changed it.. well in the ended i didnt tweak anything when i took those sshots ^_^''

been playing for 80 hours or so now with motion blur off, the performance is basically the same, no more headaches thought :)

Ya I'm kind of hesitant to upgrade my set up until further analysis is done on what actually works for MEA. Love the guide as far as what effects what though.

From what a lot of the early benchmarks are showing, the more cpu cores/threads you have the better for most things in the game. There's simply a lot of *stuff* going on in the worlds in the game, from a lot of wildlife, to people and then just the detail of the environments themselves. I personally found a noticeable jump in performance switching the game onto my SSD over a standard HDD because of all of this data and having a more powerful cpu to handle it all helps a great deal too.

That being said, exactly what setting you have your graphics to will come down to what your gpu can sensible handle. So long as you have a powerful cpu to back it up, a decent mid-high end card can get you a nice experience at 1080p running 60fps on high/ultra.

It honestly depends on your current setup to what you could get best out of your money with an upgrade. Many of us writers for LI (as well as the staff in general) recommend balanced rigs, so just spending on a top end gpu would be pointless unless you have the cpu, motherboard, ram and so on to back it up! :)

Glad you like the guide! Let us know if you every need help with the upgrade!

I'm on the expensive end of the superb tier (1060 6gb, OC'd 7600k, 16gb ram, game installed on SSD) and playing the game on a 60Hz, 1080p monitor is most certainly not "silky smooth". Using your definitions the game hovers around the border of Playable and Smooth, and that with the auto-detect settings putting me at High rather than Ultra as you've recommended. And yes, I got the most recent nVidia drivers that released just before the game.

Anyway, just wanted to throw in my 2 cents. Thanks for these amazing write-ups either way, even if my experience does not match.

Thanks for the suggestion and the feedback, we will take it into account going forward!

We're glad you like the guide!

Hey Gummy, thanks for your feedback. Your comment prompted me to look at some more benchmarks, and I have dialed back the benchmark estimates based on the average performance I'm seeing.

Hey Gummy, I will say the tables are more of a guide than an absolute. Having looked around at reviews and benchmarks writing this up I know some have been getting an awful lot of performance differences when it comes to people's experiences with the trial. For the 1060 6GB most have been saying the trial did anywhere from 53-75fps at 1080p on ultra, depending on cpu etc. So I would have thought you'd have an easier time of it if the game is setting you to high.

For my own experience, I've not yet dropped below 80fps when I didn't sync the game to my monitor for testing (1080p 60hz monitor) with an i7 4790K and GTX1070 on ultra, generally getting me around the 90-100fps range. Yet again I have seen posts of some not even getting to 80fps so I think it's very system dependant.

I think now that the game is out in the US (now sadly stuck here waiting for the release in the UK...) we'll get a bigger number of benchmarks with the full release where things can be run for longer and we can of course adjust things like this on the guide accordingly :)