As I’ve observed and mentioned several times, I’m absolutely convinced that SCS has made numerous under-the-hood improvements to the graphics. The current vanilla visuals are now the most realistic they’ve ever been, surpassing many other graphics mods (free and paid). Here’s the perfect mod list:
- No paid or free graphics mods because the vanilla graphics in 1.55 are the most realistic (with Ultra settings and Color Correction enabled).
- Use Reshade (free) to enhance image sharpness in-game. I'd recommend the AdaptiveSharpen shader.
- Real Traffic Density ATS by Cip
- All AI traffic packs by Jazzycat and TrafficManiac
- All AI traffic packs on Steam Workshop for ATS
- Sound Fixes Pack
- Real companies, gas stations & billboards by MLH82
- Realistic Rain by Darkcaptain™
- Reshade and NVIDIA presets: These mods tweak the brightness, contrast, and exposure of the default graphics, which are already highly realistic. As a result, they often make the visuals look unnatural. Even if they improve realism slightly at certain times or with specific skyboxes, at other moments, they end up looking fake.
- Realistic Brutal Graphics And Weathers V 7.4: Some of the skyboxes and weather lighting in this mod feel unusual and not commonly seen in real life.
- Weather Mods for ATS by GRIMES: These mods are fantastic, offering impressive seasonal visuals while maintaining the vanilla lighting.
- Weather 3.3 and its "Low Saturation" addon: the mod now features more weather types than the default game, and the addon makes everything look more realistic. Download the official "Low Saturation" addon from the original author here: posting.php?mode=quote&p=2047847
To get the best graphics in ATS, do this in your NVIDIA Control Panel:
- Go to Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings -> Euro Truck Simulator 2.
- Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias: Set to Clamp - This setting can force the game to use higher-resolution textures even when they are further away, potentially increasing sharpness. However, it can also introduce shimmering or other artifacts. By setting this to "Clamp," you prevent the negative LOD bias from going too far and causing those artifacts. It ensures a good balance of sharpness and stability.
- Texture filtering - Quality: Set to High Quality.
- Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: Set to OFF. Trilinear filtering is a basic form of texture filtering. Optimization settings often try to speed it up by sacrificing some quality. Turning it OFF ensures the highest quality trilinear filtering is used as a baseline before anisotropic filtering is applied.
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