Under The Waves – How to Fix the Visuals and Get Great Graphics

The Best Graphics Settings

Another user posted about a really useful utility to give UE4 games a command line that allows changing a plethora of hidden settings. I had a go at it and there are some really useful things that can be done; including removing all the crappy post-processing & making this game look great!

Here Is How:

• Download the “Universal Unreal Engine 4 Unlocker” client from here. (Look for the “Universal UE4 Unlocker v3.0.xx.” link).
• Extract the download. In the extracted folder find and run “Uuuclient.exe”. Then start “Under The Waves” from Steam.
• Alt-tab to the uuuclient and select the game Process to inject to > find UnderTheWaves-Win64-Shipping.exe and select it.
• Click Inject DLL. It will then memload a modified XInput DLL that the DirectX API is calling from your system.
• Alt-tab back to the game process and press tilde (~) drop into the console and allow you to enter commands. Press it once for a single line at the screen bottom, a 2nd time for a big console window and a 3rd time to close it.
• Now you can enter commands to modify different parameters to turn graphical and effects quality up/down/on/off, etc. You can do all kinds of other stuff like change FOV, but that’s beside the point.
• Read the whole page to get a grasp on how the console works, what the commands do, etc. It’s not a lot to read and pretty easy to understand. What settings you want to use will depend on how powerful your PC is, so it’s good to learn what you’re doing. If you just want to know what to do to fix the graphics, follow the next step.
• My PC is high-end, so I just maxed everything with this command, which also disable’s the ugly stuff like Chromatic aberration, motion blur, etc. You don’t want to completely disable post-processing because AA is tied to it and turning that off looks really bad. So just copy & past this into the in-game uuuclient console and press enter:

sg.ShadowQuality 5 | sg.FoliageQuality 5 | sg.ViewDistanceQuality 5 | sg.PostProcessQuality 5 | sg.EffectsQuality 5 | sg.TextureQuality 5 | r.DepthOfFieldQuality 0 | r.motionblurquality 0 | r.Shadow.DistanceScale 4 | r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM 0 | r.Streaming.PoolSize 4096 | r.Streaming.MaxTempMemoryAllowed 256 | r.SSR.Quality 4 | r.MaxQualityMode 1 | r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale 0.001 | r.maxanisotropy 16 | foliage.LODDistanceScale 100 | r.MipMapLODBias -15 | r.AmbientOcclusionMaxQuality -100 | r.Shadow.SpotLightTransitionScale 4096 | r.SkeletalMeshLODBias -1 | r.Shadow.TransitionScale 4096 | r.Shadow.MaxResolution 8192 | r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution 8192 | r.PostProcessAAQuality 6 | r.SceneColorFringeQuality 0 | r.ViewDistanceScale 2 | r.postprocessing.disablematerials 1 |

And that will do everything up nicely! The game should look great now.

• I have a 4090, so others may need to tweak some settings for better performance. Read the console commands page at least once and you should have no problem finding settings that work best for you. One useful setting is “r.ScreenPercentage”, which modifies the render resolution scale. Even with a 4090, raising it too much over 100 killed performance. Though turning it down below 100 might be an easy way to get better performance instead of having to mess with a dozen other settings.

I hope everyone can get the game looking exactly how they like it, because with the right settings the game is beautiful. Good luck!