Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hidden Unobtainium graphics setting needs next-gen GPUs

Released on December 7, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora arrived roughly 14 years after Avatar: The Game. Both titles carry Ubisoft's logo and were directly inspired by James Cameron's movies. Alongside the game's arrival for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X | S, Ubisoft also unleashed a document called "PC Features Deep Dive" that reveals a rich set of command-line parameter options. The most interesting one allows the user to enabled the otherwise hidden Unobtainium graphics preset, which was conceived to stress out even GPUs from the future.

Speaking of video cards currently available to the general public, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora can barely run on today's top-of-the-line GPUs when using the aforementioned preset. As it often happens with new games, Reddit was soon flooded by performance reports from users. According to one of these reports (the full thread), the Unobtainium setting uses 18.5 GB of video memory at 4K when running on a GeForce RTX 4090, in which case it delivers 30 fps using DLAA without frame generation. To hit 50 fps at 4K, another RTX 4090 owner reported using the quality DLSS mode. However, he also noticed a 50% performance drop from the highest quality setting available in the game after running it in Unobtainium-mode.

At the time of publishing, there was no report regarding the performance of the game on AMD's most potent video card. Although slower than the RTX 4090, the results should be at least decent, since the Radeon RX 7900 XTX has 24 GB of video memory and this is an AMD-sponsored game, after all. Based on how taxing seems to be this setting on today's flagship GPUs, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora might replace Crysis as the go-to title used to push gaming hardware to its limits and "Can it run Unobtainium at 60 fps?" might replace "Can it run Crysis?" for PC gamers as soon as 2024.