Given the drawbacks of post-process anti-aliasing along with the power of the PC platform, some flexibility here would have been useful. The lack of any way to treat the stippling effect across character hair and foliage is also a minor blemish. Similar to the PS4 and Xbox One editions, these elements flicker noticeably, even at the PC version's best options, and even attempting to override it via GPU-level transparency super-sampling fails to improve the effect.

However, on balance, these are minor gripes. The upgrade from console is often tangible, with PS4 and Xbox One's settings a match for PC at its default settings (high across the board, but with shadows and texture filtering at medium). An exception to this rule is in model detail, where the PC's lowest preset still aces both consoles in terms of tree and object draw distances, plus LODs across buildings. This is easily the most vivid upgrade for PC users, gifting higher-end machines a richer, denser looking scene as standard.

In practice, the upgrade in Ground Zeroes' texture filtering is also impactful - much more so than its largely unnoticed update in normal maps from console. For PC users running at anything between 1080p and 4K resolutions, the console-grade filtering method sticks out like sore thumb while playing close to a monitor at default settings. Thankfully, higher quality options sharpen this up, letting all surfaces at an angle appear clear and defined.

Budget-orientated gaming cards with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, such as the GTX 650 Ti Boost and GTX 750 Ti, can stretch to 30-40fps while maxed out. This makes it possible to use the game's built-in 30fps frame-rate cap to produce a last-gen grade of performance, while still hitting peak visual returns. Alternatively, a 60fps refresh is attainable by attacking the bottlenecks, which in Ground Zeroes' case are shadows, screen filtering and SSAO. Once these are lowered a notch, that crucial 60fps lock comes back into view.