5 Graphics Settings Worth Tweaking in Every PC Game

[Karlston]

5 Graphics Settings Worth Tweaking in Every PC Game

Sure, you can settle for the default presets, but even small changes can mean better performance—and a much better gaming experience.

Illustration: Elena Lacey

 

 

PC gaming can be a double-edged sword: Sure, you get better graphics and unparalleled customizability, but most people are hesitant to jump in. After all, what's the point of those amazing graphics if you have to spend a bunch of time tinkering with settings first?

 

At least, that's the prevailing thought among non-PC gamers. But as numerous and complex as graphics options have gotten, you don't have to do a ton of work to get a good experience. Simple presets like Medium or High will do a decent job of dialing things in, and some automated tools can more precisely tune a game to your hardware in one click. You'll get the perfect balance of performance and graphical quality for your system, without much work.

 

There are, however, a few settings that are a bit less about quality and a bit more about personal preference. Some people love them turned on, some people hate them with a burning passion … and some may vary in quality from game to game. If you have a few minutes, it's worth looking at these and judging them for yourself, so you can get into the game without distracting visual annoyances.

 

Vertical Sync

A composite image of what screen tearing would look like with vsync turned off.

Whitson Gordon

 

Have you ever noticed lines in the middle of the screen, where it feels like the games graphics don't "align" properly for a split second? That's called screen tearing, and it happens when your graphics card finishes generating a new frame while your screen is still drawing the previous frame. Part-way down the screen, it'll start drawing the new frame instead, leading to a mismatch that is incredibly distracting.

 

Vertical Sync, or VSync, aims to fix this by "syncing" your graphics card with your monitor, so that a new frame is drawn at the same time the screen is refreshing. This eliminates screen tearing but has a few disadvantages:

• It adds a small bit of input lag, since your graphics card may send a frame a few milliseconds after it was drawn rather than as soon as possible. Some hardcore gamers may notice this lag, while others may not.
• If your frame rate doesn't match the refresh rate of your monitor, it will get cut in half. For example, if you have a 60-Hz monitor but your graphics card can only produce a maximum of 47 frames per second, you'll only see 47 frames with VSync off. With VSync on, your frame rate will drop to 30 frames per second in order to stay synced, which can make motion far less smooth.

 

You can mitigate some of these downsides by turning on Triple Buffering or Adaptive VSync, if your game offers those modes. They require a bit more graphical horsepower but create a more even compromise between tearing and input lag. Some people still prefer to leave it off entirely, so you may have to try it on a game-by-game basis to see what you like. Whatever you do, ensure your other graphics settings are low enough that your frame rate stays above 60 (or whatever the refresh rate of your monitor is) whenever possible.

 

Oh, and speaking of which, make sure your game is set to run at the correct resolution and refresh rate to begin with. Some games may default to 60 Hz even if you have a 144 Hz monitor, preventing you from getting the benefits of that higher frame rate.

 

Finally, if you have a G-Sync- or Freesync-capable monitor and graphics card, you can leave VSync off in-game and turn it on in your graphics driver's control panel globally. You should only need to set this once, then forget about it forever.

 

Motion Blur

Screenshot by Whitson Gordon

Most graphical settings, when turned on or turned up, make your games look better. They add more realistic shadows, give more definition to surfaces, or add more stuff to make the world feel lived in. These are, usually, objectively positive improvements. A few settings, though, aim to make games feel more "cinematic," and these changes are a bit more … controversial.

 

Motion Blur is the most common of these. In old games, this would add a smeary effect that made everything look awful, but many modern games implement it a bit better, blurring the scenery or certain objects to mimic how that motion might look in a movie. It has a lot of detractors, however, with some people hating it so much that they turn it off in every single game, no matter what. Other people don't take as much issue, so I recommend trying it both on and off to see which you prefer. Similar settings, like Depth of Field, Film Grain, Lens Flare, Bloom, and Chromatic Aberration might also be worth looking at trying on and off.

 

Field of View

Screenshot by Whitson Gordon

The human eye has a relatively wide field of view—you can see someone approaching from the side through your peripheral vision. When you're playing a game, your character doesn't have this same peripheral vision, because you're playing on a screen that takes up only a portion of your own field of view. That means you won't see as many enemies coming up the side, or you may even feel motion sick when moving the camera around fast.

 

Adjusting the oft-ignored Field of View setting can help with this, provided your game offers it. Widening the field of view may add a slight fisheye effect to the edges of the screen, but you'll be able to see more of the game world, and it may help reduce that nausea. (It'll also hamper performance a bit, since the game has to render more objects.) The ideal field of view is dependent on the size of your screen, how close you sit to it, and your personal preferences, but anywhere from 90 to 110 degrees is usually a good starting point. Tweak the setting, give yourself some game time to get used to it, and tweak it again if need be.

 

Anti-Aliasing

Screenshot by Whitson Gordon

Anti-aliasing is another one of those settings that isn't quite so cut-and-dried. As its name suggests, it aims to fix aliasing, or jagged edges in certain objects or textures. If you've ever seen a blade of grass or window frame that looked like a blocky mess rather than straight lines, you know what I'm talking about.

 

There are many forms of anti-aliasing, each with their own pros and cons, and it's hard to say one is better or worse than another. Most games will give you an option between a few of these. Super-sampling anti-aliasing, or SSAA, is the ideal solution, rendering objects at a higher resolution and then scaling them down—but this comes with a large performance penalty, so most people won't have the graphical resources to devote to it.

 

That leaves you with the compromises: MSAA eliminates aliasing along edges, with a more moderate performance hit. TAA can remove the "shimmering" effect you see on some objects, at a lower performance penalty, but comes with some motion blur. FXAA and SMAA are even less resource-intensive, but add even more blur, to the point where I'd personally rather have jaggies than FXAA. And on top of that, many anti-aliasing settings also come with different levels (like 2X, 4X, or 8X) that offer heavier improvement at the cost of performance.

 

You can try each of these to see if you have a personal preference, or—if you're already overwhelmed by these options—leave it off and start fiddling if you notice jagged edges or shimmering that are bugging you to death.

Resolution Scaling, Adaptive Resolution, or DLSS

Screenshot by Whitson Gordon

Anti-aliasing is useful if you have a little performance headroom to spare. But if you find yourself on the more graphically hindered side of the fence, lowering your resolution can actually gain back a lot of performance. For example, running modern games at 4K is hugely hardware-intensive, so if you're playing on a 4K monitor or TV, lowering the resolution to 2560 x 1440 could keep things running smoothly.

 

That can, however, make the image a bit less sharp, so many modern games have features to mitigate the downsides of a lower resolution. Resolution Scaling, for example, renders the game world at a lower resolution, while keeping UI elements—like your health bar or mini-map—rendered at the display's native resolution to keep them sharp. You'll usually find Resolution Scaling presented as a slider or percentage of your main resolution.

 

Adaptive or Dynamic Resolution takes this idea even further, changing the game's resolution as you play—if a particular scene is really intensive, it'll scale down to keep performance up, while scaling up during less-demanding scenes. (You may be given the option to set a target frame rate for Adaptive Resolution, in which case I'd recommend the highest your monitor supports—though it's up to you.)

 

DLSS is Nvidia's next-gen version of this technology, using AI to upscale games at lower resolutions more intelligently, with fewer sacrifices. Nvidia primarily advertises DLSS as a companion to ray tracing, but some games allow it to be used on its own. It's relatively new, not all games support it, and you'll need a newer Nvidia card to use it, but if you have the option, it's worth a shot. AMD should have a similar technology in it's upcoming next-gen video cards as well.

 

Set Everything Else Automatically

Screenshot by Whitson Gordon

The settings above are unique, and whether you use them is based on personal preference, or your specific setup, more so than a linear on-good-off-bad scale. For more typical settings—texture quality, lighting effects, and so on—you can usually let your game decide what to use. If setting everything to High gets you choppy performance, turn it down to the Medium preset and see where that gets you. You don't have to tinker with every single one individually.

 

However, some settings are more intensive than others—shadows at high, for example, come with a big performance hit despite not having a hugely noticeable improvement in graphics. That's where a tool like Nvidia's GeForce Experience comes in handy: after installing it, you can head to the app's homepage, hover over the game you want to adjust, and click Details. You can then click the Optimize button to automatically set the ideal settings for your hardware (with the wrench providing options if you want to favor performance over graphical fidelity). AMD used to have a tool like this, but sadly it's been discontinued.

 

You can, of course, skip the software and google a guide for the recommended settings in any given game, too. But that takes a bit more fiddling than we're really discussing for this guide, so it's up to you how much effort you want to put in. Still, it's a nice halfway point between "no tweaking" and doing all the work yourself. Just don't make yourself crazy. At the end of the day, it's all about having fun in the game.

 

 

5 Graphics Settings Worth Tweaking in Every PC Game