Graphic options to avoid...

Hi,

everytime I configure the graphic options of a game I always ask myself what option will have the best benefits or worse framerate drop...

So, I decided to ask this here to you fellow gamers. What are the options better worth keeping down in high demand games?

For example, I read that "uber sampling" in Witcher 2 destroys the framerate.

Anyway, all comments are welcome and I hope this thread will help others like me that are not really familliar with Filtering, Anti-Aliasing, Vertical Sync, etc. options...

Thanks!

 

Anti-Aliasing -> GPU hog, one of the first you should lower if you need higher fps.

 

Ambient occlusion. (e.g. FSAO, HBAO, etc.)

 

Great thanks!! Waiting for more

 

Dialing up Anisotropic Filtering seems to offer the greatest visual improvement for most games with a very minimal impact on frame rate.

 

Vsync can vary depending on the game. Vsync has a bigger impact on performance in FPS games IMO.

 

Mostly shadows, ambient occlusion and anti aliasing.
Also resolution matters. You can run games at your native res by tuning down a few settings or in the most cases drop the resolution a bit (from 1080p to 1600x900 as an example) and max out those settings you renounced.

 

like others have said, ambient occlusion can seriously impact frame rate for a minimal increase in graphical quality.

anti aliasing also hits frame rate pretty hard - though some versions more than others (CSAA has less of an impact than MSAA on NVIDIA GPUs)

turn resolution down, depending on the game you may get better performance at 720p with minimal FSAA vs 900p with no AA

 

Resolution > Antialiasing > model quality/shadows/shader effects > textures and everything else.

Sometimes it differs from the above, but resolution and AA will have the biggest effect on your frame rate. Texture quality makes barely any difference so it's usually best to just leave it at maxed or one down since it adds significantly to the overall quality.

 

Ambient Occlusion is usually a 20-25% hit on the framerate with my 6970M. That's almost larger than going from 1600x900 -> 1080p.

 

I almost never use antialiasing at all, even in games that my computer doesn't even blink at. The visual difference just isn't worth the frame rate drop for me. Same with anisotropic filtering.

Resolution is the last thing I lower if I can help it. If I can choose between native resolution and low settings or a lower resolution and max settings at the same frame rate, I'll take native res every time. Non-native resolutions inevitably look terrible, regardless of how nice the settings are.

 

Resolution - massive performance impact, large visual quality impact. Resolution affects the general detail of all aspects of the scene. Also of note, lowering resolution at all on LCD monitors has it's own visual quality impact (slight blur in addition to lower resolution).

Aniso Filtering - low performance impact, substantial visual quality impact. Aniso filtering is a rendering method that keeps textures looking good when you view them at an angle. Normally, if you view a surface (like a wall) and you are looking right at it, it will look normal. If you turn and look along the hallway instead of at the wall, you'll notice that the texture on the wall gets very blurry a short distance ahead of you. Same with the floor. Aniso filtering fixes that. That phenomena occurs with any textured surface that you view at an angle, not just walls and floors, that's just a convenient way to make it really evident. It improves general detail in the scene, as you will generally view many surfaces at an angle. Set this to at least 4x. 16x is pretty commonly selected for "maximum quality" benchmarks.

Anti aliasing - large perfomance impact, substantial visual quality impact. anti aliasing reduces the appearance of jaggy edges on objects in the scene. Increasing the resolution also helps with this somewhat, but antialiasing can solve it pretty completely, but the performance cost is high. There are a variety of antialiasing methods that are very different, (they all have trade offs, usually in image quality and performance, some with ease of implementation / compatibility) but they all have the goal of reducing jagged edges on objects. You can control how much AA to apply to the scene. 1x generally means "none". All the way up to 16x in most game settings menus, although you could technically go even higher. 4x is a pretty commonly selected amount for "maximum quality" benchmarks.

Ambient occlusion / SSAO / HBAO - very large performance impact, moderate visual impact - adds shadows to increase the illusion of depth and shape of objects. mostly a subtle change with a very large performance impact. I would leave it off unless you have so many frames per second, you don't know what to do with them. This is either set on or off, you may have a choice of which type to use. Each has performance / quality tradeoffs.

Shadows - large performance impact, massive visual quality impact. Shadows affect the realism of the scene in a huge way. They make it more believable. They help your mind understand depth and shape. They also tend to be very costly, performance wise. Shadows are implemented differently in different games, so it's hard to say exactly how changing the setting will affect performance, but just know that, in general, higher quality shadows affect performance a lot. Your best bet may be to turn the shadow quality down if you need more performance. Many games allow you to turn off shadows entirely, but this will have a massive impact on the look of the game.

Texture quality - low performance impact, large visual quality impact This affects the resolution of the images you see on all object surfaces in the scene. If you're game resolution is really high, you'll want really high resolution textures, but you are limited by the graphics memory on your GPU. This isn't usually an issue, because performance goes down dramatically with resolution anyway, and higher performance parts end up having more memory. You can generally set the textures either all the way up or somewhere in the high range, with low performance change. If you have a lower end part, you may need to set them lower. If you're running in a lower resolution, it won't matter as much

Vsync - variable performance impact, variable image quality impact Vsync synchronizes your frame rate with your monitors refresh rate. This primarily can eliminate a phenomenon called "Screen tearing" - which usually looks like a horizontal tear/glitch/cut/flicker across the screen. It can also introduce some problems. It can decrease performance dramatically, and/or introduce "input lag" - where you feel like the responsiveness to your mouse input is lower than it should be. Screen tearing may or may not commonly occur in games, it depends, and there may or may not be any performance change or input lag. I would only enable it experimentally if you are experiencing screen tearing in a particular game.

 

Wow guys, thanks a lot. This is starting to look like a reference manual for me hehe

Bookmarked this! It will help a lot of newbie people like me

Thanks!!!

 

Yeah, this is way too general.

Just experiment with the game settings, it takes 10 minutes to figure out what features you want and don't, and what setting is best for performance.

It's not a big deal or rocket science...

 

Sometimes it can be hard to figure out what exactly is changing if you're going through things and you don't have any idea what they do. In the end, what people *really* want is to optimize their image quality benefits per performance penalty. It helps to know what the settings do, and sort of what to expect.

I would start with everything on lowest in native resolution, see what your performance looks like, and start tweaking up from low, focusing on what is important to you. It's hard to be disappointed that way, especially if low looks good already (it most likely will on BF3). If you just set everything to ultra and have turn a bunch of settings down to high or medium, it can be disheartening even if there really isn't any noticeable difference. Putting everything on low will also give you a sense of what high performance feels like on your machine.

 

It's going to be way easier starting with high settings, then pairing them down while you monitor the framerate impact. It's much more intuitive to gauge the difference going from Ultra -> Medium than vice versa. Just leave self esteem out of the process.

Also, Vsync is now a non-issue in nearly every modern PC game. All gamers should be using D3DOverrider with every game they play. Leave the in-game setting on OFF and let the 3rd party app handle.

 

I didn't mean to start an endian-ness debate. It really doesn't matter how you tinker. Point is, it's better to know what you're doing than not. I personally like to start at low because I like to see how high I can get the settings and how little the performance changes. The other way might be more intuitive to you for whatever reason. It doesn't really matter.

D3DOverrider certainly isn't necessary if you intend to leave vsync off anyway. I haven't heard the advice to use that particular application before for all games, but I'll look into it. I'm assuming you're trying to enable triple buffering in applications that don't support it? Triple buffering is still a trade off.

 

Yeah, well it's a good thing to have a knowledge base. I don't mine playing 10 minutes to optimize, but it's way more efficient when you know what you are doing. No it's not rocket science but it's a public forum and I wanted to ask and many great people did help me

 

playing 10 mins? I spent half of my time in the BF3 beta trying to optimise my settings ;-(

 

part of the difficulty in changing settings in BF3 beta was that a lot of them didn't actually do anything.

that really makes it hard to figure out what's going on.

 

Yeah, I took the 10min from hulawafu77's comment. I too take more time usually and I hate it. That's why this thread is very useful to me