Which eye candies suck more from the GPU?

I was wondering what things (eye candies) use more GPU power. I know that it depends on the game, but for the ones that can see the whole picture: What is your opinion?

I would say (from more to less GPU use):

Anti aliasing
Anisotropic filtering
Advanced Shadows
Advanced Reflexions
Texture

I don't know much about this stuff, so I would appreciate if people would give their opinions.

 

Soft shadows (distinguished from shadows in general!) is an advanced feature as I understand it and is one of the first features one is told to turn off to help with settings

 

vista



lol

 

In order of highest to lower GPU usage: Anti Aliasing, Advanced Reflections, Advanced Shadows, Anisotropic filtering (which is texture filtering).

That's from my experiences at least with modern-ish cards, a 6600GT and a 7600Go. Newer chips always add more features, sometimes making certain types of effects "free", as in you can enable the effect with no slowdown on the card whatsoever.

 

Hardly, its just the drivers that are poor.

Shadows can at times halve your framerates, especially in games like Medieval 2: Total War where thousands of soldiers appear on screen. Anti-Aliasing is usually fine if you leave it at 2x..

 

Quoted for truth.
Though the advanced reflections depend on it's implementation in the game.

 

Depends. Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering isn't such a big deal anymore (most of the time). Generally doesn't take that much performance on modern cards.

Instead, shadows and reflections (which both depend on the implementation) can be insanely heavy on the GPU.

There isn't really one fixed cost though. It depends on the game, the resolution it's run at and a handful other factors.

 

I agree with jalf on this one

 

Shadows and reflections are kind of last year though...

What is killing pcs now are:

Per pixel stencil shading (Which does go into shadows)
Particles
Physics
Dynamic game environments

 

Turning off shadows can increase your fps substantially in most modern games. This seems to apply especially to Medieval Total War 2 where I can double my fps by turning off shadows. I've noticed that Texture resolutions don't have a huge impact on performance and neither does Anisotropic Filtering.

 

Textures set to high with full anti aliasing at high res...

 

@Zellio - Those are done by the CPU and PPU (in the case of the XPS 1730)j

Whats killing PC's now is BAD CODING!

AA is always very intensive since you're drawing at higher resolutions and downsizing (thats how AA works) e.g. AA×4 at 640×400 you're actually drawing 1280×800, at 8×AA you're drawing 2560×1600 etc. (thats unless they've found a better way to do AA)
It also depends on the GPU, AA would kill the the 8700 (bandwidth) but shadows wouldn't, older GPUs would struggle more with shading/shadows

 

Here's a tip if you play the game in your monitors native resolution AA usually isn't even needed.

 

? How does that work? (unless you're refering to DPI, e.g. both my lappies have high enough DPI to fool most eyes into believing that there's a curve despite it being a set of blocky "stairs") however, 15" laptops and lower res 17" laptops would benefit greatly from AA

 

AA has more of a performance hit as resolution increases. 4xAA @ 1920x1200 = destroyer of framerates (compared to 0xAA at 1920x1200), 4xAA @ 640x480 = barely a dent.

Fortunately, as resolution increases jaggies become less noticeable. At 1920x1200 on my 17" lappy, I can kind of see jaggies, but they don't bother me enough to take the hit for 2xAA. (depending on the game. For older games like CS:S, I can put on 4xAA @ 1920x1200 and still have 70 FPS )

After that, soft shadows (aka, shadow filtering) makes a big dent for a small improvement in image quality. Then, shadows in general, since disabling those can give a hefty boost to your framerate.

Anisotropic Filtering (in my experience) doesn't affect framerate very much at all. I usually just keep it at 8x and it's fine.

Lowering texture quality can provide a boost to framerate, but it makes the game look much, much worse (Half-Life 2 looks so pretty mostly because of its high-res textures). This should be the last thing you lower.

 

AA/AF won't cause much performance hits on modern non-lowend GPUs as long as levels of AA/AF is kept low and you aren't using high-resolution (say, 1680x1050).

Shadows tend to kill framerates, especially high-quality shadows - and they don't do much to improve IQ on many games (except FPS).

Advanced-Reflection - this largely depends on how it is implemented in games - but yes, this tends to cause more performance hit that it worth.

Post-Processing - again, depends on how it is implemented - but this usually is a terrible feature that cause massive drops in performance while actually making game more ugly.

Dynamic-Lightings - This really kills framerates in many games, although it does make game much nicer. If possible, reduced level of dynamic-lighting is good (say, reduced light sources) for our wimpy laptop GPUs.

Texture - Texture quality can make or break the looks of games - always pick the highest compressed texture, unless your GPU is short on video RAM.

Model details/geometry details - same as above, except they aren't even memory intensive.

I strongly recommend against using game's preset features - "medium" "high" "low" etc - as they usually set everything to medium, low, high, and so on. Which is not very preferable - the setting with high texture/models but low shadows and "effects" almost always look better than the settings with everything on medium.

 

Dynamic shadows + S.T.A.L.K.E.R. = hell

 

Then again they look awesome

about what will hit you the hardest though. physics/particles are the new GPU killers. then its probably lighting options such as shadows/reflections, then AA/AF, then textures/models.