What graphical settings do you lower or disable for better performance?

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oc-co

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So my GPU (GTX 980 Ti) is starting to show it's age. There's no more time of being able to bump all video settings to max. and roll 60+ FPS with it.

Nowadays, on most modern games, I have to lower my video settings to a certain degree to maintain a steady 60 FPS gameplay, so I'm looking for some advice on which settings are the most demanding.

When opening a game, and going into it's settings menu, what video settings do you guys lower (or disable) in order to gain more FPS, and in what order?

What are in your opinion settings that have the most impact on FPS while barely giving any graphical difference?
 
It usually varies some based on the game. AA and shadows are typically two that can be tweaked to gain better FPS. Digital Foundry does a good job showing various graphics settings and their impact on performance.
 
I would just start with the global Medium setting and turn up some settings from there if you have the headroom for it.

If you're seeing sporadic hangs and freezes, you're likely VRAM limited and need to turn down textures with only 6GBs of VRAM on newer titles, esp. if running at 1440p or so.

After that, big impacts come from AA type and quality, lighting/shadow settings, reflection quality, LOD settings (if applicable - this can have a big impact), NPC/object density, etc.

But the quality levels can vary considerably in performance and IQ between different games. It seems many newer games have a negligible impact on both performance and IQ on their high-max settings, and some even between their medium-max settings for some effects.

So you just kinda have to put a FPS counter in the corner and play with settings for a bit to dial it in on each game. Personally, I've been getting more impatient messing and tweaking game settings as I've gotten older, even on flagship cards, and have relinquished most of my gaming to consoles now for a much simpler experience. Esp. with many newer games having shader compilation stutters on PC that doesn't affect consoles for the most part.
 
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If I play on the TV because of my would need glasses put do not wear it and because of high the resolution is (4K), resolution is often one that I try to set lower, specially if they have good upscaling option.
 
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ZodaEX said:
As a post processing effect wouldn't depth of field make the FPS lower?
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that what he just said, just poorly worded.



it depends on the game. google "game optimization guide" and theres usually something that will tell you what to turn down without losing too much quality and what hits fps the most.
 
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Motion blur, film grain and anything to do with lens flare gets turned off immediately and every time (if possible.) I don't care what the performance is, they get turned off. After that the first thing is shadows. I hardly ever notice shadows in the first place and they tend to be very big performance killers. After that it depends on the game and what different settings do for performance.
 
First thing I do before I even launch the game is to turn off all blur and DOF type stuff regardless of whether performance is a concern. If performance is poor the next thing I do is turn down shadows, if that's not enough I mess around with the AO settings, if performance is still poor I'll usually search online to see if the game has any specific settings that kill performance. I often try all the different AA modes which is partially to check the performance with each but mainly to see which looks the best in the game, back when MSAA was the norm it was the first or second setting I would turn down for performance.
 
Hey, everyone! Apologies for the late reply. I forgot to check the thread for any replies, and before I remembered it was already night-time, so I went to sleep.

Anyway, thanks for all the suggestions, I've written them down, but I still have some questions:

Furious_Styles said:
It usually varies some based on the game. AA and shadows are typically two that can be tweaked to gain better FPS. Digital Foundry does a good job showing various graphics settings and their impact on performance.
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I play at 1440p, so AA is usually disabled, as I hardly notice any jagged lines, but sometimes they do appear and are quite visible.

In such cases, which AA method would you guys recommend me to use that does not have a big hit on performance (except FXAA, as it looks ugly to me)? Also how much sampling should I use (2x, 4x...)?

T4rd said:
If you're seeing sporadic hangs and freezes, you're likely VRAM limited and need to turn down textures with only 6GBs of VRAM on newer titles, esp. if running at 1440p or so.
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Damn, didn't know that 6GB would be considered low, but I guess it was just a matter of time before games start utilizing it, lol.

Playing @ 1440p especially doesn't help much.

After that, big impacts come from AA type and quality, lighting/shadow settings, reflection quality, LOD settings (if applicable - this can have a big impact), NPC/object density, etc.
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Same question as above.

Since I play @ 1440p, AA is usually disabled. If I notice some jaggies, which AA method would you guys recommend me to use that does not have a big hit on performance (except FXAA, as it looks ugly to me)? Also how much sampling should I use (2x, 4x...)?

Ebernanut said:
First thing I do before I even launch the game is to turn off all blur and DOF type stuff regardless of whether performance is a concern. If performance is poor the next thing I do is turn down shadows, if that's not enough I mess around with the AO settings, if performance is still poor I'll usually search online to see if the game has any specific settings that kill performance. I often try all the different AA modes which is partially to check the performance with each but mainly to see which looks the best in the game, back when MSAA was the norm it was the first or second setting I would turn down for performance.
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Speaking of AO, I've always heard that HBAO+ should be enabled and that the performance cost is negligible (1-3 FPS maybe), is there any truth to this, or should I just disable AO entirely?

t1337duder said:
I turn on DLSS.
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Turn it on, or turn it off?
 
Ebernanut said:
First thing I do before I even launch the game is to turn off all blur and DOF type stuff regardless of whether performance is a concern. If performance is poor the next thing I do is turn down shadows, if that's not enough I mess around with the AO settings, if performance is still poor I'll usually search online to see if the game has any specific settings that kill performance. I often try all the different AA modes which is partially to check the performance with each but mainly to see which looks the best in the game, back when MSAA was the norm it was the first or second setting I would turn down for performance.
Click to expand...

This is how I do things as well. Shadows and AO tend to have big performance hits but generally not a lot of graphical benefit. At least not in motion when you're not standing still and staring at the corners of map props.

As a general rule if performance is still bad with those settings turned down, you will probably have to turn down a lot of other settings to get playable performance.
 
T4rd said:
DLSS is only supported on RTX cards.
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I don't mind not being able to use it, as I can live without it, but what I'm curious about is, what exactly are DLSS/FSR technologies, and what are they used for?
 
oc-co said:
I don't mind not being able to use it, as I can live without it, but what I'm curious about is, what exactly are DLSS/FSR technologies, and what are they used for?
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They are just more sophisticated upscaling methods. DLSS being the best currently. Setting DLSS to quality mode in most games gives you free AA that is superior to TAA along with a performance boost with almost no image quality loss.
 
oc-co said:
Speaking of AO, I've always heard that HBAO+ should be enabled and that the performance cost is negligible (1-3 FPS maybe), is there any truth to this, or should I just disable AO entirely?
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AO is one of those things that used to have a bigger impact on performance in any form, with modern hardware you can usually enable it in some form without a major performance hit but it depends partly on how each game implements it and HBAO+ and especially SSAO can sometimes still be performance killers.
oc-co said:
I play at 1440p, so AA is usually disabled, as I hardly notice any jagged lines, but sometimes they do appear and are quite visible.

In such cases, which AA method would you guys recommend me to use that does not have a big hit on performance (except FXAA, as it looks ugly to me)? Also how much sampling should I use (2x, 4x...)?
Click to expand...
Image quality with different forms of AA also depends heavily on how it's been implemented in a game, especially for post proccess AA forms like FXAA(FXAA can look like a blurry mess in some games and be better than msaa in others). Like I mentioned in my other post I tend to try the different AA forms to see which looks and performs the best in that game but I pretty much always use some form(27" @1440p) unless they all look bad and I usually prefer MSAA when available and I can spare the performance.
 
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Flogger23m said:
This is how I do things as well. Shadows and AO tend to have big performance hits but generally not a lot of graphical benefit. At least not in motion when you're not standing still and staring at the corners of map props.

As a general rule if performance is still bad with those settings turned down, you will probably have to turn down a lot of other settings to get playable performance.
Click to expand...

Yup, shadows and AO.

That's how it been for a while now
 
Mchart said:
They are just more sophisticated upscaling methods. DLSS being the best currently. Setting DLSS to quality mode in most games gives you free AA that is superior to TAA along with a performance boost with almost no image quality loss.
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Thanks for the useful info! I think I get the gist of it now :)
 
Oh yeah, another thing that hasn't crossed my mind until now was; since I'm still on my Haswell CPU, what settings should I lower or disable for CPU-bound games? Does it even matter if you change anything in the video options (as they mostly affect the GPU)?
 
It took some time for me without DLSS to keep frames about 60fps on my 60hz TV for GTA V = keyboard driving is rough!

 
t1337duder said:
Brutal. What about...FSR 2.0?
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It can work on a 980ti but it's only officially supported for 1000 series and up on the Nvidia side. Apparently the 980ti supports the shader model that is a hard requirement but doesn't support the more efficient floating point format that FSR prefers to use.
 
Shadows are always first for me. They usually come with a hefty performance hit and, honestly, shadows in real life aren't as sharp/defined as the ones in most video games.
AA would be next. Especially at high resolutions. I don't turn it off, but I'm happy to turn it down.
Anything cloud related would be next. While neat once someone points it out, I'd otherwise never notice.
They don't usually affect performance much, but I always disable motion blur and film grain. Film grain especially. I don't like film grain in actual films, let alone video games.
Things I strive to crank up: Details, view distance, particles, and vegetation. To me, those are the things that make a decent looking game look great.
 
Shadows, probably. But with my new CPU, a 3070, and the games I play, I'm at maxed settings with 150+ fps. :D
 
I hate having to disable graphics settings which is one of the main reasons I'm content with my 1440p G-Sync display...I won't jump into 4K until the Nvidia 5000 series (the 4090 seems like it could handle it as well but I'm not paying $2000+ for a GPU)
 
polonyc2 said:
I hate having to disable graphics settings which is one of the main reasons I'm content with my 1440p G-Sync display...I won't jump into 4K until the Nvidia 5000 series (the 4090 seems like it could handle it as well but I'm not paying $2000+ for a GPU)
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yawp, same here.
 
polonyc2 said:
I hate having to disable graphics settings which is one of the main reasons I'm content with my 1440p G-Sync display...I won't jump into 4K until the Nvidia 5000 series (the 4090 seems like it could handle it as well but I'm not paying $2000+ for a GPU)
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You think the 5k series will be cheap?
 
WilyKit said:
You think the 5k series will be cheap?
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I don't think Jensen can keep raising prices as much as he has been doing...the 4000 series is already not selling well...I see a price correction coming with the 5000 series
 
polonyc2 said:
I don't think Jensen can keep raising prices as much as he has been doing...the 4000 series is already not selling well...I see a price correction coming with the 5000 series
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naw, by then poverty line will be $100k/year. :D
 
polonyc2 said:
I don't think Jensen can keep raising prices as much as he has been doing...the 4000 series is already not selling well...I see a price correction coming with the 5000 series
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I hope you're right but nVidia's policies suggest that won't be the case. They can very easily correct current pricing while also saving face by simply releasing a 4090 Ti at 4090 pricing and dropping prices on all the cards. Instead they've chosen to artificially create a supply shortage to keep prices high. They are prioritizing margins over volume.
 
NOTHING!!!!!!!

:D

Seriously though it really varies game-to-game. Usually I'll try to find a guide from a place like Digital Foundry that has some numbers to back shit up, but I go based on what I notice. I try to turn down things that I don't really notice first, even if it is just a minor uplift. As other have noted shadows are often a good target but it really depends on the game, what the graphics are like, and how they implemented things as to what I do and don't notice.
 
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