Do you tweak a games settings

[mjs warlord]

Have you dropped any games setting and can you see anything different.

I read a lot of threads for all sorts of games and their seems to be a culture of ..... i got an all singing all dancing rig and i should be able to run max everything but cant .... I WANT A REFUND !

My rig cost over £3,500 just over 6 years ago .... i had the just released gtx 1080 put into the build , ( not bragging , just saying ) their are gamers out their that have worse or better set ups than myself and i sometimes get the impression that a game refuses to work as you want it for no apparent reason.

if you look at say a castle wall you will see each individual brick and the mortal in between them , if you drop everything to minimum all you will see is a plain wall and no detail. The thing is gamers just seem to refuse to experiment with settings and instead they go on discussions and pull the game apart.

Heres 1 example of how easy it is to make a game more user friendly.....

As i say i have a gtx 1080 , i installed SATISFACTORY and the game auto set everything to ULTRA , i suddenly noticed a lot of warm air coming from under my desk so brought up the task manager and saw the temp for my card was 82 this was a surprise to me as their are not many moving things in the game so not much to refresh , cpu was 50% and i was using about 70% of my available 16 gb ram ( its not faulty ) .

I reset the graphics button and the built in checker still gave me ULTRA on everything , i turned off v sync and experimented with fps , i went from 144 down to 70 and in all honesty i cant see anything different but the key thing for me is i got the temp from 82 down to a more comfortable 68.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

Yeah, I tweak a lot. I try to get my settings to the max that I can run and still get 60fps. One of my go-to tweaks is if I can pull off 4k resolution, I almost always completely turn off antialiasing. In my opinion, antialiasing is completely unnecessary at such high resolutions, and turning it off increases performance drastically. I use it to some extent if I have to go with anything under 4k, though.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Depends on the game and how old my card is at the time, but I'll tweak until the game feels smooth enough if I need to. Usually check a settings guide or whatever to help me get an idea of what settings are most expensive for performance.

At the same time once I upgrade I sometimes go back and play a bit of a really good looking game with everything maxed out just to enjoy what it looks like when its running smooth and maxed out.

 

[DXCHASE]

The question should be, who doesn't tweak their settings as a PC gamer lol. Even with a high-end pc, tweaking any graphical settings will usually benefit that machine.

Also, PC games tend to come out un-optimized and with a lot of issues graphically so turning off certain features drastically improves the play (bloom, anti-aliasing, raytracing etc.)

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Motion Blur off immediately, every time.

 

[Johnway]

The usual stuff, motion blur, vsync, if i'm running on ultra settings i sometimes switch to high (again, performance varies) and turn on subtitles are the usual stuff.

i do some .ini tweaks if a game doesn't start. Assassins creed unity and dead rising 3 i'm looking at you.

 

[Zloth]

Motion Blur off immediately, every time.

And lens flair. And probably reduce the FoV a little to make my screen corners less crazy. (I hate it when the moon or something gets in the corner of the screen and looks like an egg.)

But yeah, the people that buy top of the line components then whine about how they put the game on "max" and get bad framerates have no clue what they are talking about.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

The usual stuff, motion blur, vsync, if i'm running on ultra settings i sometimes switch to high (again, performance varies) and turn on subtitles are the usual stuff.

i do some .ini tweaks if a game doesn't start. Assassins creed unity and dead rising 3 i'm looking at you.

I don't know how you guys can handle turning off vsync. Don't you get a lot of screen tearing?

 

[Johnway]

I don't know how you guys can handle turning off vsync. Don't you get a lot of screen tearing?

Honestly i don't notice it. If i actively keep at eye out for it i might see it but it doesn't affect me. If its like jagged black then yeah, that would be noticeable and i would turn it on and see what happens, but for the most part i don't see it at all and i need the frames so i turn it off.

That said, some games i keep vsync on. I remember crysis 2 being practically unplayable without it. Turned it on and the game was silky smooth and playable. Ninja Blade was unplayable without vsync on as you couldn't do 90% of the actions without it.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

And lens flair. And probably reduce the FoV a little to make my screen corners less crazy. (I hate it when the moon or something gets in the corner of the screen and looks like an egg.)

But yeah, the people that buy top of the line components then whine about how they put the game on "max" and get bad framerates have no clue what they are talking about.

I'm inconsistent with everything other than motion blur. If I'm trying to up frame rate the film effect type stuff is generally first on the chopping block though.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

Honestly i don't notice it. If i actively keep at eye out for it i might see it but it doesn't affect me. If its like jagged black then yeah, that would be noticeable and i would turn it on and see what happens, but for the most part i don't see it at all and i need the frames so i turn it off.

That said, some games i keep vsync on. I remember crysis 2 being practically unplayable without it. Turned it on and the game was silky smooth and playable. Ninja Blade was unplayable without vsync on as you couldn't do 90% of the actions without it.

I think I'd probably notice it most of the time. I'm the type that picks out minor glitches, and they get on my nerves. Sometime, I'll have to try it out on a more modern game and see what it's like.

 

[ZedClampet]

I don't know how you guys can handle turning off vsync. Don't you get a lot of screen tearing?

I either don't get it or don't notice it. In the rare games I've noticed it, I turn it on.

My big things with open world games are the sky, which I almost never look at (and what's wrong with having a nice, clear day?) and shadow detail. Shadows are something you mostly just notice subconsciously. You don't, or at least I don't, stare at them much or at all. As long as there are shadows, it doesn't matter to me how detailed they are.

Motion blur, lens flair, god rays...all those have to go.

If I'm struggling with my CPU, I'll reduce ground clutter a bit. I'm really hesitant, depending on the game, to reduce draw distance. I hate stuff popping in.

In Dying Light 2, I turned off Ray Tracing (sorry Nvidia). It was supposed to impact a lot of different little things, so I stood in a room that I thought it should help with and took screen shots with it on and off, and there was very little difference. If it took place in a neon shopping district in Tokyo, I might leave it on, but in a grungy, falling apart city, it's very meh.

If I have trouble getting the settings right, I usually give GeForce Experience a try and let it handle the settings, and I've had pretty good luck that way. In RDR2, I couldn't even get to the settings because it would crash the game, so setting it up in GeForce Experience was kind of a life saver. I'm sure there was a settings file I could have changed, but GeForce worked just fine.

 

[Frag Maniac]

I tend to always try to optimize graphics settings as much as possible. With finicky games, I refer to expert guides like Digital Foundry, whom offer in depth analysis and recommendations for various levels of GPUs. Their guides for RE Village, Halo Infinite, and God of War have been invaluable.

However I also experiment on my own beyond that. For instance I noticed after using DF's recommendations for Halo Infinite, I was getting tons of flickering, and that at times, there was intermittent lag. Since the flicker only happened when moving the mouse, I tried lowering it's polling rate from 1000 to 500.

I also tried rebooting after changing the graphics settings. Both these minor things now allow me to play the game lag and flicker free, with pretty good settings at 1440p DSR. I also have a 1080 in my rig too (EVGA SC). It's a great card, and I'm hoping it lasts me through this fiasco of chip shortages and scalping driving up GPU prices.

My GPU never exceeds 70c, and I love that the fans don't even turn on until it hits 50c. My next GPU will likely be another EVGA. Oh, btw, I also concur on always turning off Motion Blur. I also turn off Depth of Field, Chromatic Aberration, and Film Grain in any games that have those effects. I even lower Fog settings in some games that use it excessively.