What are your top 3 tips for graphical settings to optimize a PC game?

[ZedClampet]

Around the web and often on here, people complain about performance issues. Independent of a person's specs, what are your favorite tips for optimizing a PC game?

Mine are:

1) If it's turned on, turn off ray tracing.
2) Drop your overall preset and see if your FPS changes. If not, you are CPU bound and need to adjust settings that help your CPU.
3) Give super-sampling a try if it is included in the game.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Around the web and often on here, people complain about performance issues. Independent of a person's specs, what are your favorite tips for optimizing a PC game?

Mine are:

1) If it's turned on, turn off ray tracing.
2) Drop your overall preset and see if your FPS changes. If not, you are CPU bound and need to adjust settings that help your CPU.
3) Give super-sampling a try if it is included in the game.

Yea thats a good start I'd say. I dont have an RT GPU but that stuff kills performance.

My first step in new games if I'm not getting the performance I need on my AMD GPU is 3, enable FSR quality at all ultra settings. I have a pretty fast CPU and a pretty mid range GPU so its mostly going to be GPU for me that the problem in 3d games. If that doesnt cut it, look up a guide to see what the best settings to lower are as a compromise between quality and performance. Maybe also change the FSR setting down a notch and see how it looks.

Sometimes FSR looks terrible like Atomic Heart. In that case play with the settings that the guide recommends until a compromise between frame rate and fidelity that works for me is found without the upscaling on.

Would be nice if all games included a proper in game benchmark that represented the worse case scenario for performance. I've quite often had to lower settings for certain areas of a game later on which are a lot more demanding than others and its annoying.

 

[Slasken]

Around the web and often on here, people complain about performance issues. Independent of a person's specs, what are your favorite tips for optimizing a PC game?

Mine are:

1) If it's turned on, turn off ray tracing.
2) Drop your overall preset and see if your FPS changes. If not, you are CPU bound and need to adjust settings that help your CPU.
3) Give super-sampling a try if it is included in the game.

Agree with this, except maybe use MSI Afterburner and have a screen overlay that displays CPU, GPU, and Ram usage to determine bottleneck.

 

[Brian Boru]

♣ Shut down all non-MS apps & processes, incl game-related stuff like performance monitors, overlays, chats etc—anything which needs GPU attention to work.

♦ Reduce or turn off these until you get the performance you want:
Ray Tracing
Anti-aliasing
Ambient occlusion
Shadow quality
High DPI scaling
Resolution—last resort

♥ Toggle between Full screen, Windowed, and Windowed full screen—Full screen should be the most performance-friendly as far as I know. Also, run monitor at its recommended resolution.

♠ Bonus tip: Become a Patient Gamer, so you can run all games on a potato at ultra high

 

[Zloth]

Shadow quality is first on my list. (Well, depth of field and lens flare are the first, I suppose, but I turn them off regardless and they don't hit performance all that hard.)

Next would be to turn on super-sampling, if available.

Resolution used to be so easy to do back with the CRT monitors!

The CRT Advantage

Ahhh, the good old days

forums.pcgamer.com

 

[Slasken]

Might also be a good idea to close those 50 tabs you have open in Chrome or Firefox.

 

[Colif]

Afterburner doesn't work properly with AMD cards but then who uses those?

I am CPU bound but then I don't think a CPU exists that wouldn't create that situation with my GPU.

I don't play any games that would require me to turn down effects. RT would be about only one but no games I play have that... Diablo 4 doesn't plan on having it at launch, for instance.

 

[Zimbaly]

Shadows lowered, Resolution lowered, and the last one it depends on the game, but either lighting or decal/corpses staying to low or off.