Turn down ray tracing first, then shadows, then volumetric effects, and switch on an upscaler before you touch the resolution. Those few settings account for most of the frame rate you can recover. Most of the rest of the menu costs a few percent at most, and some of it costs nothing measurable.
This guide has PC graphics settings explained one group at a time: what each setting draws, which part of the PC pays for it, and when lowering it is worth the loss in image quality. The caveat is that every game weights these differently, so the first section is about testing in your own game.
Do you need to change individual settings at all?
Presets are a reasonable starting point, not a final answer. A preset moves every setting together, including the ones that cost nothing, so Low often looks much worse than a tuned Medium while running only slightly faster.
Our PC gaming performance guide covers the steps that come before this one: measuring frame rate and frame times, and working out whether the CPU or the graphics card is the limit. That answer decides which half of this article applies to you.
How to test graphics settings properly
A setting is only worth lowering if you can measure the gain. Test with a repeatable method, or you will chase differences that are run-to-run noise.
- Pick a repeatable scene. Use the game’s built-in benchmark if it has one. If not, pick a demanding 30 to 60 second route, such as a walk through a busy area, and repeat it the same way each time.
- Turn off anything that hides the result. Disable VSync and any frame rate cap while testing, or every result will stop at the cap.
- Record average FPS and the 1% low. The 1% low is the frame rate of the slowest 1% of frames, and it shows stutter that an average hides.
- Change one setting at a time. Drop it by one or two steps, rerun the scene and write down the result.
- Ignore small differences. A change of 1 to 2 percent is within normal variation between runs. Treat it as no change.
- Check GPU usage. If the graphics card sits near 100 percent, it is the limit and GPU settings will help. If it sits well below that, the CPU is the limit.
Graphics settings ranked by FPS cost
This table ranks the common settings by how much frame rate they typically cost. The size of each effect varies by game and engine, so use it to decide what to test first, not as a prediction.
| Setting | Typical FPS cost | Limited by | Turn it down when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ray tracing and path tracing | Very high | GPU | First, in almost every case |
| Resolution and render scale | Very high | GPU | After enabling an upscaler |
| Shadows | High | GPU and CPU | Early; Medium is often close to High |
| Volumetric fog and clouds | Medium to high | GPU | Early; the visual change is small |
| Global illumination | Medium to high | GPU | When ray tracing is already off |
| Screen space reflections | Medium | GPU | When you need a further few percent |
| Draw distance, LOD and crowd density | Medium | CPU | When the CPU is the limit |
| Ambient occlusion | Low to medium | GPU | Lower it a step, rarely off |
| Anti-aliasing (TAA, FXAA, SMAA) | Low | GPU | Rarely; MSAA is the costly exception |
| Texture quality | Near zero within VRAM | VRAM | Only when video memory runs out |
| Anisotropic filtering | Near zero | GPU | Never; leave it at 16x |
| Motion blur, film grain, depth of field | Near zero | GPU | By preference |
Resolution and render scale
Resolution is the number of pixels the graphics card has to shade for every frame. It is the largest single cost because almost every other effect is calculated per pixel.
The arithmetic explains the size of the effect. 1920×1080 is about 2.1 million pixels, 2560×1440 is about 3.7 million, and 3840×2160 is about 8.3 million. A 4K frame has four times the pixels of a 1080p frame, so a card that manages 100 FPS at 1080p can fall to a third of that or less at 4K.
Render scale, sometimes called resolution scale, renders the 3D scene at a percentage of the output resolution while the menus and interface stay sharp. A render scale of 80 percent at 1440p shades roughly 64 percent of the pixels, because the percentage applies to both width and height.
Keep the output resolution at your monitor’s native resolution. Lowering the output resolution makes the monitor or the driver stretch the picture, which blurs text and the interface. If you need fewer pixels, use render scale or, better, an upscaler.
Upscaling: DLSS, FSR and XeSS
Upscaling is a technique that renders the game at a lower internal resolution and reconstructs a full-resolution image from it, using data from previous frames. It recovers most of the frame rate of the lower resolution while keeping far more detail than simple stretching.
The three main options are NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. NVIDIA’s DLSS page describes it as AI-based and limited to GeForce RTX cards. AMD’s FSR and Intel’s XeSS have versions that run on graphics cards from other vendors, although the newest FSR and XeSS features have their own hardware requirements, so check each vendor’s page for your card.
The quality mode sets the internal resolution. In DLSS and FSR, the usual ratios are:
| Mode | Render scale per axis | Internal resolution at 4K output |
|---|---|---|
| Quality | About 67% | 2560×1440 |
| Balanced | About 58% | About 2227×1253 |
| Performance | 50% | 1920×1080 |
| Ultra Performance | About 33% | 1280×720 |
XeSS uses its own ratios, which have changed between versions, so a mode with the same name does not always render the same number of pixels. Compare by measured frame rate, not by label.
Start with Quality mode. At 1440p and 4K it is hard to tell from native in motion. At 1080p the upscaler starts from fewer pixels, so stay on Quality and avoid the lower modes.
Frame generation is a separate setting. It inserts generated frames between rendered ones, which raises the displayed frame rate but does not make the game respond faster. It works best when the base frame rate is already around 60 FPS, and it uses extra video memory.
Textures and VRAM
Texture quality sets the resolution of the images wrapped around every surface. Textures are stored in video memory (VRAM), and the graphics card reads them without much extra processing, so higher textures cost almost no frame rate as long as they fit.
The cost appears when VRAM runs out. The game then has to move data between video memory and much slower system memory, and you see hitching when you turn the camera, textures that stay blurry, or an out of video memory message. Lowering texture quality by one step usually fixes it.
Check before you lower anything. Many games show a VRAM estimate bar in the graphics menu, and Task Manager’s Performance → GPU page shows Dedicated GPU memory in use against the total. If usage sits at the total while you play, textures are the first setting to reduce.
Anisotropic filtering keeps textures sharp on surfaces viewed at a shallow angle, such as roads and floors stretching into the distance. On any modern graphics card its cost is too small to measure reliably. Leave it at 16x.
Shadows
Shadow quality controls the resolution of shadow maps, how far from the camera shadows are drawn, and how soft their edges are. To draw shadows, the game renders the scene again from each light’s point of view, which is why they are expensive.
That extra pass costs the CPU as well as the graphics card, because the CPU has to submit the scene’s objects again. Shadows are one of the few settings that can help in both a GPU-limited and a CPU-limited game.
The step from Ultra to High, or High to Medium, usually removes a large part of the cost with a small visual change: slightly softer edges and shadows that fade in a little closer. Low or Off is a much more visible loss, since objects stop looking anchored to the ground.
Lighting, global illumination and ray tracing
Global illumination is the simulation of light bouncing off surfaces onto other surfaces, so a red wall tints the floor beside it and a room lit through a window is bright near the glass. Older games bake this into the level ahead of time at no runtime cost. Newer games calculate it live.
Unreal Engine 5’s system is a common example. Epic’s documentation describes Lumen as the engine’s fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system, with a software mode and a hardware ray tracing mode. In games built this way, the global illumination setting has a real cost even with “ray tracing” switched off, and lowering it by a step is a worthwhile test.
Ray tracing traces the path of light rays to produce accurate reflections, shadows and bounce lighting. It is the most expensive group of settings in any game that has it. Each effect is usually a separate toggle, and their costs add up.
Path tracing, sometimes labelled full ray tracing, replaces nearly all of the game’s lighting with traced rays. It needs a high-end graphics card and, in practice, upscaling and frame generation to reach a playable frame rate.
Volumetric fog and clouds simulate light scattering through air. They are often set very high by the top presets, and dropping them to Medium is rarely visible outside a side-by-side comparison.
Screen space reflections reuse what is already on screen to draw reflections, which is far cheaper than ray traced reflections. Their weakness is that anything off screen disappears from the reflection.
Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing is any technique that smooths the stair-step edges and shimmering caused by drawing a scene on a grid of pixels. The methods differ a great deal in cost.
- FXAA and SMAA are filters applied to the finished image. They cost almost nothing. FXAA softens the whole picture slightly.
- TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) blends information from previous frames. It is cheap and handles shimmer well, at the price of some blur and occasional ghosting behind moving objects.
- MSAA (multi-sample anti-aliasing) takes extra samples along geometry edges. It is sharp and expensive, and it is uncommon in new games. Epic’s documentation notes that in Unreal Engine it is available only with the forward renderer, which most large PC games don’t use.
- DLAA, FSR Native AA and XeSS Native AA run the upscaler’s reconstruction at full resolution. They give the cleanest image and cost more than TAA.
Many current games rely on temporal data for effects such as hair and foliage, so turning anti-aliasing fully off can make those look broken. If the image is too soft, add a little sharpening before you remove anti-aliasing.
Ambient occlusion
Ambient occlusion is a shading effect that darkens creases, corners and the places where objects meet, where less ambient light would reach. It adds depth to a scene at a modest cost.
SSAO is the basic version. HBAO+ and GTAO are more accurate variants that cost a little more, and ray traced ambient occlusion costs considerably more. The difference between the top two quality steps is small, so dropping one step is a sensible early trade. Turning it off entirely makes scenes look flat.
Post-processing: motion blur, depth of field and film grain
Post-processing effects are applied to the finished frame, like a filter on a photo. With few exceptions they are cheap, so set them to taste.
- Motion blur smears the image during camera or object movement. It can hide a low frame rate at 30 FPS, and many players turn it off at higher frame rates because it reduces clarity.
- Depth of field blurs what is out of focus. It mostly appears in cutscenes and when aiming. High-quality versions have a small cost during those moments.
- Film grain, chromatic aberration, vignette and lens flare imitate camera flaws. They cost nothing measurable, and turning them off gives a cleaner picture.
None of these will fix a low frame rate. Don’t spend testing time on them.
Draw distance and level of detail
Level of detail (LOD) is a technique that swaps distant objects for simpler versions with fewer triangles, which Unity’s documentation describes as improving performance by reducing the work needed to render far-away meshes. Draw distance, sometimes called view distance, sets how far away objects are drawn at all.
These settings matter because they change how many objects the CPU has to process, not just how many pixels the graphics card shades. The same is true of crowd density, traffic density, foliage density and similar population settings.
If the earlier test showed GPU usage well below 100 percent, this group is where your frame rate is. Lowering resolution or ray tracing won’t help in that case, and lowering density and draw distance will.
The visible cost is pop-in: objects, shadows or grass appearing as you approach. Lower the setting until pop-in bothers you, then go back one step.
What to turn down first
Work in this order and stop as soon as you reach your target.
- Turn off ray tracing, or reduce it to one effect.
- Enable an upscaler in Quality mode at native output resolution.
- Lower shadows one or two steps, to High or Medium.
- Lower volumetric fog and clouds to Medium.
- Lower global illumination and reflections one step.
- Lower ambient occlusion one step.
- Move the upscaler to Balanced, at 1440p or 4K only.
- Lower draw distance and density settings if GPU usage is below 100 percent.
- Lower textures only if VRAM is full.
If a game still crashes or throws errors after you have lowered its settings, the cause is something other than load. Our PC game troubleshooting guide covers those cases.
How to verify the result
Rerun the same benchmark scene you started with and compare average FPS and the 1% low against your first numbers. A before-and-after pair from the same scene is the only reliable evidence that a change worked.
Then play normally for a session with a frame time graph on screen. A benchmark covers one scene, and the heaviest area in a game is often somewhere else. If the frame rate holds there too, you are done.
Estimate Your FPS
