Always put Texture Quality and Anisotropic filtering on the highest possible. The first usually only eats up vram without affecting fps too much, and the latter makes textures look clean without once again taking any significant fps hit in most cases
@@vncube1 in many games lightning is the most demanding option i often go with a option like medium/high. But never low. Low lighting is like games from 1999
A hard question as it depends on developers, we have to remember that "Medium" settings is just a UI element, whatever gets turned off and toned down when using it depends entirely on the dev teams direction, it's so drastic from game to game. Me personally, I think some individual options are worth going down to medium, IF the performance uplift is big enough.
Indeed , take Horizon Zero dawn for example . Model detail setting adjusts environment draw distance as well as detail so to get better fps ( as model detail kills it in many map areas) setting model quality to medium makes things pop in quite badly as well as making the quality of local tress and grass inferior to the high setting as it reduced polygon detail as well as draw distance of vegetation, rocks as well as tress. I wish more devs would separate certain settings for better fine tuning
I never use the "presets" for ultra, high and medium... I change each setting myself, insuring I get the most details, while also gaining as much fps as possible (for those games that needs it) other games like new world I just hook to the monitors refresh (currently 75Hz/75fps) rarely use my 144Hz monitor. One of the most important to crank up as high as possible within reason is TEXTURES... that one hurts BAD when you turn it down... tesselation etc. can most of the time be nudged down and actually get a more realistic look, then the rest of the settings are personal preference while checking the fps but in games like new world I want MAX viewing distance to enjoy the great views and such, where Battlefield 2042 I want MORE fps than I want fine detail and I want huge view distance as well but it ran quite great most of the time.
Tesselation, anisotropic filtering and textures barely have any impact on performance. That's why always max them out. And when trying to boost performance, lowering volumetric fogs, shadows and draw distance give that most highest boosts.
Well said. This is probably why I had no issues with Arkham Knight while others were freaking out. I never expected to be able to play it maxed out and I was getting 60 fps @ 1080P on a 750 Ti. Just lower the settings a bit...
In short like pretty much any pc gamers: It differs per game and per computer. Tinker with the settings until you got your best looks vs fps balance you want. Same goes for RT etc.
The main problem with medium settings is that the presets oftentimes are partly nonsensical. Higher textures cost next to no performance and just require a specific amount of VRAM. Texture filtering is also very light on performance, but is pretty much always turned down on lower settings, but on the other hand stuff like motion blur and depth of field stays active. Also, personally I feel like AA is much less important on 1440p or even 4k than on 1080p and additionally on lower settings you usually get FXAA which just looks bad and reduces image quality.
The one that always gets me is when they turn down AF in lower presets. AF hasn't had a performance penalty for as long as I've been PC gaming. 4x AF vs 16x AF wouldn't even be outside margin of error on most games in terms of a performance hit yet it has a huge visual cost. It's the dumbest thing to turn down yet it usually is on medium/low presets.
I always use FXAA whenever I can. It's the best for performance and its much better than not having any AA. I should note however that I'm stuck on an old R7 260X so I try to squeeze out as much performance out of a game as I can. Resolution is very important to me so if anything, I try to keep that at 1080p. If a game is particularly laggy, I'll do 900p (Cyberpunk) but as long as I can achieve 30fps for the majority of gameplay, I'm generally "happy". Happy is a bit hard to say because the experience still sucks but it's better than nothing I suppose.
If you are used to setting presets only, and are on mid-ranged hardware, do yourself a favor, and learn what the different settings mean. Learning what they do, what kind of performance/visual impact they have, will give you the ability to go into advanced settings and tune it more to your liking. There are still games that ommit important settings even in the advanced options, and tuning outside of the game is a must, if you don't want certain effects. I think something like chromatic aberration should be a toggle in all games that use it, for example. There are some other settings like that as well.
100%, there are usual only a handful of settings that have serious performance/visual impacts and they do not always corellate with each other (And these settings vary quite a lot from title to title) I have an RTX 2060, at 1080p 165hz and often turning one setting down to medium, while still having high-ultra on the rest can mean the difference between barely holding 60fps and pushing 80-120 fps and the percieved smoothness is almost always worth the cost. Usually it will mean having shadows and SSR on medium and a couple of other tweaks. TAA quality seems to improve substantially with higher frames in most games and better image stability in general means your not really sacrificing "Visual Quality" outside of screen shots and relatively static scenes. It's also just really satisfying watching a game go from just barely playable to incredibly smooth with minimal downgrade because you figured out which setting was killing your fps. But I would really like to see HB elaborate on this series with some quick tweaks to get almost medium frames at almost high/ultra settings, but less exhaustive than their full HWunboxed recommended settings there is a lot of potential for this especially now FSR, DLSS and dynamic resolution scaling are becoming commonplace and i do wonder how many less enthusiast PC Gamers are playing with horribly unoptimised settings thinking their rig is a dud.
Games could do a better job at presenting the settings. Like they should have a little preview made by technical artists, which shows what sort of difference to expect, plus annotation whether it affects CPU or GPU performance a lot or a little, maybe little 3-step bar charts. There should also be a hotkey to show CPU and GPU utilisation in the game, GPU utilisation is easy, people have RivaTuner overlays (which btw, i wish it was so much less necessary, because inserting third party software into game's rendering loop using Detours-like technique is fundamentally fragile), but CPU is less trivial, like, the game could be measuring its hot thread and compute a max between total utilisation of the worker threads and critical thread, or just the utilisation of the critical thread, because how the game reacts to CPU congestion differs by game so much, and they could have their own metric which more accurately reflects the requirements of the game. Like just because the game is doing CPU work in the background, doesn't mean it really needs that CPU horsepower; and couldn't aggregate the computations across a longer period with barely a difference in result, a lot of the work it's doing could be redundant, it could be updating geometry that is out of sight time after time with more details that don't matter. And in turn just because RivaTuner shows that you have in total 40% of CPU left idle, doesn't mean the game isn't choking on its critical, most serialised thread.
@@SianaGearz I couldn't agree more. Well said. There have been games that do a decent job at describing a setting, explaining it's resource impact, and showing an example. Basic descriptions, examples, and resource impact should be the norm.
I think the biggest hit in terms of performace is Shadow settings. Turning this down to medium or low will provide the biggest benefit, while everything else has minor impacts on game's performance.
Unless the game has anything with the word "volumetric" in it then drop those settings immediately. They usually maim performance while making something irrelevant like clouds or fog look SLIGHTLY nicer.
Correct, if you're looking to save on performance, shadows are the first thing you want to be turning down. To be honest, medium shadows look decent in the vast majority of games and in fact look softer and more realistic for the most part, so well worth the drop for the performance gain. If you start to see shimmering, mesh or fragmentation of the shadows at this setting though, you're fresh out of luck. Some games have terrible shadow presets and leave you with not many options.
Used to be. Now it's Volumetric Lighting. Most titles like Borderlands 3 there is zero visual changes from Ultra to Medium and the fps gains are brutal.
Would be nice to have a blind test like Linus did with the refresh rate. I'm pretty sure in most game, except when a setting drop a massive feature like removal of shadow, most people couldn't even tell blindly which is which.
It really depends on the game but my view is to always have a smooth framerate. I would prefer to play Doom with medium settings and a smooth framerate rather than a choppy one due to higher settings.
Same but doom is a fast paced skill based shooter. For those types of games having more fps is always better but for adventure games, rpgs, tactical games, having that extra fps doesn't really do much if at all. For those visual enhancements are a bigger deal (given the game is running 60 fps constant).
@@bruhder5854 Yes it really depends on the game, but i didn't want to overanalyze it. Nobody would care if he/she got 120 fps in Syberia or any other adventure game :)
There was a tech site years ago, maybe they still exist but I’ve forgotten their name. Their approach to GPU reviewing was completely different. They had a concept of a good playable frame rate and then ranked/reviewed cards based on the resolution and image quality that the cards could manage and still make that framerate. I do miss that approach.
It does look as a good way to review a GPU, however, these days someone can use the same card for either 4K 60 Hz, 1440p 144 Hz or 1080p 240 Hz and in this case it is harder to review the card based on settings
If a game's content is engaging, most of the "issues" with visual quality tend to fade to insignificance. Ever notice that watching a really good film on mediocre equipment makes the equipment not matter very much? There are always the options of just not playing those games that look awful on your system or upgrading your system to a level appropriate for the games and quality you desire.
That's been my argument for years. If the game is fun then you'll play it at 640x480 @ 30 fps. Shit, I used to play Doom @ 320 x240 and hope it would hit 30 fps and I played the hell out of that game. If the game is fun then the visuals aren't as important. I will certainly admit that on occasion it's a big deal, draw distance and resolution is huge when playing a racing game, not seeing the curve coming up or seeing that the arrow points to the left or right makes all the difference in the world...
Hell yes. That's the reason I still enjoy Commodore 64 games and older DOS games. Same with movies. I'd rather watch any great movie from the 80's, 90's than modern flashy full of CGI "blockbusters" with a "story" written by an 8 year old...
@@chrisjr6214 I've been through it since the beginning. You play what is available. The old days it was 320 x240, hell, the older consoles were like 240 x144. If the game is fun the visuals are not the primary focus.
It's a bit like trying supermarket own-brand foods, sometimes you can't tell the difference from top brands (made in the same factory) and you save yourself money, or in this situation, frames.
Solid advice. I'd agree and say that Textures + Anisotropic Filtering are two settings that should definitely be turned up as high as possible, even when starting at a medium preset.
I would say as most gamers (prob. 90%) don't have a 4k monitor yet and are still on a GTX1060/1070 or RX580 era videocard with a 1080p or 1440p monitor. Maybe showing those medium/high/ultra settings might give a better idea of how to tweak the settings instead of using a RTX3080 and a 4k monitor.
I agree - most PC gamers are at least 2 years behind the latest and greatest and it's getting worse - I've consistently heard that GPUs won't become available to most people until at least next Summer. I'm on a 1070Ti at 1440p. I normally like to get High in textures and draw distance. I usually reduce shadows to Medium or Low. And always turn off DoF, bloom and any blur effects (personal preference, not related to resource usage). Happy to use 2x or 4x AA. So I aim for Medium to High and hope to get 60fps at 1440p.
@@donkeysunited 2 years ? My 1080ti is 4 years old now. And the average gpu according to steam is a 1060 lol which is 130% slower. Average cpu is a 4 core .. 4 cores is something i had about 5 years ago... Ive had a 1070ti.. it was near 100% slower than my 1080ti. I returned it and just spent thr money on the 1080ti back then. You will not be getting that much fps at high details in 1440p.. i have a 2560x1440 monitor and that card cannot handle that resolution on games 4 years ago.. let alone today. My 1080ti is starting to go below 80-100 fps now in alot of games.. sometimes 40-60 in very modern ones.
@@jeepsblackpowderandlights4305 Yes, I bought the 1070Ti as a stop gap a few years ago intending to get a 2080 the following year. As the 2xxx series was disappointing I then waited for a 3070/3080 or AMD equivalent .. and then they all disappeared. So I've been waiting 2 years to buy a new card but, you're right, the one I have is a lot older. I've been avoiding a lot of the newer games because what's the point with this card. Instead I've been replaying a lot of the older games that support mods like Skyrim, Fallout 4, XCOM 2. And just waiting for the market to recover so I can upgrade my PC and get back to buying modern games. I presume the entire PC gaming market is suffering - without a new GPU I have no reason to upgrade my PC and won't buy the newer games. First world problems eh :)
The point was to show relative performance difference. That isn't really going to change because he used 4k. The gap between different presets would still be more or less identical and at lower resolutions the CPU might start bottlenecking the GPU.
I had my rx 580 since release but I also use a sub-par 1360x768 monitor which is hilariously outdated. I was going to upgrade to a 3000 series card and a 1440p high refresh rate monitor but idk that seems like a pipedream with how things are. For right now my low res monitor actually helps out with keeping my gpu running games on high presets at 60 with a lot of overhead. Hell if I have to I can just cap my framerate at 30 for newer cross plat games if I can't get a locked 60.
I always tune everything to the highest first, then move specific settings down that will give more performance for the least visual differences. Volumetric lighting and ambient occlusion are usually the most impactful in the games I played.
I tend to wait usually about 1 year before I play AAA titles that way I tend to get both games that are more optimised at good discount and less buggy plus I am playing last year games with current game hardware
Medium settings are only shunned because presets are usually idiotic. They should be contextual, and seperated from VRAM intensive settings like Texture resolution and geometric detail settings (tessellation for instance). That would make it much better.
Mhm but Medium is a catch-all for sub-par machines, that are not quite high-spec in all regards, but good enough to represent the game largely as artistically intended; and what each such machine needs is very different, some will have a weak CPU, others will have a weak GPU, yet others will have a garbage slow disk or not enough RAM. So ultimately games should explain their settings better, with previews and annotations which part of the system they'll hit heavier. Like if you have a CPU that is too weak to reach high framerate in a particular game, you might as well go High on most of the graphics settings, but trim down those settings which are more CPU intensive. Texture resolution seems like a "safe bet" to increase to many, as long as it doesn't overextend VRAM, but people with a slow hard disk, or in DX11 games not enough main RAM, will also be affected. Unfortunately, DX11 games are still a thing, look at Ubisoft.
in the past medium settings ment a major downgrade in visual quality but in the last 2 years medium settings are realy good and the higher settings just add that extra bit of polish. but its dependant on the game,
developers should start implementing console settings in graphic options like horizon zero dawn, we know developers spend most time optimising for consoles so those optimisations can carry on to pc as well.
Console hardware is locked and know by the devs. They can't optimise something without knowing on which hardware their software will run. It's just like asking racing mechanics to optimize the setup without telling them the track or conditions the car will run. So the best thing they can do is preset settings and add more option or fine tune for each option. Just like WOW 10 settings instead of just low mid high as an exemple. Not to mention console usually use dynamic resolutions, specifics textures, shared but variable Vram etc... I bet you any devs will tell you to just start on mid setting or whatever the game start with and adjust depending on your system.
I agree. At least create an extra preset which mirrors the console settings exactly. It will usually be very good balance between performance and visuals. Medium with a few high and maybe one or 2 low settings is usually what console use, so the medium preset is a pretty good estimate, but it would still be better for an exact preset. The PlayStation did this well with the original setting preset.
Still rocking a 1070 Ti and prefer FPS over max quality (I mostly play shooters). If I had a newer card I'd happily push ultra settings in more scenic games but I'm more than comfortable with sitting around medium-high in new big titles to keep the frames 100+ at the very least. I don't really see the value in cutting my frames in half when most games still look great in the custom med-high settings realm lol. Anybody that tells you a game looks bad if it's not pushing ultra, supersampling, etc, is lying to justify their big boy cards ;)
The problem with most developers is that they will never ever optimise for pc hardware properly at least not that much the only Devs that actually care are the ones that make doom and Forza horizon 5
Cyberpunk 2077 and RTX 3090 agree with you. I thought high-end 30-series cards would last a while but Cyberpunk even with DLSS is barely hitting 30 FPS maxed out.
I usually get a mid-high card so I can upgrade more frequently. There's always new tech coming out that requires a new card like ray-tracing, freesync or physx.
Would you consider doing a smaller subset of the tests on something budget/midrange? Because those are the kinds of GPUs people using medium setting, by far will actually be using. So while these numbers here together with those of the earlier ultra-high ones offer concistancy, they may not be _representative_ at all. These high/top end cards aren't just linearly scaled core and vram versions of their lower tier family members. They have different bus widths, different clocks, very different cache sizes, vastly differently transfer banwidths etc. There's a _very_ high probability that this will cause the performance results between ultra, high and medium, to scale differently on top end cards vs midrange and budget class ones. If a small subset could be run for medium to high on one or two budget/midrange cards - then we could learn a lot more about how this scales on those cards. Enabling us to extrapolate more useful, and more accurate, data from these already posted tests - to apply onto midrange and budget cards.
I play on PC but I play 99% of my games with controller. With a controller, 60 FPS is enough for me (with V-Sync off and with a 60 FPS frame cap for significantly better input lag), even though I appreciate higher framerates. So if I have to choose between medium 120 FPS and ultra 60 FPS in a single player game, I'll probably choose the latter one, while I aim for 144 in competitive shooters that I play with M+KB.
@@d3m3nt3d_t3acup_ I have no issues playing at 60fps with a controller. I do notice the slightly increased smoothness at 120 but it's marginal. I can imagine with the snappiness of a mouse high refresh rate is much more important.
@@d3m3nt3d_t3acup_ I play with a controller because controls are unified between games, plus in a way, playing games with a controller feel more immersive to me, and it's more comfortable etc. The reason why lower framerates feel better with a controller is because you don't make as sudden and quick movements with a controller as with a mouse. 60FPS (without V-Sync) is awesome with a controller. But with a mouse, it's almost unbearable to me, it feels laggy, the framerate sn't fast enough to follow my mouse movements.
@@d3m3nt3d_t3acup_ Lower framerate and higher latency is definitely more tolerable with a controller! I don't have a super strong preference and use both; generally preferring the controller for games where it's a decent match because it makes for a more relaxed posture and less joint pain, which is something i suffer from. So i have a garbage PC, and i was getting maybe bordering on 30fps when Cyberpunk came out in this game, and gargantuan input latency. Since it's a first person game, i was going to play it with mouse and keyboard, but noped out pretty hard, my hand just didn't feel connected to the action at all, felt like 1/3rd of a second of lag. With a controller, no problem. Well, a hugely suboptimal experience, but like, tolerable, you can do what you have to without too much discomfort! The latency also depends on the game, different games (and different sets of settings in a given game) make different number of frames of effective input latency, and even at 60fps, it's a substantial difficulty to get it just right to where it doesn't feel disconnected from the mouse hand, usually i limit prerendered frames in the GPU control panel, use fast sync, use framerate limiting. Switching to a high refresh rate monitor (even though i can't reach high refresh rates in-game) and a high sample rate mouse was helpful as well. Controllers have a 125Hz sample rate and some input filtering, and nobody seems to mind. I actually love vibration/force feedback, when well implemented. A lot of driving/racing games have a field day with that, with the road surface or when one of your wheels bumps against something, or gear changes. One more plus point for controller play. And i actually love driving and racing games. Got to get myself a PC racing wheel someday, and naturally it'll have to have true force feedback. But i digress.
@@SF-li9kh Yeah I've not had a good experience with FSR myself and have a RTX card I'd prefer dlss but having all options helps those without a RTX card.
I would prefer an actual GPU upgrade from Nvidia that increases rasterization performance. Ray tracing is cool but it is a very small amount of the overall scene being rendered. This release seemed to just bolt on more RT Cores and not really improve the rest much. This was all to try to save face after the terrible 2000 series impressions of RTX.
Great video HU. It's really worth it for people to spend a few minutes working out the graphics settings. A lot of them don't do too much to quality, especially once you start playing and stop looking for it. You can really get a lot from your current GPU if you take the time to tweak the settings for all your games. When video cards started getting really good about 4 years ago, reviewers slowly started to review GPUs at ULTRA settings at very high resolutions in order to differentiate the cards better. The result is that there seems to be a disconnect between what is really needed for most people to enjoyably play games and what people think they need. For example, I've talked to a bunch of people with 2070 super or higher cards with 60hz monitors! Most people still play at 1080 on low refresh monitors (see steam data) yet they are rocking high end gpus. In these times of limited or overpriced GPUs, it's time to take a hard look at what you really need before you spend thousands on a GPU you think you must have in order to have fun playing games.
For Cyberpunk please look at NPCs as well, for example Misty in her shop. The contact shadows settings is only enabled with the Ultra preset, but it can make quite the difference for character lighting
Great video as always. I can tell you that medium settings look much better than they did in last gen games. Before making a bunch of upgrades to my gaming setup in the last year, I mainly gamed on my Lenovo laptop with a 960M 4gb and I'd drop down to 1080P medium and then tweak a few settings to high or low depending on the game. Thankfully with my 3080 laptop now I can play pretty much any game at 1440P Ultra settings but I still drop settings depending on the game to get a fps boost.
Based on these comparisons, it's definitely good enough. I'm sure if I'm comparing stills, id catch a missing shadow or two, but if things are moving I don't see much difference in visual fidelity. What's noticeable is that frame rate jump.
What I've found is the best is to mix between Med and High. Try to keep textures and view distance high, give it some form of anti aliasing and go with med-low shadows and you are golden.
It might be hard for your channel but could you do a bit of a blind test with 4k and 1440p and ask which system people would rather play on using your test system with high settings? I'd like to see if that visual fidelity is worth the performance cost.
That would heavily depend on the screen size. If you want a truly immersive experience with non-completive games, 4k and a 42" or bigger screen is definitely the way to go if you have the graphical horsepower. It won't look sharper than 1440p. It will look the same but on a bigger screen since the more pixels are spread thinner so they PPI would be the same. My 48" C1 has the same PPI or apparent resolution as a 1080p 24" screen. On smaller screens like 27" or 24" its not worth it. So if you are a competitive gamer then I would say stay away from 4k or even 1440p.
its like they went back in time, read my comment on the ultra settings video, then went back to the future to add this video to my watch later list. love it
when i have to go to medium settings its time to upgrade. in 9/10 games that is where draw distance really is visibly reduced, long and short range detail.
I have a 3070 Ti, but I know what it's like to tune down settings to keep playable framerates, back when I had my 1060 6gb games like SOTTR or RDR2 needed a bit of tweaking at 1080p to get constant 60fps and I've learned to live with medium settings. When I got my 5700XT I started playing at 1440p and 2020 games like Cyberpunk and Valhala also started to need a bit of tweaking, and that's where videos like the ones you guys do or DF does, comparing performance and graphics really comes in handy.
Hi guys, I really like your channel. You make the most detailed tests and the summary is always informative. However, what I really miss from you guys is the "efficiency" segment. Energy prices are going up in Central Europe at the moment and I think it will be the same in other regions. Playing with an energy-saving computer is not the goal of many viewers, but the everyday computer many have or wish for. With it, you can work efficiently for many hours a day, edit a video and play a game in the evening. With more and more people working from home, this issue is becoming more and more important. When someone is in the office of his company, the employer pays the electricity costs. If the computer is in the living room or office room at home, issues such as noise and energy efficiency are very important. To make it clear once again: Efficiency is not simply consuming less energy. Efficiency is that the consumption is adapted to the requirements or is in balance with the costs ( purchase and ongoing costs).
The title really needs to be changed, we are not talking about medium settings, we are talking about medium presets. That is a big difference. Changing a few key settings to medium would always result in greater performance without much visual degradation. As with the previous video, the key takeaway is "DO NOT USE PRESETS", custom settings is KING.
Medium!? Might as well play on console then :P. Jokes aside. My rule of thumb is easy. Use the highest setting that gets me at least stable 60fps. I typically don’t play games requiring super high fps.
its not a joke, really. I got PS5 digital and given a choice where i want to play the newer games.. my GTX 1080 is simply not up to snuff anymore. All games look better on the PS5, and run better.
@@Gungrave123 Funny you say that. My old gaming PC had an GTX1070 (i7 6700k, 16GB 2400 ram) and wasn't up to the task anymore. I got a PS5 with disk drive but found that the performance in many titles just weren't there. If I wanted to play 60fps most games dropped to a almost equivalent of low settings on PC. And I don't want to play 30 fps games no matter how much ray tracing it has. So I got a RTX 3060 Ti (roughly the same cost as a PS5 with disc drive) and just swapped out my GTX 1070 from my old PC and I have no problem maxing most games on 1440p. I can play most titles with about 60fps with RT on 1080p or on 1440p with resolution scaling/DLSS. That's way better money spent/performance than a console. Consoles still have a place for me with exclusive titles and they're easy to carry around to friends houses. But I play games on PC as a first priority.
@@HazewinDog I'm usually willing to do some resolution scaling before dropping settings. I find it to be a pretty nice way to increase fps without losing too much visual fidelity.
@@zhaf You went from 1070 to 3060 Ti? Nice, I really want to upgrade from my 1070 to a 3060 Ti or even better gpu than that. But yeah consoles really are mainly for exclusives these days.
I'll be getting a 3440x1440 monitor soon, so I was curious if there was much difference going from ultra to high-medium. Really don't notice much difference, so the upgrade will be worth it.
I find you can usually improve performance a lot and still make it look really good changing individual graphics settings rather than just using the pre-sets. Usually start on high and adjust downwards if necessary personally so I have the good image quality to start with so I know what I am willing to sacrifice for the better performance. Textures usually as high as it will go
Honestly I can barely see any difference from Low to Highest in those examples other than in a few areas.. As long as the preset doesn't change the amount of items in a scene I probably won't notice it in most cases
I play games in 4K so I mostly plat on High settings and sometimes through some medium mixed in depending on the game, But anything old it pushes high ultra FPS on a lot of games too.. I'm Using a 6800XT though and it gets the job done I can do above 60 FPS in most all games at high settings..
I believe that developers include ultra so that future hardware can make the game look a lot better. Think about how Half-Life 2 still looks decent today even though nobody could run it at ultra at the time of the games launch. Today even Intel iGPUs can maintain 60fps with the game maxed out.
I feel you should do a 1080p test, with a mid range graphics card, 4k using 3080 does not look like a good use case for someone who's thinking of medium settings
I have a 42' display I sit about 70cm away from. I can tell the difference between 4k and 1440p but it is subtle. The coolest thing about 4k to me is that they can cram that many pixels into a 28' display. oh and bragging rights :P. Fun fact apparently Farcry 6s HD texture pack specs are aimed at 4k with the memory at 11gb moving to 1440p on a 3080 with 10gb means no missing textures :).
@@joshuawest3906 Yeah that's the problem with 4k, needs at least 32 inches for it(due to scaling) but 40+ inches works the best overall. It's why I might go for an ultra wide monitor next that's 3440x1440.
As a simmer who spent WAAY too much time and money to build a custom pc for flying over my hometown (and getting mowed down in DCS), I appreciate that you covered MSFS2020 in this video.
Sometimes I feel like having 3 or 4 variations of "high" are just to combat perceptions of titles being poorly optimized and make gamers feel good about their GPU. Do we really need settings like high, medium high, very high, ultra high, and mega high?
@@devilmikey00 Mhm but quickly going through the presets to assess performance and visuals is the first step. I don't see the point of deep diving into the settings before getting the overall lay of the land.
It depends on how old the game is. I'm currently playing Tomb Raider (2013) all settings maxed out. Why would I bother lowering settings to gain FPS? That's what Ultra was originally for I think. Back in the 90s, no graphics card could handle max settings. The max settings were always so people can enjoy those settings in years to come. I always buy mid-range hardware so I set new games to medium/high settings. Older games maxed out. In 5+ years time, I'll be playing some of today's games at ultra settings. The FPS will be maxed out as well because the hardware will be so good.
Haha, in the mid 90s games were software-rendered, until about 98 when the big graphics card revolution happened; and they usually had a 640x480 or higher-res option, but it would run on a CPU that you couldn't buy yet. But they knew that 2 years down the line, these CPUs would be super common. People forget that inaccessibly high, seemingly pointless settings, are a bit of software future proofing.
Majority of games and settings within, yeah medium is good enough during gameplay but saves you loads of performance which counts more. I think unless you're able to sustain 120+ with high/ultra the hit you take quality wise for medium makes it worthwhile.
This also depends on what kind of monitor you have too. If, like me, you've only got a 1080p, 75Hz screen. Anything more is just excess. Unless, you also wish to upgrade in resolution or Hz.
@@JustIn-sr1xe Yup, that's also something else to take into account. Preference as well. I aim for 120 in multiplayer and 60+ in single player with 1080p144 monitor. Sitting on a RX 480 still.
I totally agree that Ultra settings are usually complete overkill. The real reason I want to be able to run Ultra is I don't want to have to fuss about with what settings are worth giving up.
I'm a long time console gamer, so anything above 30 fps for me feels great. Nowadays I play with over 100 fps on PC, but still, playing over 30 fps is still an improvement to me. For those who have always played 60 fps or more, that's something they'll always feel is the standard which is understandable.
Sadly i have to cuz my replacement gpu died i bought it for $90 then boom so now im gonna buy a gpu for $300+ just to get at 1080p high or medium and sad part is my dreams to buy a GTX 1070 a fucking 2016/17 gpu i pray that nvidia and amd create a RX6400 8gig N RTX 3040 6g Gpu with GTX 1070 Or more performance for $200-$400 cause i mean we all cant be left so stuck in the past like damn.
Great video! I personally just set presets to high and if my RX570 8g doesn't push enough frames I turn down quality of effects (or others settings) until I notice a decrease in eye candy. 1080p 24" 144htz freesync VA panel, R5 2600x, 16G 3200cl16 tuned I'm happy playing story driven titles. Never drop as low as Medium, In some games I can barely see a difference in settings, 8x vs 16x, sharpness of shadow edges, ect. As long as effects are mostly intact I'm to into the game to notice.
IMO you can always clip down Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Volumetric Lighting, Volumetric Fog, Shadow Quality and MSAA. These are (generally, depending on engines) the visual features that are hardest to optimize for when developing as they all significantly impact the lighting pipeline render time and total scene/screen render time, which is generally the slowest thing in the render pipe overall. You can tell exceptions to this where you drop quality and there is no performance increase, this means something else in the render pipe is slower and isn't a function of quality settings, it will be the hardest optimization problem, things that probably don't get fixed (ever). Generally an engine limitation or a reflection of some much earlier technical feature decision that cannot be worked around in the final render. Eg no one ever fixed frame pacing issues in the IdTech 5 engine due to the nature of streaming functions as part of the engine design, so no setting you change will solve this either.
This right here! One of the best ways to increase visual fidelity, especially at lower resolutions, in games like RDR2 or MSFS that rely on heavy handed TAA, I'll turn on VSR in the AMD driver, run the game at 4K, and set the render scaling back to about 50-75%. Add in some sharpening, and you're basically doing the same thing FSR does. MSFS has a huge problem with TAA haloing, and supersampling is the best way to fix it. RDR2, whenever you move, the whole game world gets super blurry/fuzzy, and the only way to fix it, is supersampling. TAA looks great when you're not moving, but sometimes can be pretty bad looking, depending on the implementation.
@@Mark13376 I don't see why it would work? TAA is applied at the source rendering resolution. So if you have render scale of 50%, that's the resolution TAA is running at. And if you're aiming for same effective internal resolution, to achieve a given level of performance...
Good enough for me, that's for sure! ;-) I've been buying mid range cards (best price/value gpus) every single time because I'm satisfied with medium settings, all I need is consistent and stable frames per seconds (above 60 fps). However there are some quality settings - like Mesh Quality / Draw Distance setting in multiplayer FPS games - that have to be set to maximum, otherwise you are at disadvantage. There are also some settings that if you set to max you are giving yourself disadvantage, so one has to figure that out.
Often I find Ultra causes a 20 or 30% loss in FPS for basically no obvious differences. I have no doubt this is due to console focus during development and with the engines. We're definitely entering an era of CPU priorities due to the way consoles are made, and the focus is making optimization worse and worse needing more and more power each year with new releases. Lazy development to save money.
G'day Tim, That was really interesting & helpful, I have a R3 3300X, 16GB RAM & RX580 8G for gaming on a 1080p@75hz monitor, So although not 4K I can use these setting hints for my 1080p Setup so I can get the best compromise for reasonable FPS vs Image Quality (my preference)
That's why I often want to see folks review GPUs, Laptops and PCs, based on what the hardware can deliver on 60FPS, 120FPS and 1080p or 1440p at most based on what people actually use. 67% of people still rock 1080p based on Steam Hardware survey, myself included. I believe 1440p would be the next step. SO if 3060ti is good enough to deliver a rock solid 120Fps, @ 1440p why even bother thinking about 3080. I know different games, different needs and what not. But I am trying to address the amount of GPUs skews we have now where a 3050ti doesn't make much sense to me (in terms of value preposition, looking at surface laptop studio) and 3090 is like waah?
Even with 1440p display, i sometimes want 1440p rendering, but most times, i'll drop game's internal resolution to just south of 1080p effective via resolution scale (CAS and such). I think depending on game's per-pixel image quality, more than 1080p might not be quite as worth striving for, it's kind of the golden resolution at which things stop looking like junk, which is how it persevered for such a long time.
Best option is custom, I’m running RTX2080,9600K,32GB Memory System. I just set which settings I like higher and once I don’t care about lowered. Shadows Low Texture Ultra Water Quality Medium Anti Aliasing High Volumetric Low Ambient Occlusion Medium Reflections Medium I use a mix of a bit of everything. But I couldn’t give 2 craps about volumetric and shadow quality. Shadows have always eaten frame rates and it’s painfully obvious. It’s been happening for years. Texture Quality is the most important in any game. Always set that beast to Ultra since it doesn’t affect FPS at all.
Imo, your eyes get used to any decent settings....as long as they don't look seriously bad.....but it's your mind that keeps reminding you that 'certain' settings are dialed down on your current card....and that you need to upgrade to 'crush' the games visuals. I literally don't give a crap for ANY settings above High.....along with any 'technical' sounding visual setting. Just my observation but it's very difficult to tell the difference between High / Ultra / Epic textures. Keeping the textures at high and rest at medium gives me a serious boost in fps with hardly any noticeable difference in the visuals. The big differences in visual fidelity is noticeable in older games, when one changes the settings from medium to high, but not so much in modern games. Plus as I said before......your eyes get used to any settings as long as you don't let your mind fool you into thinking otherwise.
New games i refuse to crank up to the max. Id prefer high refresh over eye candy. Plus once I am in the mood to play the game again later I'm most likly able to play them at high refresh with ultra.
Haha these new bots that copy some random top level comment are obnoxious. Anyway i upgraded to a 165Hz 1440p monitor recently, and i actually love it. My system is hot garbage, literal garbage, i picked up a thrown out office PC a couple years ago, an i5-3570, and added a used GTX970 to it. So the system was NOT faring well at 1080p60. Thing is, once you miss a frame at 60Hz locked, it's pain city, you might as well drop down to 30fps locked, but that still sometimes backfires. I have been playing some Forza Horizon 3, and i can't hold stable 1080p60 to save my life. But i can run it at 1440p with a high refresh rate, like 120, 144 or 165, and it'll be around 70fps still sometimes dropping into 40s, and it feels much smoother. I can probably limit it to 60 if i care, for extra smoothness at 120Hz, but i don't even care. A lot of games i can set internal render resolution to somewhere close to 1080p, while i'd target lower resolutions previously to just try and keep the performance in check, but i can play at 40-50fps and not care, it's fine, looks good, feels good. I imagine if you had a 75Hz screen with VRR (variable refresh rate), you could have a similar experience, but a 60Hz TV lacks the feature. Can definitely recommend going the HRR/VRR route. I picked high refresh rate because i knew my GPU wouldn't support VRR with these modern inexpensive monitors without a dedicated G-Sync scaler board, but i got this display for years to come, i expect to be using it for like 7 years at least, i can take advantage of VRR when i get a new GPU some years later, the display supports both.
This was a very relevant video topic, and can be very helpful for many people. I would be interesting to see the video where are you do actually tinker with individual settings after choosing the medium preset (as suggested), to show how you could bring back some of the visual quality without much impact on fps and performance.
@Phoenix 𝙾𝚙𝚎𝚗 𝙼𝚢 PROFILE I have a high end system, so my suggestion was to help those who don’t have a 6900XT and 3080Ti to play with. I find that in the slow parts of games, like when trying to find my way and slowly pick the path through a canyon in Mass Effect, that visual quality does matter even in an engaging game. in Forza It’s less important when the scenery is flying past me, but the quality of the cockpit and gauges can really suffer in lower settings and break the illusion.
"High" is almost always equivalent to or slightly better than consoles, so those are the settings that the developers optimized the game experience around. It depends on the game, but once you go under that you're giving up some serious visual compromises. If you don't have a low-end GPU, I would only change things to medium on a setting-by-setting basis to make sure you aren't turning off any key visual features.
Well that's because of the 3080s crappy 10gb of Vram. It's interesting to see how the video and comments have dated. Practically no-one is talking about dlss (which is nice) and theres only 7-8 RT comments. How that has changed within 12-14months is quite scary. It just shows what a good job Nvidia has done advertising these band-aids for visual preformance via fidelity ( rather than just focusing on rasterization (to get around the Vram argument).
Been trying to put together my first build and those benchmarking videos running 4k ultra settings give me performance anxieties all the time, so thanks for your video!
4k gaming is almost dead on PC. Edited ( 4k is dead). This video once again proves this. What I mean is that only 1% of gamers have and will have for the next 10 years at least the option to play at 4k. When this last gen of GPU came out it almost looks as if 2021 was the year where half of gamers could afford this, but not,that dream ended very quickly. I don't see monitor manufacturer pushing to make 4k monitors much, if a 3080 paired with a i9-10900k can only give you about 80 fps on high settings on Watch Dog Legion, and maybe 60 fps on Assassin's Creed imagine what would happen when the next one comes out, you are gonna get what, 50 fps? Unless the magic of DLSS works great and it used effectively so you gained those extra 25 fps. I mean best case scenario you need to upgrade that $1000 video card every 3 years to stay at least between 60-90fps, it's just ridiculous. Alsoo, this vidoe was entirely about 4k medium, it is only targeting that 1 % of gamers, and it is not news that at 4k is harder to notice big differences between medium to higher settings, however at 1080p and 1440p it is way easier to spot major differences between medium and higher settings. While I very much enjoy watching the video, it should have been done at least at 1440p as well, maybe with fewer game samples? Because at 4k only is hardly helping anyone to decide
4K was a meme when it came out, and a meme it still is. It's great for old games sometimes, but supersampling does the job just fine, even softer. High refreshrate and high framerate is where it's truely at.
The adoption curve for 4k is going to be different for everyone. To keep performance high on reasonable priced hardware some sort of DLSS or other advanced reconstruction will need to be used. The other problem is monitors. But overall, 4k is by no means dead. $4-500 Consoles are already making 4k60 gaming go fairly mainstream, albeit with upscaling in most cases.
@@deviouslaw Consoles are a whole different game friend. It would take a new $1500 pc to play at xbox series x or ps5 quality/fps. I think this has been said enough in the past, that both Microsoft and Sont do not make money by selling you their console, that however they make their millions in market share, memberships. Can you imagine having 5 million people paying $10 a month on xbox live on average. That's where the money is. So unfortunately console gaming can't be brought into this video fo comparison purposes
@Transistor Jump The equivalent to an xbox series x roughly is an rx 6800, unless that information has been updated lately,not sure it has. It could very well be a 6700xt if you want.. Iam not talking about buying a bunch of dusty 10 year old parts on Ebay to build your own,I mean walking into a store like Best Buy and buying a gaming PC. It is definitely going to cost you at least $1500. Hitman 3 for example runs great on the Series X, native 4k at 60 fps locked. A 3070 would get you around 75 fps, yes higher but you get the point. Lets say a 3060, you can probably play some major AAA games with a 3060 or 3060 ti and get close to 60 fps. But where can you buy a pc with a 3060 or 3060 ti for less than $1400? This is what I mean. Again though,this is not about consoles vs PC war, let's not get away from the main subject.
@@dbgmediainc7506 I disagree; consoles are extremely relevant to the discussion. Consider that your original post stated that 4k is dead, not that PC at 4k is dead. Two different things. Remember, to match an Xbox 360 at the time of it's release also required a much stronger PC than 2-399 could buy you. PS4 also, although maybe to a lesser extent. This is nothing new. Maybe a bit worse than before due to the current situation, but that's somewhat unavoidable. I think if anything is keeping 4k from being a thing sooner it's not really the lack of horsepower from the current GPUs but rather the recent interest in high framerate among the PC community. So we aren't needing to achieve 4k60 but now 4k120+ in order to be attracted to that resolution. But even with that, smart people will realize once monitors come down a bit more than having the resolution headroom does not mean you need to max out your monitor in every game. The smart player will have a 4k144 panel and let VRR clean up the situations where they cannot achieve that framerate in demanding titles while gaining the benefits in older or less demanding titles without having to wait for "universal" 4k144 on every title in their library
Optimizing medium settings is where the FUN is! It is also how you learn about the different settings and their impact on performance the best: first hand.
Hey I’m looking to get a ultra wide monitor that isn’t 3440x1440. Could you let me know what you think of the MSI Optix MAG301CR2 1ms 2560 x 1080 Ultra Wide 200Hz?
@@theglowcloud2215 - It’s because it what I enjoy. I blow my money on what dafuq I want to, I earned it. If you want game on a CoreDuo, that’s your business. I’ve been playing since the Atari 2600 and I enjoy seeing every detail the artists put in the game. I know what games use to look like and what they do in todays games and I don’t want to feel robbed.
I haven't watched this yet cause I'm at work ...but saw the thumbnail and set it for 'watch later' - just wanted to say - i'm glad you did a video on this, I don't see much content on this subject matter. It is also an interesting time to post a video like this because no one can get a super high end video card right now haha!
Turning down the settings to medium gives me Dishonored 1's water color painting effect that I love....not to mention some serious jump up in fps's.....win win.
Excellent advice. Optimized settings based on your hardware to provide a consistent gaming experience. I played shadow of the tomb raider on 1440P medium with R5 3600 and RX 5600xt, stunning game and frame rate averaged around 80 and rarely dipped below 60.
I usually start with the highest preset, then turn off effects I don't like, e.g. motion blur, DoF, etc. Then if I'm not hitting a solid 60fps (at 2160p), turn down various effects that can hurt performance, like AA, tessellation, particles, bloom, etc. Textures can stay at max; with 16GB VRAM, why not use it?
