Understanding what graphics settings actually do

To the uninitiated, PC graphics settings can be quite a daunting affair.

The various sliders and switches are so pleasing to look at and it’s often tempting to just switch everything on and hope for the best.

Even for those of us who have a decent idea of what we’re doing can be completely thrown off by an unknown setting option or unusually poor performance.

With that said, check out the most popular graphics settings and what they mean below:

FPS (Frames per second)

The most basic thing to understand and the ultimate goal for most graphics aficionados.

There’s no point in playing a game that looks amazing but runs like a slide show.

Depending on how fussy you are and what type of game you are playing, playable framerates are considered to be around 20 frames per second and up.

The current benchmark is around 60 FPS, although newer monitors are pushing this standard ever upwards.

Don’t know how to check your framerate? We suggest FRAPS.

Vertical Sync

When a display’s refresh cycle is out of sync with the game’s rendering cycle, the screen can refresh just as the game has finished supplying a frame and started on another one.

This gives the game a “tearing effect” and while it usually only lasts a couple of seconds can be disorienting and ultimately costly if you’re playing a competitive game.

Turning Vsync on will stop this effect by locking your frames to your monitor’s closest synchronised value.

Unfortuanetly this can also introduce its own problems including lower than possible framerates and input lag.

Anti-Aliasing

Noticed that a game’s round textures appear jagged around the edges?

That’s likely because you have anti-aliasing turned off. Typically each type of anti-aliasing works in a different way and as a result are more or less GPU intensive.

All AA settings feature a numbered “x” to indicate the number of samples being taken. The higher the number, the smoother the picture but the more work it requires from your GPU.

Check out the complete breakdown below:

Supersampling (SSAA): Renders games at a higher resolution and then downsamples and layers over your current resolution – quite resource intensive.

Multisampling (MSAA): Typically produces the same results as SSAA but without being so resource intensive> it is the most commonly used AA used in games.

Fast Approximate (FXAA): As opposed to a layering technique, FXAA acts as a post-processor. It specifically focuses on the edges themselves and is arguably the most effective technique.

Not on the list? There are also a number of vendor specific options exclusive to both AMD and Nvidia cards.

Ambient Occlusion

Most modern games have various light sources in order to set the perfect scene.

In order to add realism, Ambient Occlusion is used to approximate exactly how much light should be shining on any specific part of a surface, based on the light and its environment.

As a result, the game looks more natural and overall the lighting in scenes is improved.

This is compounded by Screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) which uses real-time rendering of light sources. Once again, this makes a scene’s lighting appear even more realistic but hard on system resources.

Anisotropic Filtering

Texture filtering deals with how a texture—a 2D image (and other data)—is displayed on a 3D model.

Why is this important? Because 2D pixels don’t necessarily always line up perfectly on top of 3D models.

“So, when we want to know the color of a pixel, we find the point on the texture it corresponds to, take a few samples from nearby texels, and average them. The simplest method of texture filtering is bilinear filtering, and that’s all it does: when a pixel falls between texels, it samples the four nearest texels to find its color.”

Trilinear filtering takes this is a step further by not only averaging texels but also smoothing out the spaces between samples (bitmapping).

But what if you’re not looking at an image dead on? Anisotropic filtering, significantly improves texture quality at oblique angels.

Anistropic will require the most resources out of the three but genuinely none of the above is considered particularly intensive for newer hardware.

Textures and Quality

This is anything from “that Quality bar” to the miniscule breakdown of water, land, and grass textures.

While shadows are typically quite noticeable, they tend to only become very intensive on your machine amongst the higher quality settings, including softening and sharpness.

Textures on the other hand offer quite a noticeable jump in graphics quality between presets.

This is is because they rely quite heavily on GPU’s VRAM. They are the most intensive settings on your hardware, with the difference between high and Ultra sometimes being the difference between a perfectly playable game and a hard crash.