![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Screen-tearing-example.jpg\")
<\/a>An example of screen tearing in action.<\/p><\/div>\n
Shadows, lighting, and ambient occlusion<\/h3>\n
If your graphics card has to render high-quality shadows and lighting, then the framerates that it produces will be significantly impacted. For the best performance, you should decrease your shadow and lighting quality.<\/p>\n
Ambient occlusion involves how object shadows are cast on one another and how they interact. You should turn ambient occlusion down or off to see improved performance.<\/p>\n
Anti-Aliasing<\/h3>\n
Aliasing is when curved lines in video games appear jagged, much like stairs. Anti-aliasing prevents this from happening.<\/p>\n
Supersample Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) is the most demanding to your system, and you should avoid using it unless you have a powerful enough GPU.<\/p>\n
Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) is a better choice than SSAA and has multiple options ranging from 2x MSAA to 8x \u2014 stick to 2x as 8x is more resource-heavy.<\/p>\n
You should also avoid enabling Temporal Anti-Aliasing as it is prone to visual artefacts like ghosting and streaking.<\/p>\n
Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing should be your go-to option if you want more performance, as it is the least resource-intensive.<\/p>\n
Reflections and ray-tracing<\/h3>\n
The golden rule for reflections is to turn them off at first and then gradually increase them to see how much your framerates are affected \u2014 lower quality usually means better framerates.<\/p>\n
Ray-tracing is one of the most demanding tasks for a GPU to perform since it draws individual rays of light from a source to mimic real-time lighting.<\/p>\n
These light rays can bounce off objects and cast shadows to make in-game scenery beautifully realistic, but you need a graphics card that can ray-trace, like Nvidia\u2019s RTX series cards.<\/p>\n
However, even with an RTX card, ray-tracing still impacts gaming performance significantly.<\/p>\n