It’s all too tempting to set your graphics settings to high for the most immersive gaming experience, but if you want performance, we’re going to show you some simple graphics setting tweaks to improve your gaming performance.
Not all these changes will make a huge difference but if you’re an avid gamer, especially in multiplayer, some small change could have a perceptible impact on your performance.
Game Video Settings to Improve Performance
V-Sync
V-Sync provides you with a smoother game performance, and ensures your game visuals always appear correct.
The downside of V-Sync is that it adds a fractional delay from input to screen (we’re talking a few milliseconds, but it can be noticeable on slower machines) and since it’s syncing with your monitor, it’s going to reduce your framerate to a divisible amount of your monitors frame rate. For example, if your PC is running at 57 fps, but your monitor is 60fps, you’ll see a framerate of 30 fps.
This can be mitigated a little by triple buffering or adaptive v-sync, but these will put more pressure on your graphics card.
You can also bypass some of these issues by utilizing G-Sync or Freesync, which offset some of the pressures of V-Sync.
Motion Blur
Designed to make your games feel more cinematic, motion blur can make your games feel more immersive, but it’s essentially an effect/filter added to your game, so expect it to impact your game performance slightly. As with most of our tips to improve game performance, this is a trade-off between performance and quality, but for multiplayer games it’s a no-brainer.
Field of View
Field of view is a trickier setting t optimize. A wider field of view is going to impact your game performance, but it means you’ll have less peripheral vision (especially useful if you’re playing on a widescreen monitor. If you’re finding yourself getting hit by lag it may make sense to cut down on the field of view setting, trading in some peripheral vision for smoother and more responsive gameplay.
Anti-Aliasing
Out of all the graphical features, anti-aliasing provides the most visual impact, effectively reducing the number of times graphics appear pixelated or blocky. That visual blurring comes at an increased performance cost however. If you’re seeing noticeable stuttering, disabling anti-aliasing could be your quick and simple fix.
Resolution
Changing your resolution may be one of the simplest and most effective ways to improve game performance, but there’s no doubt it’s going to have the biggest impact on your gaming experience, especially on larger or higher resolution monitors.
For gamers who are stretching their gaming setup to the max with the latest games, reducing resolution can have significant performance improvements, but it’s going to have the biggest impact on your visual experience.
Some graphics cards and games now provide adaptive/dynamic resolution, or auto-scaling which can automatically help balance resolution against performance. These features can help effectively balance your resolution and performance, but the in game quality changes may feel a little jarring to some gamers.
Customizing Settings Per Game
Outside of our more generic tips, it’s worth remembering that you can adjust your graphic driver settings at a game-by game level. Most Graphics cards come with software to help facilitate this, such as the NVidia Geforce Experience, These have prebuilt settings for most popular games, but you may be able to find user generated profiles for your favorite games that provide even greater performance benefits without as much sacrifice to performance.
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