PC Game Settings Explained: What Every Graphic Option Actually Does

Every PC game graphics menu looks the same: a wall of options you half-recognise, sliders you don’t know how to set, and a performance warning that appears the moment you touch anything above Medium. Most guides tell you to drop everything to Low for FPS, or max everything for visuals — but that ignores the enormous difference between settings that genuinely transform how your game looks and settings that consume frames for almost no visible gain.

This is a complete reference guide for every common PC graphics option. Each setting gets a plain-English explanation, a visual quality impact rating (High / Medium / Low), an FPS cost estimate, and a clear recommended action. Keep it bookmarked for the next time a new game asks what you want to do with ambient occlusion cascades.

Graphics Settings at a Glance

Before the detail: this overview table lets you scan every major setting at once. FPS costs are relative — actual numbers vary by GPU, game, and resolution.

Resolution Settings

Resolution

Resolution is the number of pixels your GPU renders per frame. 1080p (1920×1080) means 2.07 million pixels. 1440p (2560×1440) is 3.69 million — roughly 78% more work for your GPU. 4K (3840×2160) is 8.3 million pixels — four times the compute load of 1080p. Higher resolution means sharper edges, cleaner text, and more detail in distant objects. The difference between 1080p and 1440p is very noticeable on screens larger than 24 inches.

Visual impact: High | FPS cost: High | Recommendation: Set to your monitor’s native resolution. Then use upscaling (DLSS, FSR, or XeSS) to manage performance — they render at a lower internal resolution while outputting near-native quality.

Render Scale / Resolution Scale

A percentage multiplier applied to your base resolution before output. At 100%, the game renders at full native. At 75%, it renders at 75% of native then stretches the result back to fill your screen. This is different from resolution — resolution sets what your monitor displays, render scale sets how much work your GPU actually does. Below 100% the image gets noticeably softer, especially on text and fine-detail geometry.

Visual impact: High | FPS cost: High | Recommendation: Keep at 100%. If you need FPS, enable DLSS or FSR instead — they achieve the same internal resolution reduction with dramatically better output quality through AI reconstruction.

Aspect Ratio

The width-to-height proportion of the rendered image. Standard widescreen is 16:9. Ultrawide is 21:9 or 32:9. If set incorrectly the image appears stretched or has black bars. This is a display configuration setting, not a quality tradeoff.

Recommendation: Match your monitor. Leave it alone unless troubleshooting display distortion.

Refresh Rate / Display Frequency

How many times per second your monitor refreshes its display, measured in Hz. This is a display setting, not a rendering quality toggle — a 144Hz monitor shows up to 144 unique frames per second, which feels dramatically smoother than 60Hz. Critically: if your GPU produces 200 FPS but your monitor is 60Hz, you see 60 frames. Your monitor is the ceiling.

Recommendation: Set to your monitor’s maximum rated refresh rate. For gaming monitors, 144Hz is the practical minimum target.

Upscaling Technologies

Upscaling renders the game at a lower resolution than your display, then reconstructs a higher-quality image using temporal data or AI. Modern AI-based upscalers do this well enough that Quality mode output is frequently indistinguishable from native — while boosting FPS by 30–60%. Upscaling is the single most impactful category of settings available in 2026. For a direct head-to-head comparison of DLSS versus FSR performance and quality, the DLSS vs FSR 2026 guide covers that in detail.

DLSS (NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling)

NVIDIA’s AI upscaling technology uses dedicated tensor cores built into RTX series GPUs to reconstruct a near-native image from a lower-resolution input. Available only on RTX 20-series and newer. DLSS 4, released in 2025, added Multi Frame Generation — producing multiple AI-generated frames between each rendered frame on RTX 50-series cards.

Quality mode renders at 67% of native resolution (at 1440p, the GPU processes roughly 960p and DLSS reconstructs the 1440p output). Balanced = 58%, Performance = 50%, Ultra Performance = 33%. Most players find Quality mode visually indistinguishable from native in motion. Ultra Performance is best reserved for 4K displays where even the reduced input resolution remains reasonable.

Visual impact: High at Quality mode | FPS boost: 30–50% at Quality, 60–80% at Performance | Recommendation: Enable DLSS Quality mode as your default. Drop to Balanced or Performance only if you need more frames. DLSS remains the best upscaler available in 2026.

FSR (AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution)

AMD’s upscaling technology has a key advantage over DLSS: it works on any GPU, not just AMD hardware. FSR 3 and FSR 4 use temporal accumulation to reconstruct frames — FSR 4, available on RDNA 4 GPUs, uses machine learning for reconstruction that competes directly with DLSS 4. On older or non-AMD GPUs, FSR 3.x delivers solid results competitive with DLSS 2.x. FSR Frame Generation generates additional frames between rendered ones, similar to DLSS Frame Generation but GPU-agnostic.

Quality modes mirror DLSS: Quality (67%), Balanced (59%), Performance (50%), Ultra Performance (30%).

Visual impact: High (FSR 4), Medium–High (FSR 2/3) | FPS boost: High | Recommendation: Best choice for AMD and Intel GPU owners. On NVIDIA, prefer DLSS when the game supports it; use FSR as the fallback when DLSS is absent.

XeSS (Intel Xe Super Sampling)

Intel’s upscaling technology works on any GPU but delivers its best quality on Intel Arc hardware with dedicated matrix accelerators. On non-Arc GPUs, XeSS uses a fallback DP4a path with results comparable to FSR 2. XeSS 2 (2025) improved temporal stability and reduced ghosting significantly.

Visual impact: High on Arc GPUs, Medium on others | FPS boost: High | Recommendation: Excellent on Intel Arc. Acceptable fallback on AMD/NVIDIA when neither DLSS nor FSR is available in a game.

TAA Upsampling / Built-In Temporal Upscaling

When DLSS, FSR, and XeSS are all unavailable, some games offer their own temporal upsampling mode — often labelled TAA Upsampling or Dynamic Resolution. These use simpler reconstruction algorithms without dedicated AI. The output is noticeably softer than dedicated upscalers, particularly on fine detail and moving edges, and ghosting is more common.

Recommendation: Use only when dedicated upscalers are unavailable. Native resolution with lower settings is often preferable to heavy render scale reduction without good upscaling.

Shadow Settings

Shadow Quality

Controls the resolution and rendering technique used for dynamic shadows. Low quality shadows are blocky and pixelated — you can see the individual staircase steps in them. High quality shadows have smooth edges with sub-pixel detail. Ultra adds soft penumbra (the gradual fade at a shadow’s edge where light partially reaches) and higher-resolution shadow maps.

The difference between Low and High is very visible in interior scenes and on character models under direct lighting. The difference between High and Ultra is noticeably smaller — close-up examination reveals more detail, but in actual play it’s difficult to spot.

Visual impact: High | FPS cost: Medium–High | Recommendation: High or Medium. Ultra shadow quality rarely provides visual improvement proportionate to its FPS cost. This is one of the first quality settings to reduce when recovering performance.

Shadow Distance

How far from the camera dynamic shadows are drawn. At Low, objects 30 metres away may cast no shadow at all. At Ultra, shadows extend to the full visible horizon. Most noticeable in open-world games with long sightlines — in corridors and closed indoor environments, shadow distance has negligible visual impact.

Visual impact: Medium (game-dependent) | FPS cost: Medium | Recommendation: Medium. Ultra shadow distance is rarely worth the GPU cost — the quality difference is only visible at the far edges of your view, and even then it’s subtle.

Shadow Cascades

A technique that uses multiple shadow maps at different distances: a high-detail map close to the camera, progressively simpler maps further out. More cascades produce smoother transitions. With too few cascades, you’ll see a visible quality step — shadows suddenly shift crispness as you move the camera. Primarily relevant in open-world games with long view distances; negligible in enclosed levels.

Visual impact: Medium | FPS cost: Low–Medium | Recommendation: Default or Medium. Increasing beyond High offers rapidly diminishing returns.

Ambient Occlusion (AO)

The soft, contact shadows that appear where surfaces meet — the darkening where a wall meets the floor, under a table, in the folds of clothing. Without AO, objects appear to float. AO is what makes a scene feel physically grounded and three-dimensional. Three types appear across modern games:

• SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) — The cheapest and most common. Limited to what is currently visible on screen: AO disappears at screen edges and can flicker on fast camera movement. Visual impact: Low–Medium. FPS cost: Low.
• HBAO+ (Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion) — NVIDIA’s improved technique. Significantly better than SSAO — more accurate occlusion in hair, foliage, and complex geometry; less flickering; smoother transitions. Visual impact: Medium–High. FPS cost: Medium. The sweet spot for most builds.
• RTAO (Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion) — Physically accurate contact shadows via ray tracing. Dramatically better in scenes with many overlapping surfaces. Visual impact: High. FPS cost: High (requires RTX).

Recommendation: HBAO+ if available. SSAO if HBAO+ is too costly. RTAO only on high-end builds with remaining GPU headroom after other RT features.

Lighting

Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) determines how light bounces off surfaces to indirectly illuminate the rest of the scene. Direct lighting — from a source to a surface — is straightforward to compute. GI is the hard part: a red wall making nearby objects glow slightly red, a room lit by light creeping under a door, a flashlight’s spill illuminating the ceiling above the beam. Without GI, scenes look artificially flat — light appears to come from nowhere.

Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen system computes real-time GI using a hybrid ray-tracing and signed-distance-field approach, and it appears in most major 2024–2026 releases. Older games use baked GI, which is pre-computed and looks correct only in static lighting conditions.

Visual impact: High | FPS cost: High (real-time GI), Negligible (baked) | Recommendation: Enable real-time GI when available. Lower the quality preset if performance is an issue. This is one of the most impactful settings for scene realism.

Volumetric Lighting and Volumetric Fog

Volumetric lighting makes light beams visible in dusty or particle-filled air — sunbeams through windows, car headlights cutting through rain, flashlight shafts in dark corridors. Computed by sampling how light scatters through a volume of participating media rather than just striking surfaces. Volumetric fog applies the same principle specifically to mist and atmospheric haze, giving fog genuine depth and light response rather than a flat colour fade.

Both are high-impact settings for atmospheric environments. The difference between a standard fog implementation and volumetric fog in an outdoor night scene is immediately visible.

Visual impact: Medium–High | FPS cost: Medium | Recommendation: Enable at Medium quality. Ultra quality shows minimal improvement over High for a meaningful FPS penalty.

Lens Flare

The circular halos and streaks appearing when looking toward bright light sources — a camera lens artefact. Your eyes do not produce lens flares. In games it’s a stylistic choice that some players find cinematic and others find distracting.

Visual impact: Low | FPS cost: Negligible | Recommendation: Personal preference only. Zero meaningful FPS impact either way.

Texture Settings

Texture Quality and VRAM

The resolution of the image maps applied to every surface in the game — walls, floors, character skin, clothing, terrain, vehicles. Low quality means everything looks blurry up close. Ultra uses the full 4K texture assets where the developer supplied them.

The critical point: texture quality is limited almost entirely by VRAM (your GPU’s dedicated video memory), not GPU compute power. A card with 4GB of VRAM cannot store 8GB of textures — it streams them from slower system RAM or drops to lower-resolution versions, causing blurry surfaces and loading stutter as you move through scenes. A card with 16GB VRAM holds all textures comfortably at maximum quality.

A practical VRAM guide: 4GB = Medium textures. 6–8GB = High. 10–12GB = Ultra in most titles. 16GB+ = Ultra in everything, including VRAM-heavy games at ultra settings. Check VRAM usage in MSI Afterburner or your GPU overlay; if it shows 95%+ consistently, reduce texture quality by one step.

Visual impact: High | FPS cost: Low (when textures fit in VRAM) | Recommendation: Always set to the maximum your VRAM supports. Texture quality has almost no FPS cost when the assets fit in memory — it is the most FPS-efficient visual upgrade available.

Texture Filtering (Anisotropic Filtering)

Controls how textures appear when viewed at oblique angles. Look down a long corridor floor, a road stretching to the horizon, a tiled field: without anisotropic filtering (AF), the textures become a blurry, smeared mess beyond a short distance. With AF at 16x, they remain sharp to the horizon.

The “16x” means the filter takes up to 16 texture samples per pixel and picks the best one for the current viewing angle. On all modern GPUs, the dedicated texture hardware handles this essentially for free — it was specifically designed for this workload.

Visual impact: Medium | FPS cost: Negligible | Recommendation: Always 16x. This is the clearest example of a free upgrade in PC gaming — meaningful visual improvement at zero perceptible FPS cost. Never set this below 16x.

Texture Streaming

Rather than loading all game textures into VRAM at once, texture streaming loads only the assets your camera can currently see and discards others. Reduces peak VRAM usage but introduces brief texture pop-in as new areas come into view.

Visual impact: Medium (pop-in when active) | FPS cost: Negligible | Recommendation: Disable if your VRAM comfortably holds all assets (monitor usage). Enable only if you are consistently hitting VRAM limits and experiencing hitching.

Anti-Aliasing

Anti-aliasing addresses the staircase pattern that appears on diagonal edges when a game renders at finite pixel resolution. Every technique makes a different trade-off between FPS cost, sharpness, and rendering artefacts.

TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing)

The standard AA method in modern games. TAA accumulates data from multiple previous frames using sub-pixel jitter — deliberately shifting the camera by a fraction of a pixel each frame — then blends the results to reconstruct a smooth, detailed image. Highly effective at eliminating jaggies, including sub-pixel aliasing that hardware methods like MSAA miss entirely.

Two known trade-offs: ghosting (fast-moving objects can trail a slight blur when temporal reprojection fails) and softness (temporal blending reduces fine-detail sharpness slightly compared to a still screenshot). Most developers include a TAA sharpening pass to compensate. Note that DLSS and FSR incorporate their own temporal reconstruction, effectively replacing TAA when enabled.

Visual impact: High | FPS cost: Low–Medium | Recommendation: Default in modern games. If ghosting is severe in a specific title, SMAA is the best alternative.

FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing)

A post-process screen-space filter that detects edges and softens them. Extremely cheap — negligible FPS cost — but limited. FXAA blurs edges rather than resolving them, and it cannot address sub-pixel aliasing, meaning fine detail (distant fences, wires, leaf canopies) still shimmers. It also smears some fine detail that isn’t aliased, making the image slightly softer globally. The result is sharper than TAA overall because there is no temporal accumulation blur.

Visual impact: Low–Medium | FPS cost: Negligible | Recommendation: Use when TAA ghosting is problematic, or as a lightweight addition alongside DLSS/FSR (which have their own temporal filtering built in).

MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing)

The traditional hardware AA method. MSAA renders edge pixels multiple times (2x, 4x, or 8x the sample count) to produce a mathematically precise, artefact-free edge — no blur, no ghosting, perfect geometric smoothing. The quality is excellent. The cost is the problem: MSAA does not work efficiently with deferred rendering, the standard pipeline in modern games. Where it appears today, 8x MSAA can cost 20–40% of frame rate. 2x MSAA is significantly cheaper and still better than no AA in older titles.

Visual impact: High | FPS cost: High (8x), Medium (4x), Low (2x) | Recommendation: 2x in older games. Avoid in modern titles — the deferred rendering incompatibility makes it far more expensive than it should be.

SMAA (Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing)

A smarter post-process AA that analyses edge patterns in the rendered image and applies a per-edge reconstruction filter. Better than FXAA at sub-pixel detail, less blurry than TAA, significantly cheaper than MSAA. Often considered the best quality traditional AA alternative when TAA ghosting is a problem in a specific game.

Visual impact: Medium–High | FPS cost: Low | Recommendation: Best alternative when TAA ghosting is too severe. Works well as a base layer combined with DLSS or FSR for extra edge quality.

Post-Process Effects

These settings apply camera-simulation effects after the scene is rendered. They mimic how camera optics behave — not how the human eye perceives the world. Most of them are candidates for immediate disabling.

Depth of Field

Blurs objects outside the current focus distance, simulating a camera lens with a wide aperture. A character in sharp focus, background softly blurred. Designed for cinematography — your eyes adjust focus continuously and do not create this effect. The gameplay problem: a fixed camera focus plane can obscure enemies, interactive objects, and UI elements in the blurred zone.

Visual impact: Medium | FPS cost: Low–Medium | Recommendation: Disable. The cinematic effect rarely outweighs the gameplay clarity cost. Cutscenes with hard-baked DoF will ignore this setting regardless.

Motion Blur

Smears fast-moving objects and the camera during rotation to simulate how cinema cameras capture motion at 24 frames per second. At 60+ FPS in games, your eyes can perceive individual frames clearly — motion blur adds artificial smear on top of that clarity rather than complementing it. Most implementations create ugly trailing artefacts that bear little resemblance to natural motion blur.

Motion blur is among the most universally disabled settings in PC gaming. The combination of visual smear, reduced situational awareness, and low-to-medium FPS cost with zero benefit makes it the clearest first disable in any game’s settings menu.

Visual impact: Low (most players actively prefer it off) | FPS cost: Low–Medium | Recommendation: Disable immediately. This is the first setting to turn off in any new game.

Chromatic Aberration

A coloured fringe effect at screen edges — the red channel offset slightly from the blue, creating a faint rainbow border. Simulates the optical aberration of cheap camera lenses where different wavelengths focus at different distances. Your eyes do not produce chromatic aberration. Adding it to a game introduces visual noise that degrades image clarity in a way that is hard to identify until you turn it off — at which point the improvement in edge sharpness is immediately apparent.

Visual impact: Low | FPS cost: Negligible | Recommendation: Disable. No visual benefit, unambiguous improvement in image clarity when off.

Film Grain

Random noise overlaid on every frame to simulate the grain of analogue film stock. Some games use it effectively as a horror or vintage atmospheric tool. Most games include it as an on-by-default setting that adds noise without purpose on a modern display.

Visual impact: Low | FPS cost: Negligible | Recommendation: Disable. Enable only where a specific game uses heavy grain as deliberate art direction and you appreciate the look.

The four effects to disable first — in order of priority: Motion blur → Chromatic aberration → Film grain → Depth of field. All four can be disabled with negligible FPS impact and immediate clarity improvement.

Ray Tracing

Ray tracing simulates how light actually travels — tracing individual rays from your camera back to light sources, computing reflections, shadows, and bounce lighting along the way. The result is physically accurate visuals that cannot be matched by rasterisation approximations. The cost is significant: ray tracing requires dedicated RT cores (NVIDIA RTX, AMD RDNA 2+, Intel Arc) and should almost always be paired with DLSS or FSR to recoup performance losses.

Ray-Traced Reflections

Reflections computed by tracing rays from reflective surfaces back to the rest of the scene. A puddle accurately reflects the building behind you. A car bonnet shows the actual sky. A bathroom mirror reflects what’s genuinely in the room — not a blurry pre-captured cubemap. Without RT reflections, games use Screen Space Reflections (SSR), which can only reflect what’s currently visible on screen. Objects out of frame, off to the side, or below the horizon cannot appear in SSR reflections — and SSR breaks visibly at screen edges and during camera movement.

FPS cost estimate: 20–40% FPS reduction at 1440p on an RTX 4070 with RT reflections at High. This is the single most expensive common RT effect.

Visual impact: Very High | FPS cost: High | Recommendation: Enable only when DLSS Quality mode can keep your frame rate above target. Ray-traced reflections are the RT effect most worth enabling first — the visual difference in any scene with water, glass, or polished surfaces is dramatic.

Ray-Traced Shadows

Shadow edges computed via ray tracing, producing accurate soft-shadow penumbra — the gradual gradient from hard shadow core to fully lit surface. Traditional shadow maps have fixed resolution, producing sharp or pixelated edges depending on distance. RT shadows match how real-world shadows actually look: hard and well-defined when the light source is small and nearby, wide and diffuse when it is large or distant.

FPS cost estimate: 10–20% FPS reduction on mid-range RTX GPUs. Cheaper than RT reflections.

Visual impact: Medium | FPS cost: Medium | Recommendation: Enable after reflections if GPU headroom remains. The improvement over high-quality shadow maps is visible but less dramatic than RT reflections.

Ray-Traced Global Illumination (RTGI)

Bounce lighting computed via real-time ray tracing. Light from a window bounces off the floor and illuminates the ceiling. A room lit by a red neon sign takes on a red tint from indirect light. Without RTGI, indirect lighting is either baked (pre-computed, works only in static scenes) or estimated using screen-space heuristics that fail when lights move. RTGI makes dynamic lighting physically consistent in a way pre-baked solutions cannot match.

Games built on Unreal Engine 5 typically handle GI through Lumen — a more efficient hybrid approach using ray tracing and signed distance fields that achieves similar quality to hardware RTGI at lower cost.

FPS cost estimate: 20–40% FPS reduction. One of the more expensive individual RT effects.

Visual impact: High | FPS cost: High | Recommendation: Enable on high-end builds (RTX 4080 and above). Prefer Lumen in UE5 games for better efficiency. Disable on mid-range GPUs unless DLSS can bridge the performance gap.

Path Tracing

Full path tracing computes every light interaction — reflections, shadows, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and caustics — in a single unified pass. The visual result is essentially cinematic rendering in real time: the same technique used in film CGI, now running interactively. Available in select games including Cyberpunk 2077 and Portal RTX.

On an RTX 4090 at 1440p without DLSS, Cyberpunk 2077 path tracing runs at approximately 25–35 FPS. With DLSS 4 Frame Generation, playable frame rates become achievable on RTX 4080 and above. Path tracing is currently a showcase feature — visually stunning, practically usable only on top-tier hardware or with aggressive upscaling.

FPS cost estimate: 50–70% FPS reduction versus standard rasterisation. Requires RTX 4080 or above for playable results at 1440p.

Visual impact: Very High | FPS cost: Very High | Recommendation: Screenshot and video capture mode, or RTX 4090 builds. Enable DLSS Ultra Performance or Frame Generation to reach playable frame rates if you want to experience it in motion.

Performance Settings

VSync (Vertical Synchronisation)

VSync synchronises your GPU’s frame delivery to your monitor’s refresh rate to prevent screen tearing — the horizontal tear line that appears when the GPU outputs a new frame while the monitor is mid-refresh, resulting in the top and bottom of the screen showing different game states simultaneously.

The drawback: VSync introduces input lag. On a 60Hz monitor with VSync enabled, the GPU must hold each frame until the next monitor refresh, adding up to 16ms of delay between your input and the result on screen. VSync also causes frame-rate snapping: if the GPU drops below 60 FPS, VSync halves the output to 30 FPS (the next available refresh multiple) rather than delivering a smooth 55 FPS.

Visual impact: Eliminates tearing | FPS cost: Variable (can halve FPS on stutter) | Recommendation: Disable if your monitor supports G-Sync or FreeSync — adaptive sync replaces VSync without the input lag or frame-drop penalties. Enable only on monitors without adaptive sync where tearing is clearly visible and distracting.

Frame Cap / Max FPS

Sets a hard limit on your GPU’s output frame rate. When a game renders simple scenes or menus, the GPU can produce hundreds of frames per second — running at 100% load, generating heat, and consuming power for frames you will never perceive. A frame cap prevents this unnecessary load.

The smart configuration with adaptive sync: if your monitor is 144Hz with G-Sync or FreeSync, cap your frame rate at 141 FPS. This keeps adaptive sync active (which requires the frame rate to remain slightly below the panel’s maximum) and prevents the brief screen judder that occurs when frame rate equals or exceeds the panel’s refresh ceiling.

Recommendation: Cap at 3–5 FPS below your monitor’s maximum refresh rate for optimal adaptive sync operation. Leave uncapped in competitive games where maximising frame rate is the priority.

Triple Buffering

A buffering mode that maintains three frames in the pipeline rather than two (standard double buffering). When VSync is enabled with double buffering, missing a single frame delivery window snaps the output down to 30 FPS. Triple buffering keeps an additional buffer in reserve, reducing this stall and maintaining higher average frame rates under VSync.

Recommendation: Enable when VSync is on. Irrelevant when using G-Sync or FreeSync without VSync — adaptive sync eliminates the delivery-window problem entirely.

G-Sync and FreeSync (Adaptive Sync)

Variable refresh rate technology built into modern gaming monitors. Instead of the panel refreshing at a fixed 60Hz or 144Hz interval, it refreshes exactly when your GPU delivers a new frame. The result: tearing is eliminated (the problem VSync solves) and input lag is not added (the problem VSync creates). G-Sync is NVIDIA’s certified VRR standard; FreeSync is AMD’s open standard. Most G-Sync Compatible monitors are FreeSync panels that NVIDIA has validated.

Recommendation: Enable if your monitor supports it — this is the correct configuration for all modern gaming setups. Pair with a frame cap set just below your panel’s maximum refresh rate for optimal operation.

Settings to Disable First for Better FPS

These four settings should be turned off in any new game before adjusting anything else. Combined, they recover 10–20% FPS depending on implementation, with zero or negative impact on visual quality:

Settings to Always Keep High

These two settings deliver high visual quality at negligible FPS cost. Never lower them to recover performance — you will gain very little and lose a lot:

Frequently Asked Questions

What graphics settings affect FPS the most?

Resolution and render scale are the biggest individual FPS consumers — they multiply the total work for every frame. After those: shadow quality, global illumination, and ray tracing effects are the most demanding. Upscaling (DLSS or FSR) is the single most impactful change for recovering FPS without losing visual quality — enabling DLSS Quality mode often delivers more frames than any other single adjustment. For a step-by-step approach to optimising your whole setup, the how to optimize game settings guide walks through the full process.

Should I use DLSS Quality mode or native resolution?

DLSS Quality mode at 1440p is visually indistinguishable from native 1440p in motion for most players in most games, while delivering 30–50% more FPS. Trade-offs exist — occasional blur on fine static detail, rare ghosting in some titles — but for the majority of games and setups, DLSS Quality mode is the better choice over native resolution with lower visual settings to compensate.

Is ray tracing worth enabling in 2026?

Depends on your GPU. On RTX 4070 or above, RT reflections with DLSS Quality mode is worth enabling in games that implement it well — Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, and Dying Light 2 are standout examples. On RTX 4060 or below, ray tracing in demanding titles will push frame rates below comfortable levels even with DLSS. Path tracing is currently a top-tier GPU showcase only.

What is the best anti-aliasing setting?

TAA is the correct default for modern games. It handles sub-pixel aliasing that hardware methods miss, and most developers optimise their rendering pipeline for TAA. When DLSS or FSR is enabled, their temporal reconstruction effectively replaces TAA — you often do not need additional AA at all. If TAA ghosting is severe in a specific game, SMAA is the best alternative.

Why is my game blurry even on Ultra settings?

Usually one of three causes: DLSS or FSR is enabled at Performance mode rather than Quality (lower input resolution = softer output), TAA is adding temporal blur to fine-detail surfaces, or texture quality is set lower than your VRAM can comfortably handle. Check VRAM usage — if it shows above 95%, reduce texture quality. If the issue is TAA softness, look for a TAA sharpness slider in the game’s settings, or try switching to SMAA.

Sources

1. NVIDIA. “DLSS 4 — Deep Learning Super Sampling.” NVIDIA Corporation, 2026.
2. AMD. “FidelityFX Super Resolution.” Advanced Micro Devices, 2026.
3. Kampman, Jeffrey and Walton, Jarred. “GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026: Graphics Cards Ranked.” Tom’s Hardware, March 2026.
4. PCGamesN. “What is Nvidia DLSS? Upscaling, Frame Generation, and More Explained.” PCGamesN, 2026.

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.