By Walter Jobs, Technology writer and editor · Published 9 October 2026
Short answer: turn down shadows, ambient occlusion, volumetrics and reflections. Keep textures at maximum as long as they fit in your card’s memory, because texture quality is the setting that most changes how a game looks and costs almost no frame rate. Most people do the opposite, lowering textures first because it sounds expensive, and give up the best looking part of the image for nothing.
The order to change things in
Every setting has a cost in frames and a benefit in how the game looks. The useful question is the ratio between them, which is remarkably consistent across modern engines.
| Setting | Frame cost | Visual gain | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Textures | Almost none, if they fit | Very high | Maximum, until you run out of video memory |
| Anisotropic filtering | Negligible | Noticeable on ground and roads | Maximum, always, it is effectively free |
| Shadow quality | Very high | Low once you stop looking for it | Medium. The biggest single win on this table |
| Ray traced anything | Enormous | High in some scenes, invisible in others | Off unless you have frames to spare |
| Volumetric fog and lighting | High | Moderate, scene dependent | Medium or low |
| Screen space reflections | High | Only where there is water or wet ground | Low, or off in games without much of either |
| Ambient occlusion | Moderate | Subtle contact shadows | Medium, or the cheapest option offered |
| Draw distance and crowd density | Processor, not card | High in open worlds | Lower only if the processor is your limit |
| Anti aliasing | Low to moderate | High at 1080p, less at 4K | A temporal option at 1080p, minimal at 4K |
| Motion blur, depth of field, grain | Low | Personal taste | Whatever you prefer. Not a performance decision |
Why textures are the exception
Texture quality works differently from everything else in the menu. Raising it does not ask the card to do more calculation; it asks it to hold larger images in memory. If they fit, the cost is close to zero. If they do not fit, the cost is catastrophic, because the card starts fetching them across the bus mid frame and you get stutter rather than a lower average.
So textures are a pass or fail setting rather than a sliding one. Raise them until the game warns you or until you see frame time spikes, then step back once. That gives you the best looking image your hardware can hold, and it is usually a bigger visual improvement than everything else in the menu put together.
| Card memory | Texture setting that usually fits |
|---|---|
| 6 GB | Medium at 1080p, and watch for spikes |
| 8 GB | High at 1080p, medium to high at 1440p |
| 12 GB | High or ultra at 1440p |
| 16 GB and above | Ultra at any resolution you can drive |
Which limit you have decides which settings matter
This is the part that makes the difference between tuning and guessing. Graphics settings move the card’s workload. A few settings move the processor’s. If you are limited by the processor, almost everything in the graphics menu is irrelevant to you.
| If your limit is | Change these | Ignore these |
|---|---|---|
| Graphics card | Shadows, reflections, volumetrics, ray tracing, resolution | Draw distance, crowd density |
| Processor | Draw distance, crowd density, object detail, physics | Nearly the whole graphics tab |
| Video memory | Textures, and only textures | Everything else, until the spikes stop |
Working out which you have takes thirty seconds: raise your resolution one step. A steep drop means the card is your limit. Almost no change means the processor is, and the whole first column is wasted effort. The full symptom list is in 7 signs of a CPU bottleneck.
The counterintuitive move when the processor is your limit
Raise your resolution. If the processor is setting your frame rate, going from 1080p to 1440p costs you almost nothing and gives you a visibly sharper picture, because the extra work lands entirely on a card that had capacity spare. It is the only situation in PC gaming where better looking is also free, and almost nobody takes it.
Upscaling, and when it is the right first move
DLSS, FSR and XeSS render the game at a lower internal resolution and reconstruct it. At Quality mode most people cannot tell the difference in motion, and the gain is typically larger than anything you would get by lowering individual settings.
So if the card is your limit, upscaling at Quality is the first thing to try, before touching the menu at all. If it changes nothing, your limit was never the card, which is explained in does DLSS fix a CPU bottleneck.
A starting point by target
| You want | Set this |
|---|---|
| Highest frame rate, competitive play | Everything low except textures and filtering, upscaling on, motion blur off |
| Best balance for single player | High preset, shadows down one step, ray tracing off, textures maximum |
| Best looking, frames are secondary | Ultra, ray tracing on, upscaling at Quality to pay for it |
| A stable locked 60 | High preset, cap at 60, leave headroom so frame times stay flat |
To see what your parts should manage in a particular game before you start tuning, run them through our Can I Run It checker, which gives an estimate at your resolution alongside the requirements the publisher published.
Frequently asked questions
Which graphics setting costs the most performance?
Ray tracing by a wide margin, then shadow quality among conventional settings. Shadows are the better target because turning them from ultra to medium typically returns a large number of frames for a change most people cannot identify once they stop looking for it.
Should I lower texture quality to get more FPS?
Only if you are running out of video memory. Textures cost memory rather than computation, so while they fit they are nearly free and they do more for how the game looks than any other setting. Lowering them first is the most common tuning mistake.
Is the High preset better than custom settings?
Presets are a reasonable starting point and never optimal, because they move every setting together regardless of cost. Start at High, then drop shadows, volumetrics and reflections individually and raise textures. Ten minutes of that usually beats any preset.
Does lowering resolution help more than lowering settings?
Yes, and by a lot, because resolution multiplies the work every other setting does. It is also the most visible change you can make, which is why upscaling exists: it buys most of the saving while keeping the output sharp.
Why does lowering settings not improve my frame rate at all?
Because your processor is the limit, not your card. Graphics settings reduce the card’s workload, and if the card already had capacity spare, reducing it changes nothing. Look for settings labelled draw distance, crowd density or simulation quality instead.
The frame costs described here are the general behaviour of modern engines rather than measurements of one game, and individual titles vary. Any figure for specific hardware comes from our own model, described on how we calculate this.