Optimize Your Game Settings: The Ones That Cost the Most FPS

The single biggest mistake I see people make when their frame rate tanks is dropping everything to Low and calling it a day. That leaves a lot of image quality on the table for very little gain, because a handful of settings are responsible for most of the cost while the rest are nearly free. Here is how I actually tune a game, in the order I do it, and why.

Start With The Reset: Preset, Then Undo#

Whenever I sit down with a new game, I don't touch individual sliders first. I set the overall preset to High (not Ultra), then benchmark a demanding scene. Ultra presets almost always include one or two absurdly expensive settings that exist purely for screenshots, and High gets you 90 percent of the look for a fraction of the frame cost.

From that baseline I only raise or lower things I can actually see. The whole philosophy here is spend your frames where your eyes are, not where a preset decided for you. A good test scene is important too: pick somewhere with a lot going on, like a dense city street, a forest with foliage, or a big open vista with fog. A quiet indoor room will lie to you about your real performance.

Shadows: The Usual Prime Suspect#

If I had to name the setting that most often eats the most FPS across the widest range of games, it's shadow quality. Shadows are expensive because the engine effectively renders the scene an extra time from each light's point of view to figure out what's occluded, and higher settings crank up the resolution and draw distance of those shadow maps.

Here's the thing though: the jump from Ultra to High shadows is often invisible in motion. You'd need to stop, pause, and pixel-peep a specific shadow edge to notice the softening. So this is almost always my first cut.

• Ultra to High: big frame savings, near-zero visible difference. Do this every time.
• High to Medium: usually still fine, some edges get chunkier and shadow draw distance pulls in.
• Medium to Low: this is where it starts to look bad, with shadows popping in close to the camera and losing contact with objects.

My rule: I live on High shadows, drop to Medium if I'm still short on frames, and only go Low as a last resort before I'd rather lower the resolution instead.

Volumetrics And Fog: Pretty, But Costly#

Volumetric lighting, those god rays streaming through windows and the thick atmospheric fog that fills a valley, is one of the most frame-hungry effects in modern games and one of the most inconsistent. In some titles it's a rounding error. In others, especially ones built around moody atmosphere, it can cost you 15 to 25 percent of your frame rate at the highest setting.

Because the cost varies so wildly, this is a setting I always test individually. Toggle it between High and Low while watching your frame counter in a foggy scene. If the number barely moves, leave it high and enjoy the atmosphere. If it craters, drop it a notch. Medium volumetrics usually keep the vibe while shedding most of the cost.

Anti-Aliasing: Choose The Method, Not Just The Level#

Anti-aliasing smooths the jagged staircase edges on geometry, and how much it costs depends enormously on which method you use, not just how high you set it.

The cheap, smart way#

Modern temporal upscalers double as anti-aliasing, and they're usually your best deal. DLSS, FSR, and XeSS in their Quality modes render the game at a lower internal resolution and reconstruct it, which means you get cleaned-up edges and a frame rate boost at the same time. On a lot of my builds this is the first thing I turn on, before I start cutting anything, because it gives back frames instead of taking image quality.

The expensive brute-force way#

• MSAA is the killer. It's gorgeous on hard edges but multiplies a big chunk of your rendering work, and in a modern deferred-rendering game it can absolutely gut your frame rate. Avoid unless you have frames to burn.
• TAA is cheap and catches everything, but softens the image and can smear in motion. It's the default in most engines for a reason.
• SMAA / FXAA are nearly free post-process filters. They miss some edges and won't touch shimmering, but they cost almost nothing.

If you're chasing frames, never run MSAA. Use an upscaler's Quality mode, or a light TAA, and move on.

Ambient Occlusion And Reflections#

Ambient occlusion#

Ambient occlusion adds the soft contact shadows in corners, under objects, and where surfaces meet, the subtle grounding that makes a scene feel three-dimensional instead of flat. The mid settings are cheap and worth keeping. The trap is the fancy ray-traced or high-sample variants (HBAO+, GTAO on Ultra) which can carry a real cost for a look most people never consciously notice. Medium AO is the sweet spot: you get the grounding, you skip the tax.

Screen-space reflections#

Reflections are a classic frame sink and one of the easiest places to save. Screen-space reflection quality can be dropped a level or two with almost no visible loss unless you're specifically staring at a wet floor or a puddle. I keep SSR on Medium in most games and never miss the difference.

A word on ray-traced reflections and global illumination: these are the genuinely transformative-but-brutal settings. They can be stunning and they can halve your frame rate. I treat them as an explicit choice, not a default. If your card has the headroom and an upscaler to lean on, enjoy them. If you're fighting for a stable 60, turn them off before you touch anything cosmetic.

The Settings To Keep High#

Just as important as knowing what to cut is knowing what's nearly free. These are the ones I leave cranked because they cost little and matter a lot.

1. Texture quality. This is the big one. Texture quality is mostly a VRAM cost, not a compute cost, which means if your card has the memory, high textures are effectively free frames-wise and they do more for how a game looks than almost anything else. Sharp textures make a game look modern; blurry ones make even a well-lit scene look dated. The only caveat: if you exceed your VRAM budget, you'll get stutter and texture pop-in, so match the setting to your card's memory, not your ego.
2. Anisotropic filtering. This keeps textures sharp at oblique angles, like a road stretching into the distance. It's been essentially free on modern GPUs for years. Always max it. There's no reason not to.
3. Level of detail / draw distance. Usually moderate cost, high visual payoff. Aggressive LOD settings cause distracting pop-in as objects and foliage materialize in front of you. I keep this at least on High unless I'm truly desperate.
4. View distance for shadows is the exception to keeping things high, but general geometry draw distance is worth protecting.

A Repeatable Tuning Order#

When I hand this process to a friend, I boil it down to a sequence they can run in ten minutes:

• Set the preset to High and benchmark a demanding scene.
• Turn on an upscaler (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) in Quality mode for a free frame boost with clean edges.
• Drop shadows to High or Medium. This is your biggest single lever.
• Test volumetrics individually and lower if the frame counter tanks.
• Set ambient occlusion and reflections to Medium.
• Kill MSAA if it's on; never use it.
• Leave textures, anisotropic filtering, and draw distance high if your VRAM allows.
• Re-benchmark. If you're still short, then consider lowering render resolution or the upscaler preset.

The reason this order works is that it front-loads the settings with the worst cost-to-looks ratio. By the time you've done the first five steps, you've usually recovered most of the frames you were missing without making the game look meaningfully worse.

Conclusion#

Optimizing isn't about turning everything down, it's about knowing which sliders are quietly stealing your frames. Shadows, volumetrics, heavy anti-aliasing, and ray tracing are where the cost lives; textures, anisotropic filtering, and draw distance are where the beauty lives for cheap. Learn that split once and you'll never blindly slam a game to Low again. Spend twenty minutes with your frame counter open, test one setting at a time in a genuinely demanding scene, and you'll walk away with a game that looks great and runs the way you want it to.