Which graphics settings actually tank your FPS (and which to drop first)

Every time somebody tells me a game runs badly on their PC, I ask what settings they’re using.

The answer is almost always some version of “I put everything on Low and it’s still bad.”

That’s the problem right there. Turning everything down is not the same as turning down the right things. Most people give up half their visual quality and get maybe twelve frames back for it.

Here’s how I think about it. Your graphics settings are a table full of people splitting a restaurant bill evenly. Ray tracing ordered the lobster and two bottles of wine. Film grain had a glass of tap water.

And you’re paying an even share for all of it, then wondering why the bill is so high.

So let’s figure out who actually ate what.

Your GPU has a budget and a few settings are eating most of it

Graphics settings do not cost the same amount. That sounds obvious written down, but almost nobody plays like they believe it.

A small handful of settings will each take 20 to 40 percent of your frame rate. A dozen others cost you so little you’d need a benchmark tool to prove they did anything at all.

This is exactly why the Low, Medium, High and Ultra presets are useless for tuning. They move every slider at once.

You switch from Ultra to High, you gain 30 frames, and you have no idea which of the twenty settings gave them to you. So you never learn anything.

The presets are a starting point, not an answer.

The good news is you only need to understand about six settings to get most of the way there.

Ray tracing is the lobster

This is the big line item on the bill and it isn’t close.

TechSpot ran a test across 36 games and 59 different ray tracing configurations. On an RTX 4090 at 4K, turning ray tracing on cost 29 percent of the frame rate on average.

On an RX 7900 XTX, the average hit was closer to 39 percent. AMD cards have a rougher time with it.

And when you narrow it down to games where ray tracing actually looks like something, the average climbs to 35 percent.

Some of the individual results are brutal. Hitman 3 went from 234 FPS down to 83 with ray tracing on, which is a 65 percent loss.

Atomic Heart roughly halved the frame rate. Path tracing, which is the full version rather than the partial one, runs 50 to 70 percent.

But it swings hard the other way too. Resident Evil 4 costs about 2 percent. Dead Space costs 3 percent. Fortnite costs 6 percent.

So “is ray tracing worth it” has no universal answer. It depends entirely on which game you’re playing, and you have to check per game.

If your ray tracing setting has a reflections option, that’s usually the expensive one. RT shadows tend to run 10 to 20 percent, RT reflections 20 to 40 percent.

The other big spenders: shadows, global illumination, volumetrics

One tier below ray tracing you’ve got the settings that quietly eat a chunk of everybody’s frame rate.

Shadow quality and shadow distance are the classic ones. So is global illumination, and so is volumetric lighting and fog, which is the setting that makes light shafts and thick atmosphere look good.

Here’s the thing about all three. The jump from High to Ultra costs a lot and shows almost nothing.

Ultra shadows give you slightly softer edges at slightly longer range. You will maybe notice this in a screenshot comparison and you will never notice it while you’re actually moving through a level.

Dropping shadows from Ultra to High is the single best frames-per-visual-quality trade in PC gaming.

Volumetric fog is the same deal. Medium usually looks fine and the Ultra version is mostly doing math you can’t see.

Global illumination is the one I’d be a bit more careful with, because it changes how lit the whole scene looks. Try one step down, not four.

Anti-aliasing is where people quietly lose 30 percent

Anti-aliasing smooths jagged edges. Some methods do it cheaply and some do it by rendering your game several times over.

MSAA at 8x can cost you 20 to 40 percent of your frame rate. That is ray tracing money for an effect you cannot see once the camera is moving.

TAA, FXAA and SMAA are all far cheaper. FXAA is basically free and SMAA looks better than it has any right to for what it costs.

If a game offers MSAA at all it’s usually an older engine, and you should almost always take the cheap option instead.

Nobody has ever won a firefight because their fence posts had slightly smoother edges.

Settings that are basically free, so stop turning these off

This is the part where people hurt themselves for nothing.

Texture quality is the biggest one. Textures cost you VRAM, not GPU horsepower, so as long as you have enough video memory the setting is close to free.

It’s also the setting that does the most for how the game looks. High or Ultra textures on an otherwise Medium game still looks good.

Leave your textures alone unless you’re actually running out of VRAM. If you are running out, you’ll know, because the game will stutter in a specific ugly way rather than just running slow.

Anisotropic filtering is the other free one. It sharpens up surfaces you’re viewing at an angle, like floors and roads, and at 16x it costs you basically nothing on any modern card.

Then there’s the taste pile. Film grain, chromatic aberration, motion blur, depth of field.

Turn those off if you don’t like them, I turn most of them off myself. Just don’t kid yourself that it’s a performance fix, because it isn’t.

Some settings hit your CPU, not your GPU

Not every setting is a GPU setting. Draw distance, crowd density, NPC counts, physics quality and simulation detail all lean on your processor.

So if your bottleneck is the CPU, you can drop shadows to Low and gain nothing at all. You’ve been cutting the wrong department this whole time.

Checking is easy. Pull up an overlay, something like MSI Afterburner or the one built into your GPU software, and watch your GPU utilization while you play.

If your GPU is sitting at 95 to 100 percent, you’re GPU-bound and everything above applies.

If it’s hovering around 60 or 70 percent while your frame rate stinks, you’re CPU-bound. Go after draw distance and crowd density instead, and look at whether your RAM is running at its rated speed.

Open world games and strategy games hit this wall constantly.

Upscaling gives frames back instead of taking them

Every setting so far has been about what to give up. This one’s the opposite.

DLSS, FSR and XeSS render the game at a lower resolution and reconstruct it back up. Quality mode typically gets you 30 to 50 percent more frames. Performance mode gets you 60 to 80 percent, with a visible cost to image sharpness.

Quality mode at 1440p or 4K is close to free performance. At 1080p it gets rougher, because there’s less pixel information to work from in the first place.

Turn on upscaling before you turn anything else down. It’s the largest single gain available to you and it costs the least visually.

Frame generation is a different animal, though. It inserts generated frames between real ones, so the counter goes way up while your controller feels exactly as sluggish as it did before.

It’s great for pushing 90 real frames to 150. It will not rescue a game running at 35.

The order to drop things in

So here’s the actual routine, in order.

1. Turn on upscaling first. DLSS, FSR or XeSS at Quality. Take the free frames before you sacrifice anything.
2. Check your GPU utilization. Under about 90 percent means you’re CPU-bound, so go straight to draw distance and crowd density and skip the rest of this list.
3. Ray tracing off, or down a notch. Kill reflections first, they’re the expensive part. In a game where RT costs 2 percent, leave it on.
4. Shadows and global illumination from Ultra to High. Biggest quiet win on the list.
5. Volumetric lighting and fog to Medium. You will not miss it.
6. Anti-aliasing to TAA or SMAA if the game was handing you MSAA.
7. Leave textures and anisotropic filtering high the whole time. They’re not what’s hurting you.

Run that list and most people land somewhere near their old Ultra visuals with a frame rate that actually holds up.

Stop splitting the check evenly. Make the lobster pay for itself.