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For a quick FPS gain, test render resolution or render scale, ray tracing and other advanced lighting, expensive anti-aliasing, high-resolution shadows, and demanding volumetric effects first. Their impact depends on the game and on whether your PC is limited by its GPU, CPU, or video memory, so there is no universal ranking. Change one setting at a time in a repeatable scene to find what actually helps your system.
Which settings should you lower first?
If your GPU is the bottleneck, the following options are useful early tests. The order is a practical starting point, not a promise that each one will improve performance in every game.
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- Render resolution or render scale: Reducing the number of pixels the GPU renders can help when it is doing too much pixel work. Try a modest reduction and check image quality at your usual viewing distance. Upscaling can reconstruct a higher-resolution output from a lower internal resolution, but availability and image quality vary by game, GPU, and implementation. NVIDIA’s Control graphics and performance guide describes render scaling and DLSS options that keep the interface at native resolution.
- Ray tracing and advanced lighting: Ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination add rendering work. Lower or disable them as a diagnostic if the GPU is limiting performance and you can accept the visual change. Costs differ by game and effect.
- Anti-aliasing: Try a less demanding mode before disabling edge smoothing altogether. Supersampling and some hardware anti-aliasing approaches can be costly; post-process methods may be cheaper but can differ in sharpness, ghosting, and edge quality. “Anti-aliasing” does not have one performance cost across all games.
- Shadows and ambient occlusion: Compare lower shadow resolution, shadow distance, or contact-shadow quality, along with reduced ambient occlusion. Their costs and visual value depend on the game and scene.
- Volumetric effects: Fog, clouds, light shafts, and volumetric lighting can be demanding in games with detailed implementations. Reduce their quality or resolution and check scenes where those effects are prominent.
- Texture resolution, filtering, and level of detail: Lower texture resolution when video memory is tight, not automatically as your first move. Texture filtering quality and anisotropic filtering can have small performance costs according to AMD’s graphics settings documentation. Tessellation and object detail can matter in particular games, so measure their effect rather than judging by the setting name.
Why resolution and lighting can make such a difference
Resolution changes the pixel workload
Lowering display resolution or internal render scale can reduce GPU work. It may also soften the image or make fine detail less clear. Some games render the 3D scene at a reduced scale while keeping menus and interface elements at the display’s native resolution; the exact behavior depends on the implementation. Upscaling options can help balance performance and clarity, but inspect the result in motion as well as in a still frame.
Lighting effects have game-specific costs
NVIDIA’s 2019 Control guide reports that SSAO reduced performance by 4–5 FPS with ray tracing disabled and by about 1–3 FPS with ray tracing enabled in its tested setup. The same guide says that increased volumetric-lighting sample counts, resolution, and quality could reduce frame rates by as much as 11 FPS. These are measurements and descriptions for Control, not expected gains or losses in other games.
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Anti-aliasing and shadows are not equally costly everywhere
NVIDIA’s GTA V graphics and performance guide warns that hardware anti-aliasing can have considerable performance and memory costs in that game, and that its high-resolution shadow option can have a relatively large impact. AMD describes supersampling anti-aliasing as the highest-FPS-impact mode among the Radeon driver anti-aliasing choices it documents. These sources address different implementations; neither establishes a single cost for every game’s AA or shadow settings.
A 2025 study in the Journal of Computer Sciences Institute reported a performance drop of several tens of percent for SMAA4x versus anti-aliasing disabled in Shadow of the Tomb Raider on the study’s tested mid-range configurations. That result describes those test cases only, not a typical penalty for SMAA4x across current PCs.
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Should you lower texture quality to get more FPS?
Not necessarily. Texture resolution primarily affects video-memory use. If a game exceeds available VRAM, the result may be stuttering, pauses, or crashes; reducing texture quality can help in that situation. If VRAM is not constrained, lowering texture resolution may sacrifice detail without addressing the performance limit.
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How to identify the settings that matter on your PC
- Choose a repeatable scene. Use the same demanding route or built-in benchmark. Note your game, display resolution, graphics card, processor, and current frame rate.
- Check for other limits. Look for a frame cap, CPU limit, high VRAM use, or thermal and power limits. If lowering resolution barely changes FPS, that can suggest the GPU is not the only bottleneck, but it is not conclusive by itself.
- Change one option at a time. Let the scene settle, repeat the same route, and record average FPS and frame-time lows or percentiles if your tool provides them. Changing several settings together makes it harder to tell which one mattered.
- Compare the image as well as the number. Keep changes whose performance benefit is worth their visual cost. Check motion for upscaling artifacts, ghosting, or loss of detail.
- Retest real gameplay. A benchmark segment may miss the busiest scenes you play. NVIDIA’s GTA V guide specifically cautions that its in-game benchmark does not capture some demanding gameplay, and notes that setting differences vary across GPU generations.
AMD’s Game Advisor documentation describes gameplay measurements that include average FPS and 95th-percentile frame time, plus recommendations for settings such as anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, render scale, and display resolution. The page lists compatibility limitations; check whether the feature is available with your current AMD Software version and game.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.When changing graphics settings does not help
If several GPU-heavy settings have little effect, the game may be limited elsewhere. A CPU bottleneck, frame cap, VRAM pressure, thermal or power limit, or game-specific issue can prevent graphics changes from raising FPS. NVIDIA reported a CPU bottleneck around 80 FPS at 1920×1080 in its tested Control configuration in 2019; that is an example from one setup, not a threshold for modern systems.
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Consider a graphics-card upgrade only if repeatable testing shows that the GPU is the limit and you want more rendering headroom. The right choice depends on your budget, target resolution and frame rate, current GPU, and the games you play.
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