For the biggest performance gains, test shadows, view distance, foliage or ground cover, reflections, global illumination, and visual effects first. These settings can affect large portions of an open-world scene. Lower texture quality when graphics memory is under pressure, and use upscaling only after checking whether its image-quality trade-off suits your game.
There is no universal “best” preset. A crowded town, a forest, and a long-distance driving route can stress different parts of your system. Change one setting at a time in the same demanding location so you can identify what actually helps.
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Which graphics settings matter most?
The settings with the broadest effect on an open-world simulation are the ones that determine how many objects are drawn, how far away they remain detailed, and how expensive lighting calculations become. Start with these categories rather than immediately dropping every option to Low.
| Setting | What it changes | When to test lowering it | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shadows | Shadow resolution, filtering, and sometimes the distance at which shadows are rendered | GPU-limited scenes with many lights, buildings, or vehicles | Flatter or less detailed shadows near the camera |
| View distance / level of detail | How much distant scenery is visible at higher detail | When distant geometry or draw calls are overwhelming the GPU | More pop-in and less detailed landmarks |
| Foliage / ground cover | Vegetation density, detail, and visible range | Forests, fields, parks, and other vegetation-heavy locations | Sparser scenery and more obvious level-of-detail transitions |
| Reflections | Reflected scenery on water, glass, wet roads, and polished surfaces | When reflective surfaces dominate a scene and the GPU is busy | Less accurate or lower-resolution reflections |
| Global illumination | Indirect light bouncing between surfaces | GPU-bound interiors, tunnels, or scenes with complex lighting | Less convincing light and darker or flatter areas |
| Visual effects / post-processing | Effects such as explosions, particles, bloom, depth of field, and other title-specific processing | Heavy weather, traffic effects, particles, or post-processing loads | Reduced effects or a different image “look” |
| Texture quality | Surface detail stored in graphics memory | Stutter, texture streaming problems, or a VRAM warning | Blurrier surfaces, especially when viewed close up |
| Upscaling | Renders internally below output resolution and reconstructs the image | When you need more GPU performance after conventional settings are balanced | Possible softness, shimmering, or reconstruction artifacts |
Obsidian’s performance guidance identifies shadows, view distance, foliage, reflections, global illumination, and effects as useful candidates when diagnosing slow performance. Guides for Train Sim World and Halo describe the same broad pattern: higher distance and foliage levels preserve detail farther from the camera, while demanding more rendering work.
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How to tell whether the GPU or CPU is the limit
Graphics options primarily reduce GPU work. They cannot remove a simulation’s need to calculate traffic, physics, artificial intelligence, streaming, or world-state updates on the processor. Before making a large number of changes, establish which component is limiting the frame rate.
Signs of a GPU-bound scene
- GPU usage stays near full capacity while one or more CPU cores are not saturated.
- Lowering resolution or enabling a lower upscaling quality mode produces a measurable frame-rate increase.
- Reducing shadows, reflections, lighting, or effects improves performance in the same location.
Signs of a CPU-bound scene
- Frame rate falls in busy hubs, dense traffic, or crowds even after GPU-heavy options are reduced.
- One or a few CPU cores are heavily loaded while overall GPU usage is well below its limit.
- Changing resolution, textures, or shadow quality has little effect on the frame rate.
Dovetail specifically notes that its Train Sim World settings have little impact in a CPU-bound busy hub. That is a game-specific observation, but it illustrates why lowering image quality cannot solve every simulation bottleneck. If the same demanding scene remains slow after several GPU-oriented changes, stop lowering settings blindly and investigate processor load, simulation options, background applications, or a frame-rate cap.
What each major setting does in an open world
Shadows
Shadows are often a strong first adjustment because they combine scene coverage with expensive filtering and sampling. A high setting may increase the detail of nearby shadows and extend them farther into the world. The visual difference is easiest to see under streetlights, beside buildings, or around vehicles and trees.
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View distance and level of detail
View distance controls how far objects remain visible and how long they use detailed models. Higher values make distant landmarks, road furniture, buildings, and terrain easier to read and reduce obvious pop-in. They can also increase the number of objects the engine must submit and shade.
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Preserve this setting when navigation depends on distant signs, mountains, stations, or city silhouettes. If you must reduce it, lower it gradually and test from a high vantage point or a long straight route. A small reduction can relieve a GPU-heavy scene while avoiding the severe pop-in produced by the lowest levels.
Foliage and ground cover
Vegetation options usually control both density and the distance at which detailed plants are displayed. Epic foliage in Train Sim World, for example, reduces level-of-detail pop-in but carries a performance cost. Forests, fields, and landscaped urban areas expose this cost more clearly than an indoor station.
Use a forest edge, large park, or rural field as your test location. If performance improves substantially there, keep higher foliage in urban scenes and lower it only for routes dominated by vegetation, if the game allows separate profiles. Expect more visible transitions between detailed and simplified plants after lowering the option.
Reflections
Reflections can render updated images of the world on water, windows, mirrors, wet pavement, or polished floors. Some games use screen-space methods; others combine probes or ray-traced techniques. Because the menu label can hide different implementations, compare a location containing the surfaces you care about.
When the GPU is the limit, reduce reflections one step and inspect water edges, vehicle mirrors, and wet roads. If those surfaces are rare in your normal play, this is often a better compromise than reducing view distance or foliage, which affects the whole landscape.
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Global illumination
Global illumination approximates light bouncing from one surface to another. It can improve the appearance of interiors, tunnels, covered platforms, and narrow streets, but its cost depends heavily on the game’s lighting system.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteLower it while standing in an interior or shaded urban area, not only in an open field. If the frame rate changes little, the title may be using a relatively inexpensive method or the scene may be CPU-bound. Judge the setting by the improvement in light depth you are willing to give up.
Visual effects and post-processing
“Effects” can group very different features: particles, smoke, weather, explosions, bloom, motion blur, depth of field, and other post-processing. The same label may therefore have a large impact in one game and a small one in another.
Read the game’s tooltip, if available, and test during the effect that causes trouble. Lowering particle or weather quality helps during storms and busy events; disabling motion blur or depth of field changes clarity more than raw simulation speed in some titles. Treat this category as title-specific rather than assuming every effect switch has the same value.
Texture quality and VRAM
Textures primarily consume graphics memory rather than shader time. If your card has enough VRAM, dropping textures may produce little additional frame rate while making surfaces noticeably blurry. If memory is exhausted, however, texture streaming can cause hitching, delayed detail, or warnings.
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Obsidian’s guidance suggests testing lower textures on older cards or cards with less than 12 GB of VRAM. That is game-specific advice, not a universal hardware cutoff: a smaller game may run well with less memory, while a heavily modded or high-resolution title may need more. Change textures separately from shadows and lighting so you can distinguish memory pressure from ordinary GPU load.
A repeatable tuning procedure
- Start from a sensible baseline. Select the game’s Recommended, Balanced, or equivalent preset rather than assuming Ultra is the reference everyone should use. Record the resolution, frame-rate cap, and upscaling mode.
- Choose one representative stress scene. Use the place where you normally see slowdowns: a crowded hub, a forest, a weather event, or a long view across a city. Reproduce the same camera angle and activity for every comparison.
- Check the apparent bottleneck. Use the game’s performance overlay or a hardware monitor if one is available. Note GPU load, CPU core load, frame rate, and frame-time behavior instead of relying only on average FPS.
- Adjust one setting. For a GPU-bound scene, test shadows, foliage, view distance, reflections, global illumination, and effects in that order only as a starting sequence. The best order for your game may differ.
- Measure the result. Allow the scene to settle after each change, then compare the same route or camera movement. Keep the change only if the improvement is meaningful and the visual compromise is acceptable.
- Test textures separately. If the game reports VRAM pressure or shows streaming stutter, lower texture quality one level and repeat the memory-heavy scene.
- Try upscaling after conventional settings. Compare each supported quality mode for both frame time and image stability. A higher-quality mode may look sharper but deliver less performance; a faster mode may introduce softness or shimmering.
- Stop when the bottleneck changes. Once GPU usage falls but the frame rate remains limited by the CPU, further image-quality reductions are unlikely to help. Restore settings that improve the world’s readability.
Upscaling: a resolution trade-off, not a magic preset
Upscaling modes set the game’s internal render resolution and reconstruct the output image. Dovetail’s settings guide describes its quality modes in those terms. A lower internal resolution can increase GPU headroom, but the visible result depends on motion, foliage, fine wires, signage, and the reconstruction method used by that game.
Evaluate upscaling while driving or moving through the world, not only in a static screenshot. Look for flickering vegetation, unstable fences, smeared text, and shimmering power lines. If the game offers a native-resolution option, keep it as your clarity reference. No fixed percentage gain applies across games or hardware, so use the measured frame-time change on your own system.
A concrete example: Train Sim World
Dovetail’s Train Sim World Graphical Settings Guide recommends an optimized combination for PCs that meet or exceed the game’s recommended requirements: High foliage, Medium shadows, Ultra textures, and Quality-mode upscaling. The guide reports around an 11% performance increase compared with Ultra in GPU-bound scenes.
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Choosing compromises without making the world look empty
When two settings deliver similar performance gains, choose the one whose visual loss is least important to how you play. A driver who relies on distant landmarks may prefer lower reflections to lower view distance. A player who spends most of the time in cities may keep foliage high and reduce shadows. Someone sensitive to image softness may keep native resolution and lower effects instead of using aggressive upscaling.
- Prioritize readability: preserve view distance when distant signs, terrain, or landmarks guide navigation.
- Prioritize atmosphere: preserve shadows and global illumination when light direction and interiors define the experience.
- Prioritize smooth traversal: reduce foliage or effects in the scenes where vegetation, weather, or particles create spikes.
- Prioritize surface detail: keep textures high only while VRAM remains comfortable and streaming is stable.
- Prioritize image clarity: use the highest upscaling quality that meets your frame-time target, or stay native if reconstruction artifacts are distracting.
Troubleshooting common results
“I lowered everything, but FPS barely changed.”
Check for a CPU-bound scene, a frame-rate cap, or synchronization setting. Busy hubs and traffic-heavy areas can remain limited by simulation work even when the GPU has unused capacity. Restore image quality, then investigate processor load and simulation-specific options.
“Lowering textures caused stutter to continue.”
The problem may not be VRAM. Streaming from storage, shader compilation, CPU scheduling, or a background process can also cause hitching. Compare a repeatable route and watch whether the issue appears when new scenery streams in rather than when the camera renders a complex view.
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“The distant world looks empty after lowering view distance.”
Raise view distance one step and reduce a different GPU-heavy option, such as reflections or effects. Distance settings directly control landmarks and pop-in, so they are often more noticeable than a moderate reduction in lighting quality.
“Upscaling gives more FPS but looks unstable.”
Move up one quality mode, disable unnecessary sharpening, or use native resolution with a lower shadow, foliage, or effects setting. Inspect thin geometry and moving vegetation before deciding that the extra frame rate is worth the artifacts.
Quick Recap
Practical checklist before you save a preset
- Tested in the same demanding location and camera path.
- Changed one option at a time and recorded the frame-time result.
- Confirmed whether the scene was GPU- or CPU-limited.
- Checked VRAM behavior before lowering textures.
- Inspected distant pop-in after changing view distance or foliage.
- Checked reflections, lighting, and effects in scenes where they are actually visible.
- Compared upscaling modes while moving, reading signs, and viewing foliage.
- Recorded the game version, resolution, hardware, and preset so the result remains reproducible after updates.
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