Games have several graphics settings that you can tweak to get better performance. Most games don't have the exact same menu settings, but several graphics options appear time and time again. Knowing how these game settings affect performance is crucial to helping you set a game to its proper level. Crank the settings too high, and your frame rates will plummet into the single digits. Go too low, and you might end up sacrificing too much image quality for nominal performance gains.
Roll your mouse cursor over the image to see the comparison shot. The first shot has the game running with 4x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic filtering. The second shot has both of those settings cranked to 16x. Both settings look great, but the 4xAA, 4xAF settings will give you a much higher frame rate for a smoother game. Knowing how far to push the settings will help you get the most out of your hardware.
We’ll cover six settings you're likely to encounter in games. You can find the first three settings in just about all games or in the driver settings for your video card. The latter three settings are common but you probably won’t find them in all types of games. In the following pages, we'll examine the performance costs associated with each setting and show you the image quality benefits each setting offers.
Antialiasing
If you look at the edge of building or even along a character model, you'll often see a jagged stair-step pattern that doesn’t look quite natural. Antialiasing smooths out the lines and reduces the amount of crawling, but the process uses a significant amount of graphics power. Even the most powerful video cards can have trouble if the antialiasing is set too high. Depending on the game you're playing, you might see frame rates fall into the single digits if you crank antialiasing all the way up.
Anisotropic Filtering
Anisotropic filtering helps preserve texture detail on angled surfaces. It's also used to clean up mip-maps. Games swap in low quality textures called mipmaps when rendering objects in the distance, and high quality textures for items closer to the player. Anisotropic filtering helps to clean up the picture by bridging the area where these sets of textures meet. Most modern video cards handle this setting without a problem.
Resolution
Increasing the resolution is the easiest way to make a game look better. Higher resolutions add more detail through extra pixels. Processing more pixels also makes the workload for your video card that much harder.
Draw Distance
Increasing the draw distance setting lets you see farther into the game's field of view. Of course, the farther into the distance the card has to render, the more work the video card needs to do. You'll typically find this setting in 3rd person games such as Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2.
Shadows
Good lighting and the shadows (that are created with good lighting) save us from boring rooms full of uniform colors and drab, lifeless objects. Try playing Doom 3 without shadows and you’ll notice that much of the suspense disappears. Enabling shadows usually has a performance cost, but the amount can vary greatly from game to game.
Textures
The detail of a game appears in its textures. Large textures can turn a simple black street with yellow lines into a gritty stretch of asphalt full of cracks and gravel. Some games will automatically use high-resolution textures if it detects a powerful video card with lots of fast memory.
442 Comments
@ dante77_virgil
No way. Try Quadrupling your RAM and new CPU and GPU, then yes you can.
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Newegg ships ONLY to the us. USA FTW
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airwalk-
There are there are no sale tax and shipping on most stuffs are free for newegg in the US. Some US States and our government charge income tax, but not stores.
I don't know about international policy. Maybe buy something cheap first or email customer service.
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i am thinking of buying a new video card from newegg.com but does anyone know the income tax for it coming to the UK?
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i have to upgrade my computer to run the next gen or newest games but it still play some of the game i have that just came out.
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i have a 5500 geforce256Mb 2.4Ghz with 512 mb ram.Will i be able to run the next gen or newest games.
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bennycal-
newegg is the best if you want to buy and compare and tomhardware guide is where you learn about PC components or devices. That how I built my rig. Gamespot used to review PC hardware, but cnet it's mother company does most of that. For consumer stuff, it is cnet. Cnet reviewed some stuff way after they are release.
bigmicki-
that is really bad for top games, more for everyday softwares and web-surfing
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Awesome, very helpful indeed. Thanks guys!
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any one know where to download some updates for card? i have a ATI 256mb and 768mb of RAM
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i have like an intel950 graphics card is that bad?
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i have a core 2 duo cpu, an 8800gtx, and 2 gigs of ram, so none of this really matters to me lol
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You can't play it with 0 Draw distance, it would ruin the game completely!
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Anyone know a good website for building custom pc's or buying pc components?
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OMG Oblivion on 0 draw distance is just horrible! i think im gunna sacrifice the shadows for the draw distance
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yeahh
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Anybody know how can i open the frame rate of command and conquer 3 tiberium wars
and it's a great guide
keep it up GS
ARI
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one of most useful guides from GS - but i don't know why they included x1300, it's such a poor card
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Great guide & very informative. I always have my AA at x4 and AF at 8 @ 1680x1050 on all the latest games. I average 50fps. And I always have Draw Distance on Max, never compromise on this. Most games still look great without any Shadows enabled but its all about person preferrance; I hate games that are too dark anyway.
I wish they did a test with the popular 8800GTS 320Mb as well for a better comparison. A few of my mates have that card so its hard to judge to this guide to decide how high to put the settings when the 8800GTX has 768Mb RAM. High textures manages fine if you have 2Gb RAM & Ultra is for 2Gb+ and two Raptor's in RAID0 for fast texture swapping when GPU mem gets full.
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Wow antialiasing doesn't do as much as I thought it did...
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@Bennycal
Pretty high settings, thats a good computer. Should run most games on high settings (not maxed) for some time now.
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wow...nice!! I can run my GRAW very well now!!!
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Great
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veryyyyy cood
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nice test, thx for that it really helped me!
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It could run those games really well
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Hi all, please could you reply as I need to know ASAP, cheers:
How well would this rig run Sup Com, Oblivion and COH?
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
2 GB RAM
ASUS P5ND2 Motherboard
160GB HD
256MB GeForce 7900 GS PCI - Express.
Cheers.
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Nice feature, keep them coming
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can some on tell me if my comp is running slow or fast? Im getting 5697 on 3dmark06 and my specs are:
-intel core 2 duo e6400 @2.13 ghz
-2 gb ddr2 ram @533 mhz
-nvidia geforce 8600 gts 256 mb (overclocked to 758 mhz core and 2.27 ghz ram)
-forceware 158.43
-250 gb sata ii hard drive
-windows vista home premium
-soundblaster audigy se
-
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this thing isnt comparing gfx cards, just what settings take the highest toll on a system
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Awesome to see the difference between the different settings.
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bulldog7:
thankyou very much I have finally got it down to a possibly corrupted motherboard chipset or BIOS so I'll be trying to get everything back in order I have a KN9 Ultra Abit Mobo the chipset is AMD 570 and seriously if anyone could do any research on this board that would be great!
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Woot!
Im Gonna Disable AA and AF and Shadows!!
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captCaveMan
yes that's a great fps
ARI
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Great guide with real comparisons.
I discovered that Oblivion can greatly SUCK with draw distance turned "off". However is always good to know what all those settings mean. Not a very technical guide but good enough to catch the basic stuff.
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I have a 6800gt and a pentium 4 3ghz, with xp home. i can run HL2 and Counter-Strike: Source and evey game i have, doom ,C.OF.H any game maxed out on all settings, I get about 70fps on HL2 with every thing on full.. can anybody tell me if this is a good fps cos every thing looks and runs great.
Thanks ppl
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grablinux4000: There's no way you should be getting such low performance; I'd be pissed too. There a few possibilities that I can see.
1. One of your components is seriously flawed (RAM, CPU, HDD, GPU, or something else?)
2. Bios is not set right 3. Your harddrive is extremely full (although not sure it would make the kind of difference you're identifying)
4. You have installed and uninstalled many many programs.
The last one is one that few people think of. If you have a lot of programs that you've installed then uninstalled, then wipe that hardrive completely clean and re-install your OS, drivers, etc... Installing and uninstalling programs really drags down your computer's performance. After a complete system re-installation, your comp. should leap in performance.
maybe it's none of those, just a thought
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isfn2009
wow you have no idea what your talking about...
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i have a ATI 1900 and i think the graphics are great with 2 gigs of ram. I never have fram rate problems and never have to download new drivers as u do with invida. Not saying invida isnt a good graphics card but if u look at them there isnt alot of difference between them. The thing that matters the most is whatever graph card u get ur computer has to beable to produce enough power and enough speed to get the best proformance out of the card.
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well there's ATI but not sure that's much of a comparison
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lol tomservo51
So basically, buy a nvidia card.
DUH! I mean what the hell else is out their its kinda lame it means that nvidia can charge whatever the hell they want! just like Apple.... and Microsoft.!
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So basically, buy a nvidia card.
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woooh this forum rocks
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Nice ... very well done, one of the best i've seen for a long time .... good job !
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Great Guide
ARI
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hi and thanx gamespot team for introduction me thease hardware setting.
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Hey I am Ismail from Bangladesh. i am rather a rookie PC gamer. I just want to know more about overclocking your hardwares to optimize performance. I just want a full guide / link for overclocking ,, to optimize my gpu's and cpu's
Thanx in advance
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4600+ with 8800GTS 320mb, 2GB RAM gives me ~7500 3DMarks at stock speeds.
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juxax
dude yeah its all good... I just don't know what the deal is I'm going to wipe my computer later today so.... maybe I'll try that actually even though its an older driver on the CD that came with I guess I could try it Hell anything could work now... I mean could someone post up their 3D Mark 06' score with a similiar rig if not better? Just so I can see just how low my score is...
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