What's the graphic setting you are (not) willing to sacrifice?

Back in the day, I used to have no compromises: Just the idea of lowering one thing from "Ultra" to "Very High" would feel like a betrayal to what was possible, so an upgrade was always on the table. But at some point I realized there were other things I could spend my money on in life other than a video card with a terrible price/performance ratio. So there are certain things I'm willing to sacrifice to play a recent game and certain things I am not.

My most likely sacrifice: Any of those fancy Ambient Occlusion methods above SSAO, especially the hardware-based ones, is the first thing I lower if I have to lower anything, because I find nothing eats up your framerate more than a lot of them, and I find the differences are usually so subtle I only notice them in screenshot comparisons online, not when I'm playing.

My least likely sacrifice: Anti-Aliasing. I can play a game where the shadows aren't great or the draw distance could be better, even if it annoys me a bit. Hell, in single player games, I'm even willing to lower my framerate. But nothing is more distracting to me than those weird jagged edges and strange shimmering effect. Conversely, playing a game that is either old enough or low-polygon enough to run at 4K on my TV or using supersampling on my monitor is a treat because it gets real close to making me feel like I'm playing an interactive animated film rather than a pixellated video game.

I haven't owned a super duper deluxe high-end rig since I built one roundabout 15 years ago. Even back then, graphics weren't that big a deal over performance for me. I'm usually playing older games anyway nowadays and all of them look "good enough." Ten minutes into a game I usually forget about the graphics anyway.

My most likely sacrifice: Anything that will keep the game running smoothly at 'Medium' or above settings. I have no qualms of knocking down (or even disabling) filtering such as AA and AF. Also any extra (especially new or experimental) and unnecessary graphic enhancements - like hair physics I'll usually disable.

This is kind of the inverse, but I also only recently learned that motion-blur is often used as trick to hide rougher graphics, distant lower-res textures, etc. I usually disable motion-blur because I like a game to look sharper and the blur sometimes even gives me vertigo.

My least likely sacrifice: V-sync, V-sync, V-sync. Monitor tearing is the worst. I consider the game broken for me if I have to disable V-sync. Next monitor I buy is a G-Sync one.

Haven't moved out of the no-compromises phase just yet. Maybe the opposite actually.

But, least likely is: anti-aliasing. Jaggies are terrible to watch.

Most likely; for one, just sacrificing frame-rate for higher graphics settings, hasn't really bothered me. But a few months ago I got my first high framerate monitor, so it has changed a bit now.
Other than that, some of the framerate-killing stuff like hair physics, SSAO etc. that often doesn't make any meaningful difference anyway.
And also shadows, depending on the game. They tend to be heavy on the GPU, and often the middle-setting can be perfectly fine.

Also used to always have V-sync on. With the new monitor it's always off.

Sometimes I drop all the settings as low as they go to see if I even care. Usually I don't.

I think I might care for more cinematic narrative games like God of War, Red Dead, Uncharted; but those are all console games where I don't have a lot of options to fiddle with anyway.

I like a good Ambient Occlusion, though. That's the only thing that registers as qualitatively different.

Maybe draw distance on foliage? Seeing the circle of weeds follow your character around can be distracting. If that setting can't go large enough to be unnoticeable I prefer to turn the foliage completely off.

I'm a sucker for foliage as well. I'll turn it up as high as I can go, and will drop other setting down to compensate.

I always play at native resolution (1080p in my case).

I hate aliasing but i've lost track of all the various methods of anti-aliasing available nowadays. I usually pick the one that's good enough without taking my framerate under 30fps.

I appreciated that the new God of War gave an option for performance vs resolution on the PS4 Pro. Switching it to favor frame rate made the combat feel so much better. I didn't notice any visual downgrade in the process.

For me, it's all about a steady framerate. It doesn't need to be a high framerate; it just needs to be a consistent one. I'll happily lock a game at 30fps, even if I need to use outside tools to do it, and then crank up as many settings as I can without impacting that framerate.

This is my first high end PC.

Resolution is paramount - I have a 1440p monitor so I'm running at 1440p come hell or high water.

Then I'll dial down whatever is towards the bottom of the graphics settings to maintain framerate, with the (bad) assumption that the important settings are at the top.

Motion blur gets turned off immediately.

kuddles wrote:

My least likely sacrifice: Anti-Aliasing. I can play a game where the shadows aren't great or the draw distance could be better, even if it annoys me a bit. Hell, in single player games, I'm even willing to lower my framerate. But nothing is more distracting to me than those weird jagged edges and strange shimmering effect. Conversely, playing a game that is either old enough or low-polygon enough to run at 4K on my TV or using supersampling on my monitor is a treat because it gets real close to making me feel like I'm playing an interactive animated film rather than a pixellated video game.

Yup. A million times. Though I don't have a 4K anything, so I don't quite yet have the animated film thing going on.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

Motion blur gets turned off immediately.

Oh gawd yes

Newer games I tend to leave motion blur on. But I still find myself turning off depth of field effects. I don't need a fake camera focus effect, thanks.

A good depth of field option would be 'cut-scenes only'. Is that ever a thing?

beanman101283 wrote:

I'm a sucker for foliage as well. I'll turn it up as high as I can go, and will drop other setting down to compensate.

I'll turn down foliage if it means being able to see as far as possible in an open-world game. I'll also turn down water and shadow effects if it's not part of the overall game experience. (Such as sneaking games that require hiding in shadows.)