I’m a privileged gamer. As a hardware reviewer, over the years I’ve been sent top-tier CPUs and graphics cards, letting me bounce from one flagship to the next. That’s made me lazy at game settings. I often just set the game at whatever the maximum “Ultra” setting is and get on with playing. But by doing so, I’ve just been playing into the marketing hype – and leaving a lot of performance on the table, it turns out.
Most games don’t actually need to be played at Ultra settings to look good. They don’t even need it to look great. The latest upscaling technologies are fantastically good at emulating higher resolutions, and often the difference between Ultra and High settings isn’t something I even really notice if pushed to look.
As an experiment, I turned down the settings in a bunch of great-looking games to see how much difference it really makes. Not only did I find it hard to spot any obvious visual difference in most of the games I tested, but performance went up dramatically and the smoother framerates were well worth the minimal sacrifice.
I’ve been able to ignore graphics settings for so long due to a mix of low-demand game selection and high-end hardware. As I said, my current system is powerful, but I also mostly play older sim games and lighter indies.
With an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and PowerColor Red Devil RX 7900 XTX, I have one of the fastest gaming CPUs on the market and the fastest graphics card AMD has ever made. It’s not quite an RTX 5080 or RTX 5090, so it’s not really designed with Ultra Path Tracing in mind, but it’s not a million miles away either. It’s more than capable of running almost any game at Ultra settings, at 4K, and sometimes even with ray tracing enabled.
That’s especially true once you throw in FSR upscaling and a little frame generation to smooth things out.
My plan for this test is to run a bunch of games at their very highest settings that are functionally playable – at least 30 FPS – with upscaling at Quality or native, without frame generation, and grab a few example screenshots of it in action. Then do so again at maxed out settings but with Balanced upscaling, and then a final test with everything turned down just one notch. So High, if Ultra is the top option, Medium if High is the best, etc.
Let’s jump in with what is arguably still one of the best looking games ever made, Cyberpunk 2077. If there’s one game that is guaranteed to bring my 7900XTX to its knees, it’s this one.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/ultra-graphics-settings-are-a-scam-why-high-is-good-enough-if-not-better-for-most-players
