Graphics Settings Explained: Textures, Shadows, Reflections, Volumetrics, AO, Anti-Aliasing and Ray Tracing

This guide is for players who open a graphics menu and do not know where to start, and for those who always pick "High" or "Ultra" without knowing which options actually cost performance. We go through the common settings one by one: what each does, whether it mainly costs GPU compute, video memory or CPU time, and the order in which to adjust them.

We will not tell you that a setting "costs X percent". The same option is implemented very differently from engine to engine, and its cost changes with it. What does transfer between games is an understanding of how each setting works and what kind of cost it carries, which lets you make sensible trade-offs anywhere.

Early PC games often offered little more than low or high resolution and a toggle or two for effects. Today's menus can run to dozens of options, a sign of how specialized rendering has become. Fortunately most of them fall into a few families, and once you know those, tuning becomes straightforward.

Three kinds of cost

Each setting's cost falls into one or more of these buckets:

• GPU compute: more work per pixel, such as finer lighting and post-processing. This scales up with resolution.
• Video memory (VRAM): larger or more data, such as high-resolution textures and shadow maps. Harmless while it fits, a cause of stutter when it does not; see how much VRAM you need.
• CPU: more objects and draw calls, such as longer view distances and denser foliage and crowds.

Knowing the cost type matters. If you are CPU-limited, lowering GPU-only settings does almost nothing, and vice versa.

Common settings at a glance

Setting by setting

Resolution and render scale

Before any individual effect, resolution has the biggest influence on GPU load. Output resolution sets how many pixels the final image has, and many games add a "render scale" or "render resolution" option that draws the scene at a lower internal resolution and then scales it up. Lowering render scale directly cuts the pixels computed per frame, which helps a lot, but a simple upscale looks softer.

As a rule, keep the output resolution at your monitor's native resolution; non-native output is rescaled by the display and usually looks blurrier. When you need to lighten the load, use the in-game render scale or an upscaler instead of dropping the output resolution. Upscalers are smarter than a plain stretch: they reuse information from previous frames to rebuild detail, so at the same internal resolution they generally look sharper.

Textures and texture filtering

Texture quality sets the resolution of surface images. It mainly uses VRAM and usually costs little compute, so if you have the VRAM, textures are often the cheapest visual upgrade available. Texture filtering (usually anisotropic filtering) keeps floors and walls sharp at oblique angles and is cheap on modern GPUs.

Shadows

Shadow settings usually control shadow-map resolution, edge softness and how far away objects cast shadows. The top levels often re-render the scene from several viewpoints, which is not cheap, yet the difference between high and maximum is frequently hard to spot in play. Shadows are one of the best settings to drop a notch.

Reflections

Traditional reflections use pre-built environment maps or screen-space reflections, which can only reflect what is already on screen, so reflections can vanish as the camera moves. Ray-traced reflections can show off-screen objects accurately, at a much higher cost.

Volumetric fog and lighting

These effects simulate light passing through fog and dust, creating shafts and atmosphere. They often sample a 3D volume heavily, so the highest settings can be surprisingly expensive. Dropping from maximum to high or medium frequently changes little visually while saving a fair amount of work.

Ambient occlusion

Ambient occlusion darkens corners, crevices and contact points, giving the scene depth. Common methods include screen-space techniques such as SSAO and HBAO, plus ray-traced versions. More samples and higher quality cost more. Turning it off tends to make objects look like they float, so a medium setting is usually worth keeping.

Anti-aliasing

Anti-aliasing removes jagged edges and the shimmer of thin lines, and the methods vary widely:

• Post-process methods such as FXAA and SMAA are cheap but can soften the image and do little for shimmer.
• MSAA works well with older rendering approaches but is expensive and missing from many modern games.
• TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) uses previous frames and handles shimmer well, but can blur or ghost in motion.
• Upscaler-based options such as DLAA, or FSR and XeSS anti-aliasing modes at native resolution, usually look better but need hardware and game support.

Upscalers anti-alias as part of their job too; see our upscaling and frame generation guide.

View distance, LOD and density

These decide how many distant objects are drawn, at what detail, and how dense foliage and crowds are. They add draw calls and simulation work, so they often cost CPU as well as GPU time. If your processor is the bottleneck, start here; see our CPU guide.

Ray tracing

Ray tracing simulates light to compute reflections, shadows, global illumination and ambient occlusion. It looks more natural but is usually the most expensive option of all and also raises VRAM use. Games often split it into sub-options, so you can enable only the one or two that make the biggest difference. Performance depends heavily on GPU architecture and the game's implementation, so judge it in your own play.

Post-processing and the rest

Motion blur, depth of field, film grain, chromatic aberration and vignetting are mostly stylistic and usually cheap, so set them to taste. V-Sync and frame-rate caps are not image quality, but they shape smoothness and latency: on a variable refresh rate monitor, a sensible frame cap usually gives tear-free images with lower latency.

A tuning process that works

1. Start from a preset that roughly matches your hardware class, as a baseline.
2. Find the bottleneck. If GPU usage is maxed, adjust GPU-heavy settings; if not, the CPU may be the limit.
3. Cut expensive, low-impact settings first: volumetrics, shadows and reflections are usual candidates.
4. Keep textures high if VRAM allows; they add a lot of clarity for little compute.
5. Then consider upscaling. It is often a better deal than lowering everything.
6. Change one setting at a time so you know what actually helped.

Common misconceptions

• "Ultra is how the game is meant to look." Many top settings add subtle detail at a real cost.
• "Lower textures, big FPS gain." Textures mostly use VRAM; if it fits, lowering them helps little.
• "A setting costs the same in every game." Engines implement them very differently, so test per game.
• "Anti-aliasing is best turned off." Edges and shimmer can be very distracting; temporal methods and upscalers are often better choices.
• "Lowering everything fixes stutter." If stutter comes from VRAM, storage or shader compilation, lower settings may not help.

How this relates to FrameScope

Official requirements often state which preset each tier targets, such as Low or High. Can I Run It tells you where you sit relative to those tiers, and this guide helps you fine-tune from there to a balance that suits you. See our methodology for how tiers work, and the GPU hierarchy for where your card stands.