Turn up textures and texture filtering to Ultra though 😉

The best graphics setting has ALWAYS been "Custom"

A wise man once said, "Ultra is for screenshots!, High is for gaming." -TD

Doom Eternal showing what a properly optimized game looks like.

I feel like the real take home from this is: Learn how to use custom settings effectively.

No, you have to buy the most expensive videocard. Buy at least 2. The more you buy, the more you save. It just works.

As a small-time indie dev, I'm kinda glad you made this video. When I've implemented graphical settings, I've always thought to myself that I might as well let people set the render scale to 16x native if they want to, or render shadows at 16x normal resolution if they want to. It's literally zero skin off my back to just increase the max value of the slider, and I imagine many of the "ultra" settings come from a similar mindset. However, I've started noticing people who just max out everything without second thought, even though the maxima are just ridiculous settings, and then they come and complain that it doesn't perform well, so your point of "complaining about poor optimization at ultra settings" really hit home with me. It pains me, but I've started thinking that I probably have to start limit the maximum settings to "reasonable" values just to keep people from harming themselves.

I get the impression that the highest modes are basically 'optimizations off' and it's really meant for 'forward compatibility', or in other words, use those settings in the future when revisiting the game and your new GPU can run it at such a high frame rate that it doesn't matter.

I usually set everything on ultra, then I turn off all the options I hate with passion (motion blur, chromatic aberration etc.) If I'm not satisfied with my FPS, I configure each option individually, to see how much they change in terms of graphics quality and performance.

I'm not a big fan of Tech Deals but he said it well: "high is for gaming, ultra is for screenshots".

In the days of yore, "Ultra" was a means for the developer to just push boundries, to see how far they could take it. Or so it seems when you look at older titles. But High could sometimes nearly double the framerate you got. hesedays, when you look at Ubisoft, they clearly label they intent for you to play at "High" settings, they always mention this on their spec sheet for games. In generall I have always felt games are optimized around the "High" preset, not Ultra. Ultra feels like a "Do waht you can without breaking it" kind of setting for developers.

I prefer going through each setting individually untill I find the perfect mix of quality and performance. It does take a bit more time but you only have to do it once per game so it's not too bad. I do it like this because not every single setting has the same impact on performance. For example anisotropic filtering won't be maxed out if I use a lower preset than ultra but 16x anisotropic filtering pretty much doesn't lower the performance while making the game look better. Also I usually don't like motion blur and selecting some preset often turns on the motion blur. One of many reasons why I prefer PC gaming is because I can play around with settings untill it's exactly how I like it.

I really needed to hear this. I find that I’ve started to expect too much from games. The best gaming time of my life was being a kid playing MKII and Altered Beast on my Sega Mega Drive, yet as an adult I want to play at 1440P Ultra settings and I feel let down if it’s not performing good. As my mum used to say “don’t let perfection be the enemy of good”. Really appreciate this perspective.

Its amazing how invisible the difference ultra and high is in some games. Yet they even use like more than twice the VRAM, too.

Finally someone is digging into this ultra madness :) Good point on the "if it runs poorly on ultra, it's poorly optimized" attitude. Also, I would like to see MORE optimized settings videos, it's very useful to know which settings have big performance impact for each individual game. It's not always the same and dependent on the actual implementation.

Good video on that topic. When I start to play a new game I usually fire up Afterburner+RTSS OSD and then I check the performance impact of individual settings vs. their optical impact to the game. I usually lower the settings that impact the GPU load a lot without giving me a noticeable visual benefit, even if my GPU is not running at full load.

Some differences, even if there are plenty on ultra, dont often look objectively *better* . They just look different. Medium and high graphics are sufficient, and really it is only the *low* textures that look objectively bad due to low poly , pixelated look.

Someone used to post this about MSFS 2020: 4 graphics settings Low = Low Medium = Medium High = Medium with less FPS Ultra = Medium with least FPS

Awesome testing Tim, it's great you took the time and effort to educate us about game settings (getting the idea across that the highest possible settings aren't the only ones to consider is particularly important, I think). One little nit-pick - I'm not sure turning down settings creates less stress for your hardware, since you'll see a commensurate increase in frame rate to go with the lower settings. I would think the stress, and relative power draw, would be about the same. This kind of claim shouldn't be made without specific testing (like, monitoring GPU temps and power draw). But, like I said, it's a nit-pick to an otherwise stellar piece. Thanks!

Great video showcasing the minor differences between the bleed edge and higher settings! I think I'm still going to use HUB's optimized settings, when they come out, with my games so I can squeeze out the best performance and quality balance! For the games that don't get a HUB optimized video, I definitely just be using High settings!

I’d love to see a blind test with users that claim that Ultra is the only setting they’ll accept.

This tests should have even more impact on slower GPUs and GPUs with limited VRAM. Great content! Cheers!

I 500% agree. in most games, especially fast paced/competitive multiplayers i run medium with custom settings for details. i rather the game run smoothly that look pretty. if im playing a slow/med paced or single player then ill run ultra so hard it'll make you cry how beautiful a game can be. (who knew sims on maxed settings could bring a room of adults to tears...)

This video is gold!!! Amazing & very relative content!!! I am stuck with a 1660S and for the coming years we need to learn how to play around with settings to get the best eye candy for our old hardware!!!

The ultra settings are for when you buy a new gpu and you are all enthusiastic about it and crank everything to the max. After a while the honeymoon ends and rationality kicks in, so you lower them to high for more fps or for the same fps with less power consumption and noise. Personally I prefer optimized settings as sometimes the high preset drops some settings such as anisotropic filtering to x8 which is dumb as x16 has hardly any performance impact.

I used the Hardware unboxed advised BF5 optimal settings and went up 25 fps and I don't really see a difference Hope you guys will do another optimization of settings for games soon

Man thank for you putting this video out! I have been saying this for years and am always so annoyed with the obsession for ultra settings for PC enthusiasts. It probably won't change the culture for most, but it at least will get the conversation started and some people thinking :)

A lot of the time Ultra will bump up things like reflection probe cubemap projections up to 4k which is a lot heavier to render but is often practically unnoticeable, especially depending on the object that's reflective.

Anyone who has ever owned a potato PC will have learnt this the hard way already! This is a brilliant video. A high-end PC with a high resolution monitor with a high refresh rate, on 'high' settings is the best experience in recent games.

IMO, most games' medium setting already look more than good enough for me and I'm perfectly fine re-visiting games 4-6 years later if I liked them enough to re-play them at higher details after a GPU upgrade.

Great video! You should include No Man's Sky in your testing. The differences between presets in that one are easily perceptible and quantifiable. Also, stronger emphasis on VRAM and GPU temperatures would be much appreciated. FPS and texture fidelity are no longer the most important criteria in an ecosystem where the majority of GPUs are old and pretty burned from usage.

This type of content is exactly why I stay with this channel. Thanks!

Me, that runs every game on lowest settings: "Interesting..."

I think they do have their use especially for developers to flex an engines capabilities but I also think that we shouldn't bundle multiple aspects into 1 "Ultra" settings. Shadows for example can be broken down to draw distance, contact hardening, resolution, filtering, instead of just "Ultra". This would give players more room to configure instead of having to sacrifice certain aspects of shadows by dropping from just ultra to high. I've seen so many cases where dropping shadows from just ultra to high takes away soft shadows and dramatically decreases the filtering quality. This goes to other settings as well like reflections, lighting, post processing etc

I think it depends on what hardware you have. I usually don't buy the flagship cards so turning down the settings to get good smooth frame rates is normal for me, I like to keep the framerates at 90 or higher if possible.

I'd like to see the Medium setting analysis, and more side-by-side images etc. Great video, thanks!

I wish games would allow downloading with choices of which graphics settings to download so that people who are playing on low, for instance, won’t have to store extremely high quality textures and models so they can save space too

I've almost always steered away from Ultra details as the difference between this setting and High is minimal.

Good advice here, but I still think individual optimisation videos are a godsend. Particularly if you have a mid range system that's right on the cusp of being able to handle a higher preset with all the nice shadows and reflections, but not quite consistent enough to use day to day. Someone taking the time going through each of of the customisation options to gauge the visual benefit vs the cost of FPS can be very useful.

The foolish man goes for Ultra The intelligent man goes for High But the wise man goes for Custom

This was a good one! Only had PC for a year and I'm just starting to really get a grasp of settings and what not. This seals the deal for high. Thank you!

The only setting I prefer at ultra is textures. Everything else I'm fine with high to medium.

Appreciate if possible research on mode setting vs resolution vs vram usage with example. really like the research that you and the team do! TQ

I'm mostly concerned with average fps, aiming at 120fps in 4K. I usually set everything to max at first, check what the average fps looks like, and if below ~120 I start to tweak settings until I get a stable 120+. This is pretty much always possible, but in some extreme cases I've been known to lower resolution.

reducing quality settings used to be much more noticeable in older games

It's funny, I used to have a difficult time 'settling' on less than max settings especially in single player games because I was afraid I'd miss out on something. While it's still difficult, I force myself to cycle through settings and if there's no appreciable difference I leave it on the lower option.

Ultra settings are when you want to play a game from 2014

My biggest gripe with PC gaming is the potential minefield of graphics settings. The games that offer an immediate preview of a setting change are a god send. This at least gives the user a chance of figuring out what each setting actually does in game rather than having to try and remember what the visuals looked like before changing a setting. And that's if the game even allows the setting to change without a restart.

Low settings used to look hideous, but nowadays the graphics have gotten so good that there is not that much difference between the settings anymore.

Excellent video. My advice for cases where you need to turn down even more settings , shadows is very good choice to lower as making them less sharp and detailed makes them look more natural in most games ( not all as it depends on implementation).

Games should give you the option to select the target FPS. All effects should be automatically tuned to maintain that FPS.

This is definitely good advice for 4k gaming or gaming on low end hardware. I think a lot of gamers crank it and sit there with low FPS and choppy gameplay. I would make one other point: never decrease the texture resolution if you have enough VRAM. For me I always gotta hit that FPS sweet spot as part of the tweaking process but I really like to max out all the settings that I can. Some games like RDR2 and Cyberpunk I can really see the effect of the individual settings and checking them out is part of the fun.

5:00 Me playing that game at 4K ultra high: 👀

Videos like this and Digital Foundry optimized settings are great. It's crazy how many settings barely change things visually up to medium or low, but you get huge performance boosts.

As a game developer i spend 90% of my time optimising medium and high settings as those are the settings that I actually want players to use. Ultra settings are just there so that players can turn things uo to max if they have the hardware to support it. When i get feedback saying my game runs and is "unoptimised" it's always from someone who insists on running ultra settings despite them basically looking the same as high settings but for half the fps.

This video needs to be included in every YTubers build guide. For enternity. Well done.

I love this channel. It has restored my passion for pc hardware. Keep up the great work!

"they hated him because he spoke the truth"

sort of suspected this - thanks for clarification on this issue: good to know

The gaming community needed this. Keep up the good work. We'd love to see more episodes on this topic.

I feel ultrasettings is a more future option when you play a game 3-5+ years from now. And its good for that, I reckon.

Been using HWU Optimized settings on RDR2 for ages. Then came the DLSS implementation, now I hit 80-100 fps playing at 4K.

I still miss those settings videos you used to do but this was great.

What’s your view on a calendar panel for flight sim only where pixel response time seems to be less important. I’m looking at this matter instead of spending three times as much for one of those Dell or LG nano IP panels OPS panels

That said I still do appreciate optimization videos, not all games indicate performance impact of individual settings.

I wish more games had a 'target fps' setting, rather than detail presets.

What’s your view on a va panel for flight sim only where pixel response time seems to be less important. I’m looking at this monitor instead of spending three times as much for one of those Dell or LG nano IOS panels

Excellent video, like the RDR2 series!. I usually start on Ultra, then try High. Finally I turn up some settings to Ultra, leave others on HIgh and sometimes even lower one or two settings to medium. It really depends on the game. But yeah usually is High + a few on Ultra. on newest games.

Days Gone being the outlier seems to really be due to SSGI (which allows nicer shadowing & bounce lighting within screenspace), you could likely still step down on shadow resolution & such. So yeah, don't stick to presets, custom settings all the way!

I went with a 3060 ti for this reason actually. I play on high settings on nearly all games and don't plan on going 4k any time soon so it just made sense to get the least expensive current gen card and skip next gen then hope the 5070 is a beast lol. This gen has been nuts.

What I like about you guys is that a personal rant takes the form of organization, clarity, and graphs of relevant examples. Very nice.

What a well done and interesting video. This will make me rethink settings.

At this point, medium shadows and everything at high with anti aliasing to low or off is the best way to deal with performance

Ultra low is the way to go.

Awesome Review. I'm looking at buying a Samsung 28 inch G70A and run an RTX 2080 (Not Super or Ti). Will I have to drop my settings Way down to enjoy a fun, playable experience? Thanks!

Still on a ROG Strix RX480 (basically a 580 given the factory overclocks) until the GPU prices come back down to Earth. I always try to aim for 60 FPS, but tolerate 50 FPS as long as the frame pacing is consistent enough to not suffer from juddering. Mostly get away with very high for 1080p. Your game tuning guides are very helpful in nailing down the settings. Keep up the good work! Also hoping that the AMD FSR becomes more common in new titles and I'll take some more free performance from that.

And all of a sudden, I find a video that makes me feel right in doing what I do. Thanks Tim!

5:45 yes, the High mode gives me always clarity during gaming😀

Another great video. I am glad to hear the mention of a CPU bottleneck at the end of the video, this is a very important point to make. In a future video, I would love to see some tests where there is an intentional CPU bottleneck, with a reasonable mid-tier or low-end GPU like the GTX 16-Series or something similar that a budget oriented gamer may have in their system. I personally have an AMD Ryzen 3 1200 (14nm - not the 12nm AF refresh.) and a GTX 1050 Ti. In a lot of games, my CPU is actually the biggest bottleneck, and turning my settings down can create horrible stuttering and bad performance, where as turning my settings up to maximum - especially visual settings that utilise the GPU, can greatly improve performance and often fix the stuttering. I typically always try to make as much of a GPU bottleneck as possible. It usually helps, even if it does not give me a higher FPS it can fix the mentioned stuttering in most cases. Do note, my old Motherboard was a Gigabyte A320M-S2H (Revision.1). So my CPU was running at stock. I recently upgraded a few months ago to an Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming II, and my CPU is now running at 3.7Ghz OC. Just this small OC has massively improved a lot of the stuttering I previously experienced in a lot of games, and I no longer need to push the GPU so hard to get a playable experience - although - it would still be nice to see all of these things tested in a future video, if you could. Thanks. Keep up the amazing work!

Thanks for this video was helpful just curious could you check what's the percent difference in Battlefield 2042 ultra to high?

It's a cool video, but most of the time presets don't actually set up everything on ultra, I mean even "ultra" presets have some settings on high and you can crank it up to real ultra manually, so you'll get some more noticeable differences in quality.

This didn't age very well with Steve's going on full bore on Ultra proving 8 GB of VRAM is not enough.

That was a really good informational video man!! 👍🏻🙂 Thanks.

Still some of the most well thought out hardware content on the internet. Thank you guys. Another great video.

I just make sure that I’m playing at my preferred FPS (120 FPS). As long at its stable, I put it at ultra if I can.

Thanks Tim! it would have been very interesting tho to run the test also with an older GPU like a 2060/Vega or something similar, so even people with last-gen GPUs could see that they can still run most of the games that they want to play.

In my experience the general "Rule of Thumb" for game grafics settings is: Low: If you can´t get the game running or you are an max FramesPerSecond fetishist. Medium: "Time to Time" gamer or low bugged gamer who wants to enjoy the game in a comfortable state. High: Full Time, hobbiest gamer that wants to enjoy the game in all its glory. Very High/Ultra/etc.: Enthusiasts that want to enjoy the full pontential of the games they play and/or the game is 5 Years old and your midrange GPU is getting bored on high settings.

I always set games to max settings and work back as needed. If I can get 60fps I'm happy and will only lower settings if it dips below that. 1080ti/10600k here @1080p single or 5760x1080 triples for sim racing.

Tim would you rate your hair as Medium, High or Ultra quality? It looks like Hairworks is set to Ultra for it, I think you should look at turning it down.

Ultra on Cyberpunk and many other games is just 1.5 myopia mode, things close are still the same, things far away or on the side are blurry, and that's it.

yepp, that's why i always tweak settings manually, never skimp on texture filtering and ambient occlusion but depth of field, motion blur and antialiasing can go i like my pixels jagged and sharp

The thing with "Ultra" settings is that it's a lot like a button labeled "do not press." You have to press it.

Ultra settings can be worth it though when your graphics card is powerful enough to run ultra settings at native resolution while your monitor has low refresh rate and thus can't take advantage of the higher FPS from high settings without screen tearing.

If I have to hold a magnifying glass up to my monitor to see the difference, I probably don’t need those settings.

it really depends on game. And on your hardware. And other stuff. But also it's funny because I feel its mostly because of testing channels, like yours, that (almost) always tests on max settings that set the standard that its needed/expected to play on

Hello, im playing Tetris since the early nineties at the moment im playing on ultra.. so you think i could gain any FPS when i use the high settings or maybe even lower? My pc is a 13900k 32gb and RTX2080. Thanks in advance.

not to mention sure you may notice the changes when switching back and fourth looking for differences, but when in the action of the game, last thing you are worried about is reflections in the puddle on the ground

Fantastic video. Game developers should really encourage people to use High settings. Maybe add a prompt for ultra that says: "Sacrifice lower framerate for minor visual improvement,". Really. Maybe benchmarks should also start to use high instead of ultra.

Great video! You should do high vs medium and maybe medium vs low

i very agree with you. its my opinion also. its not so much different worth the trouble. (even if i can do it) i am not watch so stunning image who make me regret playing just at high or very high.