Do You Really Need Ultra Settings PC gamers? (DF vid)

Great video by Digital Foundry. Here's the rundown:

• Ultra-use it if you can maxed out everything.
• High-for beauty of the game with high fps.
• Medium-more fps and good looking game.
• Low-console quality level but way more fps.

For me, 60fps is my priority followed by resolution. If I have both of those solid, then I go to other features. So yeah, resolution over ultra settings. Honestly it's not even a matter of opinion. Graphics settings will always look more impressive than resolution. The only time Resolution is more important is when running native otherwise Ultra & high is much more impressive than Medium. 1440p/60fps+ is my prefer setting.

It's a game-to-game thing, because some games may have minimal differences between "High' and "Ultra", based on resolution etc. I'll typically go for 60fps constant, so I would lower settings accordingly. With this comp, i'm gonna upgrade as necessary, rather than let it stagnate like I did my old comp.

General rule is push the settings as far as you can while still hitting your performance target. I usually start at max settings and lower stuff if I am not hitting at least 60fps.

As a principle I've pointed out before (and is shared throughout the internet) the first thing to recognize is that the graphics scale isn't an even distribution of quality; ie each step increases visual quality 25-30% going from Low to Ultra. As a general guidline, the higher the increase, the smaller the gradient. Going from Low to Med is the most noticeable upgrade in graphics, Med to High is also a visual treat. The difference between High and Ultra is there, but not as stark a contrast as between Low and Med.

And it becomes a matter of the gains in visual fidelity to the performance cost, Ultra is that threshold of diminishing returns. In other words, is that little bit of eye candy worth going from 60 fps (or more) down to the 40's or lower? Most would say not. Don't get me wrong, Ultra IS nice to have, so long as your resources can manage it without too much effort. For the average PC gamer it's really more a cherry on top when the cake is already great at High, never the "prerequisite".

In fact here's a couple other videos on the topic, demonstrating games played at Ultra and High, and how much difference can you really discern? Which circles back to the visuals to performance cost equation. Funny thing is too, the first video (Bad Seed Tech) comes from a guy who always advocated "Ultra or bust", and took a challenge from a friend to see what he was really missing out on. He's had a different outlook ever since :)

Another invaluable option; mix and match your settings. You can still enjoy some or a few settings at Ultra and only lowering down to High (or Med) just those settings with the highest performance impact, most notably Shadows and Anti-Aliasing. With the flexibility at your disposal each gamer can tweak their optimal visual and performance experience.

It's one of these things that feeds into the myth of just how "expensive" PC gaming is. IF one concludes that gaming must be at Ultra with high frame rate at all times, then sure it'll cost you king's ransom. But realizing that Ultra isn't a "necessity" subsequently alleviates the myth that one needs the most powerful hardware - and the cost isn't so prohibitive anymore.

This.

With that said, I occasionally will put a game to low or medium settings just to keep myself humble, or to remind myself how far gaming (especially PC gaming) has come.

I remember when TES Oblivion came out. I had a GeForce 6600 GT (great card!) and could barely run it. I modded the hell out of that game, edited .ini files, and so forth. I wanted it to look good.

Now with my humble but capable Geforce 980, I can run just about everything on high (often Ultra), and it's great. I think tech is getting better and better as far as being utilized by games. My video card is like four years old at this point and still kicking ass, this was not true ten or more years ago, if you had a four year old card you'd have been left behind.

I'm playing Star Citizen Alpha on low settings right now with ~35 fps average, game looks incredible. Can't wait until it is optimized.

Gaming is awesome.

Ultra usually means depth of field and motion blur, so no don't need em

I usually put my games on ultra but these are the settings I turn off or as low as possible:

• Motion Blur
• Chromatic Aberration
• Lens flares
• Depth of Field
• Bloom

Depends on the game. I’d rather have 1440p at Ultra than 4K at medium settings. If I can get away with high settings at 4K I’ll choose that over ultra settings at 1440p however.

Frames for me is king though so I try to make tweak my settings where I get 60fps at the maximum fidelity.

The first things I turn off if I'm not hitting my performance target are anti-aliasing and v-sync. I don't mind screen tearing, and aliasing isn't that noticeable at 1440p. I also find that v-sync gives the mouse a laggy/heavy feel, which is really undesirable, especially in first person shooters.

At 30 FPS I could pretty mmuch Ultra everything.

shame my GTX 1080 still comes in 2nd in the HDR department tho

My PC can do ultra with 60fps+ so that's the setting for me. :)

That being said, I am only playing at 1080p resolution.

Same for me !

I never really turn on V-sync as screen tearing isn't really something I notice that badly, plus I heard V-sync just isn't smart to use in online FPS (dunno if true)

AA was the first thing to go when a game doesn't performed smoothly, but most games these days use Temporal AA, which doesn't really take a big hit on your FPS. So I tend to leave it on now.

Shadow quality was also something I would turn down immediately: Most of the times you can't spot the difference between ultra and high settings but it can give you like 5-10 FPS more.

The beauty of PC gaming is in the choice, it never has been anything else.

1440P 90-100 FPS is prefered... ultrawide with 1080 TI makes this difficult on ULTRA settings for alot of games.

@R4gn4r0k: vsync always comes with some input lag on top and judder when you fps drops below refresh, on high fps with high hz monitor the tearing is much less visible, still there tho. This is what makes gsync and freesync(while not quite as good) so good, you basically get rid of both of the downsides of vsync. As for TAA it's not a lot easier on gpu than msaa and 4x is quite taxing already, fxaa is the cheap solution tho with the worst IQ as well

Not only in graphics but the INPUT choices are a massive treat.

To me pc isn’t about max settings but max performance for your hardware

I have been saying this for the longest time but people would argue that the difference between high to ultra is dramatic when its not. I also see this argument for Ultra used when console games run at high resolution and looks good but then the same folks would come in with "Its not running it on Ultra, LMAO LMAO I am an idiot. "

I always turn off Motion Blur, Lens Flares, Chromatic Aberration, Bloom, and V-sync the most and that's my first priority in settings. Depth of Field is okay, depends on the level. Sometimes it just hides the really distant stuff that is low quality anyways. Sometimes it's too aggressive.

I once read that ultra settings weren't optimized for the GPUs and that they don't have that much difference on the visuals, if that's true, then my position would be: put on high and see how it performs, if you have the most high end hardware, then throw it all, that's why you bought it, right?

Options are dumb I guess. Obvious click bait. DF just bored.

It tends to depend on game and resolution. For example, IIRC, using Ultra ROTTR texture resolution above 1080p is largely redundant. It gobbles up VRAM and is largely useless at lower resolutions. You probably get some sense of downscaling, but it would be so minimal I doubt you'd notice.

Motion blur and Depth of Field - My eyes do these things naturally. I don't need a graphical settings to do it for me. I've actually avoided games where they can't be disabled completely. Awful smoke and mirror techniques used to hide stuttering from low fps and deficiencies in back ground details.

Chromatic Abhoration (I'm chucking film grain in here as well) - It beggars belief that anyone would think it's a good idea to have these "effects" in a game. Kill them with fire and extreme prejudice. Again both of these are only used to hide low quality assets.

Another one that annoys me is over use of fog and mist, when they are obviously being used to hide poor LoD levels (I'm going off on a tangent here, so I'll stop :) ).

The absolute worst offender in recent years that uses all these horrible effects to an extreme level was The Order 1886. To think people actually still argue that monstrosity is/was a graphical show case!

I don't really mind Bloom and lens flare as they can be quite natural, as long as they are not over done. Battlefield 3 is a good example of over done lens flare and bloom, where as in The Witcher 3 they actually add to the imagery of the game.

@lundy86_4: textures dont really impact performance tho, its no harm slamming em as high as vram allows, but you wont really get much of a benefit on lower res either, to think people made 8k textures for Skyrim back in the day when barely anyone had above 1080p screens and the engine had issues with with ram already

It's been a while, and I might have tried on my 970, but I remember just notching down. I can't see it drastically affecting my 1070 at 1080p.

Yeah, Skyrim was god-awful before the enhanced release, because of the ram limitation. Didn't they release a 64-bit executable in mod-form or am I cracking up?

@lundy86_4: Special edition is 64b ye, on the original you needed to use enb to get past 2gb vram limit and then there was windows 8 dx9 nvidia drivers having their own cap, so if you wanted really fancy stuff you had to back to win7

Holy shit, I remember modding it years ago, and it was just largely a nightmare.

Most games 'Ultra' is a waste. For RPGs I like 'High' with 'Ultra' textures, 30fps+, and highest res possible. For Shooters 60fps and whatever settings benefit visibility and target acquisition.

Shadows and particles are usually the settings I'm least impacted by, so they're first to drop.

Even more reason to go PC. Customize your experience. No stuck on 30 fps medium and no mods.

Ultra Settings were always meant to be future proof. Crysis 3 is also a special case where there is very little difference between High and Very High settings, but some games do have a pretty noticeable difference when dropping these settings. Some people are also more sensitive to things like framerates and graphics detail settings. I know people who can't tell the difference between the lowest and highest settings, 480p or 1080p, 15fps or 60fps. A huge amount of people aren't knowledgeable enough or just don't care.

Personally, I want the best quality possible, including custom config edits, barring extreme settings like ubersampling or MSAA when you are already running 1440p/4k. These settings just don't seem worth the performance impact for the negligible difference in quality. There's nothing wrong with wanting to max out a game but there are certain settings I am willing to sacrifice just because they impact framerate so much while making little difference in graphics quality.

60fps is no.1 priority for me, I lower the settings to the point where I get consistent frames while maintaining visuals as much as I can.

I start at ultra and turn the settings down to get my frames to a steady 60. Shadows are the first thing I’ll turn down.

I usually start at Ultra, then manually tweak things until I’m around 72 fps.

Chromatic aberration, DoF, and motion blur always get turned off regardless. Hate those effects.

If necessary to hit 70 fps, I may drop from 1440p oversampled to 1080p with AA instead, or drop shadow quality by one notch.

Some settings are naf. I prioritize framerate, so I typically play Ultra with a few random things set to high for stability. For example, TW3 I run at Ultra but turned down foliage draw distance and couple of things to high so my 970 can keep me in a good place.

@BassMan said:

@GioVela2010 said:

At 30 FPS I could pretty mmuch Ultra everything.

shame my GTX 1080 still comes in 2nd in the HDR department tho

Salty Hermit, X1X is king of HDR and Atmos!

If you don't play at Ultra 60fps might as well get the powerful and way cheaper Xbox One X!

I don't upgrade often enough to keep my PC primed for Ultra-everything at 60fps. When push comes to shove, I opt for higher frames and will turn something else down, whether that be AA or some other visual effect (light, smoke, etc.).

When it's a SP game, locked 60fps is usually good enough. MP is a different story - I turn down most everything in order to up frames and response times.

Those have nothing to do with Ultra. They're separate settings which can be enabled/disabled. Ultra mainly pertains to settings of scaling features; textures, shadows, lighting, detail, particles, foliage, AF, etc...

High at 60 fps (and even above) is already an advantage over X1X and any console.

Most games on X1X are using high settings and HDR support. Yeah frame-rate is the clear advantage on PCs but at a higher cost compared to the X1X.

Nothing like online games like Destiny 2 a locked 30 fps. lol.

No

And that's the beauty of PC gaming, I can turn off the shit I don't like and/or optimize for performance

Yeah blame the devs for that. I know for sure that Halo 6 on the X1X is going to be running 60fps.

Yeah at least HDR support on the X is a lot better than on your expensive PCs. lol

This on top of volumetric fog and God rays. Just hinders my view and kills my FPS.

@xhawk27: Are you one of Gio's alts? NyaDC? Exposed Clown?

This.

Then why don't you get one? Still can't afford it?

I always try to get my PC games to run in at least 60 fps, and all settings as high as I can. Usually that's some settings on high and some on ultra. Maybe even some things on medium, like shadows or something else not very noticeable, but demanding. Things like chromatic abberration is just really fucking dumb, so I turn that off as well whenever a developer has been stupid enough to put it in their game.

I don't get the fixation with resolution. I still game at 1080p, and my PC games look amazing. You get such a huge drop in fps when increase the resolution. It's far from worth it over that awesome fps and texture quality and whatnot.

4K is a great way to fool people into buying new TVs and upgraded consoles..

I would of thought that dropping down settings and experimenting with them to achieve your desired frame rate is not only common practice, but common sense?

It's nice, but I'm okay with high or a mixture of settings. A constant 60fps is more important to me.