2019-06-01_PC_Gamer

Quality

settings

What quality settings actually do will
vary between games. In general, they
raise and lower the complexity of game
assets and effects, but going from ‘low’
to ‘high’ can change a bunch of
variables. Increasing the shadow quality,

for instance, might increase the shadow resolution, enable

soft shadows as well as hard shadows, increase the distance

at which shadows are visible, and so on. It can have a

significant effect on performance.

Texture quality, which lowers and raises the resolution

of textures, tends to affect performance and visual quality

a lot. I benchmarked BioShock Infinite with all settings set

to high, changing only the texture quality, to get a sense of

how expensive it is. That’s an average FPS jump of 11

between ‘very low’ and ‘ultra.’ Not too bad, but the amount

Ambient

occlusion

Ambient lighting exposes every object

in a scene to a uniform light – think of a

sunny day, where even in the shadows, a

certain amount of light is scattered

about. It’s paired with directional light to

create depth, but on its own it looks flat.

Ambient occlusion attempts to

improve the effect by determining

which parts of the scene shouldn’t be

exposed to as much ambient lighting as

others. It doesn’t cast hard shadows like

a directional light source, rather, it

darkens interiors and crevices, adding

soft shading.

Screen space ambient occlusion

(SSAO) is an approximation of ambient

occlusion used in real-time rendering,

and has become commonplace in

games in the past few years – it was

first used in Crysis. Sometimes, it looks

really dumb, like everything has a dark

‘anti-glow’ around it. Other times, it’s

effective in adding depth to a scene. All

major engines support it, and its

success will vary depending on the

game and implementation.

Improvements on SSAO include

HBAO+ and HDAO.

of slow-down will vary system-to-

system. There’s no quick method

for determining the best quality

settings for your system – it’s a case

where they just need to be tested,

and I recommend starting with Nvidia

or AMD’s suggestions, then raising

the quality on textures, lighting, and

shadows and finally checking out

your framerate.

BioShock Infinite texture quality benchmarks

(2x Nvidia GTX Titan SLI)

Very low

Normal

Ultra

Avg.FPS MaxFPS MinFPS

103 295 30

101 180 20

92 178 15

AO off

AO on

QuAlITY

SETTIN g S &

POST-PROCESSINg