What’s actually slowing this PC down?
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For a quick FPS boost, test render resolution or render scale first, then ray tracing, demanding anti-aliasing, shadows, and volumetric effects. Those options can add substantial GPU work, but there is no universal ranking: the game, hardware, resolution, and current bottleneck all matter. Change one setting at a time in a repeatable scene to find what actually helps on your PC.
Which settings should you lower first?
Use the following as a practical testing order, not a guaranteed ranking. A setting can have little effect if your system is limited elsewhere, and its cost depends on the game’s implementation.
- Render resolution or render scale: Reduce the number of pixels the GPU renders. Try a modest scale reduction before lowering your display resolution. The image may look softer or less detailed. Some games use upscaling to reconstruct a higher-resolution output; availability and results depend on the game and hardware. NVIDIA’s Control guide describes render scaling and DLSS options that can leave the interface at native resolution.
- Ray tracing and advanced lighting: Reduce or disable ray-traced reflections, shadows, or global illumination when you are GPU-limited. These features can be costly, but their impact varies by title and effect.
- Anti-aliasing (AA): Try a less demanding AA mode before turning edge smoothing off. Supersampling and some hardware AA approaches may cost more than post-process methods, but image sharpness, ghosting, and edge quality differ. “Anti-aliasing” does not have one predictable FPS cost.
- Shadows and ambient occlusion: Compare lower shadow resolution, distance, or contact-shadow quality, and test ambient occlusion separately. Their cost and visual importance depend on the scene and game.
- Volumetric effects: Lower volumetric lighting, fog, clouds, or light shafts if the game offers separate controls. Detailed implementations can be demanding.
- Textures, filtering, and level of detail: Lower texture resolution if video memory (VRAM) is under pressure; texture quality is not automatically the best first setting to reduce. Test filtering, tessellation, and object detail in the game rather than assuming their costs from their names.
What published examples show—and what they do not
Vendor guidance illustrates why a single cross-game ranking would be misleading. NVIDIA’s 2019 Control guide reports that SSAO costs 4–5 FPS with ray tracing disabled and about 1–3 FPS with it enabled in that game. The same guide describes volumetric-lighting quality, resolution, and sample counts as reducing frame rate by as much as 11 FPS. These are Control-specific measurements, not estimates for another game or PC.
In its GTA V graphics guide, NVIDIA says hardware anti-aliasing can have considerable performance and memory costs and that high-resolution shadows can have a relatively large impact. AMD’s Radeon graphics settings documentation identifies supersampling as the highest-FPS-impact AA mode among the driver options it discusses, while describing texture filtering quality as having a small performance impact. These sources cover different games and settings; they do not establish a universal ordering or comparable benchmark.
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A 2025 study in the Journal of Computer Sciences Institute reported a performance drop of several tens of percent for SMAA4x versus AA disabled in Shadow of the Tomb Raider on the mid-range configurations it tested. That result applies to those test cases, not all AA modes or systems.
Does lowering texture quality improve FPS?
It can help when the game’s texture use exceeds available VRAM, but texture resolution is not always a major cause of low average FPS. VRAM pressure may instead show up as stuttering, pauses, or crashes. Texture filtering is a separate control: AMD describes the performance impact of its documented texture-filtering-quality setting as small, and says anisotropic filtering can improve clarity on angled or distant surfaces at a small performance cost.
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If you lower textures and the stutters continue, check VRAM use and other likely limits instead of assuming that every texture-related option has the same effect. Keep image quality in mind: lowering resolution and texture detail can make different parts of the image look worse.
How to identify your actual bottleneck
- Record a baseline. Note the game, display resolution, graphics card, processor, and FPS in a demanding, repeatable scene. Use the same route or built-in benchmark for each comparison.
- Check likely constraints. Look for consistently high GPU usage, CPU limits, frame caps, VRAM pressure, and thermal or power limits. If reducing render resolution barely changes FPS, the GPU may not be the only limit; that clue alone is not conclusive.
- Change one setting at a time. Let the scene settle, repeat the same test, and record average FPS plus frame-time lows or percentiles if available. One-at-a-time changes make it easier to identify which trade-off produced a result.
- Judge the scene you play. A built-in test can provide a repeatable starting point, but it may not include the game’s hardest moments. NVIDIA’s GTA V guide specifically warns that its benchmark misses some demanding gameplay. Retest in a busy area or encounter you actually play.
- Keep worthwhile changes. Compare the measured FPS or frame-time improvement with the visual loss. Restore settings that make little difference or reduce image quality more than you want.
AMD’s Game Advisor documentation describes measuring gameplay, reporting average FPS and 95th-percentile frame time, and recommending changes such as AA, ambient occlusion, render scale, or display resolution. The page lists compatibility limitations, so check whether the feature is available for your current AMD Software version and game.
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When graphics changes do not raise FPS
If repeated tests show little change, investigate whether the game is CPU-limited, capped by a frame-rate setting, constrained by VRAM, or affected by thermal, power, or game-specific issues. In NVIDIA’s 2019 tested Control setup, performance reached a CPU bottleneck at around 80 FPS at 1920×1080. That is an example from one configuration, not a general CPU limit or a target to expect in modern games.
A graphics-card upgrade is relevant when your measurements point to a GPU limit and you want more rendering headroom. If you are considering one, the useful details are your budget, target resolution and frame rate, current graphics card, and the games you play; settings tests alone do not establish a particular model recommendation.
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