Start with shadows, view distance, foliage or ground cover, reflections, global illumination, and visual effects. These settings can affect large parts of an open-world simulation scene. Lower them one at a time in the same demanding location, then check whether the frame rate actually changes. If it barely moves, the scene may be CPU-bound rather than limited by your graphics card.
There is no universal “best” preset. A forest, a large city, a busy railway station, and a sparsely populated landscape stress different parts of a game engine. The right setting is the one that relieves your current bottleneck without creating distracting pop-in, muddy textures, or image softness.
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Which graphics settings matter most?
The most useful first adjustments are the settings that draw or illuminate many objects over a broad area. Official guidance from Obsidian and Dovetail identifies shadows, view distance, foliage, reflections, global illumination, and visual effects as practical candidates when diagnosing performance. Their cost is title- and scene-dependent, so treat the order below as a testing sequence rather than a universal ranking.
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|---|---|---|
| Shadows | Shadow detail, filtering, and sometimes the distance at which shadows are rendered. | Reduce it when GPU performance is low, then compare a scene with nearby buildings, vehicles, or characters that cast visible shadows. |
| View distance or level of detail | How much distant scenery is shown at higher detail and when objects switch to simpler models. | Keep it high when distant landmarks and world readability matter; lower it only if additional pop-in is acceptable. |
| Foliage or ground cover | Vegetation quantity, detail, and the range over which plants remain visible. | Test in a dense forest, field, or overgrown roadside rather than in an urban location with little vegetation. |
| Reflections | Reflected scenery and lighting on water, glass, polished floors, and vehicles. | Lower it in GPU-limited scenes where reflective surfaces are common, and check whether the visual loss is noticeable during normal play. |
| Global illumination | Light bounce and indirect illumination that make interiors, streets, and outdoor objects react to surrounding light. | Try a lower level when scenes with extensive lighting and geometry are slow; compare both an interior and an exterior if possible. |
| Visual effects or post-processing | Effects such as explosions and other post-processing grouped by the game’s menu. | Lower it during heavy weather, traffic, combat, or particle effects, and read the game’s description because one label may contain several effects. |
| Texture quality | Surface detail and graphics-memory demand. | Test it separately when the game reports memory pressure, stutters, or texture-streaming problems, especially on older cards or cards with less than 12 GB of memory. |
| Upscaling | The internal render resolution and reconstruction mode used to produce the displayed image. | Try the available quality modes, then judge both frame rate and clarity in your own game. |
Shadows: a visible compromise
Shadows are often easy to notice because they define contact with the ground and make buildings, vehicles, trees, and characters feel anchored. Higher levels can increase shadow detail, filtering quality, and render distance. Lower levels can reduce GPU work, but the exact cost differs by game and by scene. A crowded plaza with many moving objects may behave differently from an empty rural road.
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Use the lowest level at which nearby shadows still look stable and readable. If a title offers separate options for shadow resolution, filtering, and distance, change one at a time; a single “shadows” slider may combine all three.
View distance and level of detail: preserve world readability
View-distance settings determine how much distant scenery remains detailed. Higher values can keep landmarks, terrain features, and vehicles visible farther away and can reduce obvious transitions between detailed and simplified models. The trade-off is more geometry and scene management work.
Halo Support describes higher distance settings as increasing detail farther from the player and reducing pop-in. Dovetail’s Train Sim World guidance makes the same practical distinction: distance settings affect how much of the route remains detailed. If distant signals, stations, roads, or terrain are important to navigation, reduce another setting first. Lower distance only when a modest increase in pop-in is preferable to an unstable frame rate.
Foliage and ground cover: expensive in the places that expose it
Vegetation combines object count, geometry, shading, and visibility range. A high foliage setting may keep grass, bushes, and trees visible farther into the distance; it can also reduce level-of-detail pop-in. Dovetail specifically notes that Epic foliage reduces LOD pop-in at a performance cost.
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Test foliage where it is abundant. A setting that appears free in a city may become the largest GPU cost in a forest or field. If you lower it, watch the horizon and road edges for disappearing vegetation, not just the immediate ground around the player.
Reflections and global illumination: large visual gains, title-specific costs
Reflections can require the game to represent surrounding scenery again in a different view. Global illumination adds indirect light and bounce behavior. Both can be substantial GPU workloads, particularly in scenes with water, wet surfaces, glass, detailed interiors, or strong day-night lighting.
Obsidian lists reflections and global illumination among the settings worth lowering when diagnosing performance. Their visual value is subjective: a lower reflection mode may be barely visible in a dry rural scene but obvious beside a wet city street. Compare the setting where you actually play instead of relying on a benchmark location.
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Visual effects and post-processing: target the heavy moments
Effects settings may cover particles, explosions, smoke, weather, bloom, depth of field, motion blur, or other post-processing, depending on the game. Because menu labels are not standardized, read the in-game description before changing a slider.
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If slowdowns occur during storms, traffic surges, accidents, or other effect-heavy events, this category is worth testing. Lowering effects can improve those moments while leaving geometry and texture detail intact.
Textures and VRAM: change them for memory pressure, not automatically
Texture quality primarily changes surface detail and how much data must remain available in graphics memory. Obsidian notes that reducing textures may help older cards or cards with less than 12 GB of memory. That threshold is guidance for the cited games, not a universal hardware rule; another title may use memory differently.
The Hogwarts Legacy FAQ also notes that graphics settings can affect VRAM use. If you see texture-streaming warnings, severe stutter, missing textures, or memory usage near the card’s limit, test a lower texture level separately from other settings. If memory is not the problem, dropping textures may produce little frame-rate improvement while making every surface look softer.
Upscaling: trade internal resolution for reconstruction
Upscaling renders the game internally at a lower resolution and reconstructs the displayed image. Dovetail describes its quality modes as controlling internal resolution when upscaling is enabled. A performance mode can raise frame rate, while a quality mode preserves more detail at a higher internal resolution.
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There is no fixed percentage gain that applies to every game. Compare modes in motion, at the distance where you read signs or instruments, and during camera movement. Look for shimmering, ghosting, or loss of fine geometry as well as the frame-rate change.
What should you lower first for more FPS?
Use a controlled sequence so you know which change helped. A preset can hide trade-offs by changing many variables at once, making it difficult to recover the image quality you actually wanted.
- Start at Recommended or Balanced. If the game supplies a recommended preset, use it as a baseline rather than beginning at Ultra.
- Reproduce one demanding scene. Choose a repeatable location such as a busy station, dense settlement, forest, large traffic junction, or crowded hub. Use the same route and camera angle for each comparison.
- Identify the apparent limit. Use the game’s performance overlay or diagnostics when available to determine whether the GPU or CPU is limiting frame delivery. Note frame rate, frame-time behavior, and graphics-memory use.
- Test shadows. Drop one level and repeat the same scene. Keep the change only if frame time improves enough to matter and nearby shadows remain acceptable.
- Test foliage or ground cover. Do this in a vegetation-heavy location. Check both performance and the amount of visible pop-in.
- Test view distance or level of detail. Compare distant landmarks, terrain, vehicles, and model transitions before accepting a lower value.
- Test reflections, global illumination, and effects. Choose the category that matches the scene causing trouble: reflective surfaces, complex lighting, or particles and post-processing.
- Test textures separately when memory is constrained. Do not combine this change with several GPU-quality changes, or you will not know whether stutter came from VRAM pressure or another setting.
- Try upscaling quality modes. Compare clarity and stability, not just the displayed average FPS.
- Stop when the bottleneck is unchanged. If several GPU-oriented reductions produce almost no improvement, investigate CPU limits, simulation density, background tasks, or a frame-rate cap instead of continuing to degrade image quality.
Why does lowering graphics not improve performance?
The scene may be CPU-bound
Open-world simulations often update traffic, schedules, physics, artificial intelligence, streaming, and persistent world states. Those tasks can limit frame delivery even when the graphics card has unused capacity. In that situation, lowering shadows or textures removes GPU work but does not shorten the CPU work that is holding the frame back.
Dovetail’s Train Sim World guide gives a concrete example: its optimized settings improved performance by around 11% over Ultra in GPU-bound scenes, but the same settings had little impact in a CPU-bound busy hub. That result belongs to Train Sim World and that guide’s test conditions; it is not a general promise for every simulation game.
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A frame cap or synchronization setting may be limiting output
If the game is locked to a refresh-rate target or another frame-rate cap, lowering quality cannot raise the displayed number above that limit. Check the game’s frame-rate, vertical-sync, and display settings before judging a graphics change. Compare frame times or an uncapped diagnostic where the game allows it, then restore your preferred cap after testing.
The changed setting may not be the active cost
A menu label can group several effects, and some options matter only in particular scenes. Textures may affect memory capacity without reducing shader time. Reflections may be cheap in a dry landscape. Foliage may be irrelevant in a city. Test where the setting is visible and change one variable at a time.
Memory pressure can look different from low average FPS
When VRAM is constrained, the symptom may be hitching or texture-streaming stalls rather than a consistently low average frame rate. Lower textures and repeat the same camera movement. If stutter improves while average FPS barely changes, memory capacity—not raw shading speed—was likely the relevant constraint.
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Evaluate every setting on five axes:
- Visual change: Does it affect nearby detail, distant scenery, lighting, reflections, or temporary effects?
- Scene cost: Is the problem a forest, a city, an interior, a wet surface, a storm, or a busy hub?
- Hardware limit: Is the GPU, CPU, or graphics memory the apparent bottleneck?
- World readability: Will lower distance or foliage hide landmarks, signals, roads, or route information?
- Acceptable artifacts: Can you tolerate pop-in, softer reconstruction, lower shadow detail, or reduced reflections?
Players who navigate by distant landmarks should usually protect view distance. Players who spend most of their time in forests should test foliage early. Players with clear VRAM pressure should test textures independently. Players whose busiest scenes are simulation-heavy hubs should not expect a graphics preset to solve a CPU limit.
Train Sim World: a documented example
Dovetail’s Train Sim World Graphical Settings Guide recommends an optimized mix for PCs meeting or exceeding the game’s recommended requirements. The mix includes High foliage, Medium shadows, Ultra textures, and Quality-mode upscaling. The guide reports around an 11% performance increase compared with Ultra in GPU-bound scenes.
The same guide warns that settings have little impact in CPU-bound situations such as a busy hub. This example illustrates why a sensible preset keeps some settings high—textures remain Ultra—while reducing others that can be more useful for GPU relief. It should be treated as a title-specific starting point, not as a universal open-world simulation preset.
Practical troubleshooting checklist
- Record the game version, hardware, resolution, display refresh rate, and upscaling mode before sharing a preset or performance claim.
- Use the same save, location, weather, time of day, and camera path for before-and-after comparisons whenever the game permits it.
- Change one option at a time and write down the result.
- Check a vegetation-heavy scene for foliage changes, a distant-view scene for LOD changes, and a reflective or interior scene for reflection and illumination changes.
- Watch frame time and stutter, not only average FPS.
- If lowering several GPU settings changes almost nothing, stop reducing image quality and investigate a CPU-bound scene or frame cap.
- If stutter improves after lowering textures, treat that as a memory-capacity result rather than proof that textures are always the best first setting.
- Restore a setting if its pop-in, softness, or lighting loss is more distracting than the performance gain is useful.
Bottom line
For most open-world simulation games, test shadows, foliage, view distance, reflections, global illumination, and effects first, then address textures when VRAM is under pressure and use upscaling when you accept an internal-resolution trade-off. Keep a repeatable scene, change one setting at a time, and verify the bottleneck. If the scene is CPU-bound, lower graphics quality may barely help; the right solution is to stop chasing GPU settings and tune expectations around the simulation workload.
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