can you spot the difference i mean low to medium or medium to high sure that's
easy but the higher we go the change is less obvious outside of your frame rate
biting the dust so if super fancy extreme ultra graphics options are
hardly noticeable are developers still adding them to new games especially when
you're banging new pc can't even run them at playable frame rates are the GPU
manufacturers to blame i need an answer
and the answer to who sponsored this video is glasswire are you lagging out
while gaming use glasswire and see what apps are wasting your bandwidth and
causing your games to lag get 25 off today using offer code Linus at the link
below
even with the best modern hardware brand new aaa games often struggle to run at
maxed out graphic settings with the advent of ray tracing and HDR this has
become even more apparent as systems with high-end 30 series cards can barely
keep up once you output to a 4k monitor and flip a few in-game switches dlss and
fsr are helping but is it really worth it to spend your life savings on a
bugatti so you can feel like a badass on your five minute commute
look we're not saying maxed out settings do nothing it's just that the visual
upgrade you'll notice is minimal comparatively speaking after all at msrp
a 3070 is 4.99 while a 30-90 is
basically triple that at 14.99 so to see
whether skipping a rent payment to buy a graphics card is worth it we built two
systems to compare different settings at similar frame rates and asked a few
folks from around the office if they could tell the difference we didn't tell
them what was going on we just asked them to play a section from metro exodus
enhanced edition and to tell us which one looked nicer uh
i mean they're the same i would say this is better i want to say
i like this one better it's hard to tell though i don't know
they they look the same and guess what only one person picked correctly yeah is
this the 390 yeah it's a little bit clearer but like a
tiny bit our resident gamer god david
was able to tell pretty quickly which system was our rtx 3090 at extreme
settings while everyone else defaulted to the 3070. the results were so skewed
we started doubting the setup by the end but nope it's just really hard to tell for
most people particularly those who aren't already gaming on some of the most expensive hardware available
but why the answer has to do with diminishing returns i mean you're going
to enjoy a 70 steak more than a buck 50
hot dog but will you enjoy it 68 dollars and 50 cents more
i don't know but fortunately our friends at crytek are meat experts and by meat i
mean video game graphics they're working on the crisis remastered trilogy so we
reached out for some answers they told us that they do have performance targets
and are aware of modern hardware like the latest generation of consoles or
graphics cards but there are always hurdles in the way of smooth performance
large environments 4k textures particle effects and ai being some of the bigger
ones to get over the first step is getting all of this into the game and
running in the first place while optimization typically comes later
usually the more time for optimization the better the game will run on most
hardware when there's a lot of hardware to optimize for
things can get messy and if your setup's cable
management is messy make sure to pick up some cable ties from ltdstore.com
they're so good targets have scaled up over the years
and with modern consoles we're finally looking at 1440p or even 4k resolutions
running at 60 frames per second at least on medium or low settings if your
hardware is getting older which it is for a lot of us according to the steam
hardware survey and my back
some settings have a much bigger impact than others particularly shadows and
particle effects you've probably found yourself tinkering with settings one by
one to try to get the best mix of frame rate to fidelity only to have trouble
even noticing the difference sometimes especially if there are no example
images or videos to show you in real time why does ultra and very high in many
cases look basically identical but suddenly you go from 70 FPS to 40. the
real problem often isn't developers failing to optimize it's that as things
look better and better it's hard to notice due to the 80 20 rule getting 80
of the way there is actually pretty easy and it's not until we try to squeeze out
that extra 20 percent of detail and depth that we've run into problems
take anno for example it looks great but for the best play experience you need to
really zoom the camera out and adding more objects and textures to render in
frame causes performance to chug significantly we see similar results
when improving draw distance in other games but at a certain point it's not
really worth it since we can barely make out distant objects anyway but we're all
dumb apes and when there's a slider we can move all the way to the right we
just have to stick our grubby fingers in there even though the low medium and
high settings will probably look just fine
me like sliding so here's the example crytek gave us at the lowest option
you've got pretty low res textures a 1000 meter draw distance low amounts of
particles for effects and extra details like waves on water are turned off very
high sounds drastically different offering 4k textures a 2500 meter draw
distance lots of particles and all the extras turned on but when you compare
high to very high the gap is much smaller with the main difference being
texture resolution going from 2k to 4k and a draw distance improvement if you
don't have a 4k monitor to begin with and the foliage is thick
good luck spotting that with a naked eye another improvement that can be hard to
see past a certain point is tessellation or splitting up polygons into finer
pieces adding more triangles to smooth out a curved surface is a huge
improvement to 3d environments but unless you start zooming in a lot you
likely won't be able to tell the difference however some things are 100
percent worth turning on even if your frame rate drops significantly we
mentioned draw distance already but more realistic shadows and lighting can
really just make a dull environment spring to life
anti-aliasing solutions are also huge for smoothing ugly jagged surfaces and
higher resolution textures do look a lot better if you have the right screen for
them but these options are going to have different effects in every game so
whatever you're playing try to test the waters and find the right balance of
frame rate to visual quality for yourself and speaking of visual quality
make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on our upcoming looking glass
portrait video now if we know deep down that going from
very high to ultra is either indistinguishable or hardly better why
do developers keep making these ridiculous settings that only a tiny
fraction of players can actually run if anyone at all well there's two big
reasons one options are always good to have and two it helps market the game we
all want to buy the new hotness especially when it's pretty but many of
us have been duped into pre-ordering based on what's shown at e3 versus the
final product and while most people can't run ultra or
very high settings now they might be able to in the future once they upgrade
and want to revisit some older games for now though if you don't have the latest
and greatest GPU which is probably the case given the hard hard year we've had
don't worry these days low settings often look surprisingly good in modern
games and in some cases can give you a competitive advantage with medium and
high offering a nicer experience if you can run it there's no shame in keeping
settings on the left silly ape don't give yourself slider envy but it's
perfectly acceptable to envy this video's sponsor drop drop sennheiser
hd6xx headphones are one of their all-time best sellers with over 90 000
units sold and why not they're freaking awesome they have not changed the driver
and sound structure compared to the regular hd650s so you can expect a nice
balanced mid-range and natural sounding bass they've got an open back design
which allows auditorium like acoustics for accurate sound reproduction they've
got a detachable six foot cable instead of the 10 foot cable on the more
conventional models and really is a better better length for the cable and
they use a 1 8 inch plug that's versatile for everyday use with a quarter inch adapter included for your
av gear so why wait buy them today at the link down below they're actually
very similar to my daily driver hd 600s they're just
so comfy too so what do you guys think though do you have a 30 90 or 6900 xt
and you just refuse to play at anything other than 4k ultra even if the frame
rate dips let us know in the comments below and if you like this video make
sure to check out our dlss and fsr videos
ooh the future is looking bright