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A while ago, we did a video demystifying all the different settings in your computer's BIOS

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that we think you should tweak. But today, we're gonna take a look at certain graphics cards options

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that you might wanna fine tune, because hey, who doesn't want more performance, you know?

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But hold on a second, I have all my settings the way I like them inside of the games I play.

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Isn't that good enough? Well, to some extent, but there are other options

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that you can instead turn on in either the NVIDIA control panel or Radeon settings

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that can still make things look quite a bit better. Let's start with a very simple one, resolution.

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Modern LCD displays have a fixed amount of pixels arranged in a grid, meaning that optimally,

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you want your graphics card output signals at the screen's native resolution.

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If you don't have that, your system will have to upscale the image

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in order to fit into that pixel grid. And in exact science,

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that will leave your images looking not quite right. So make sure that your resolution is set correctly

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before doing anything else. And on the subject of scaling,

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one scaling method that actually will make your images

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look better is super sampling. This is essentially when your GPU renders frames

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at a higher resolution than what your monitor supports

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and then downscales this image to fit. It's essentially a supercharged version of anti-aliasing,

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but do keep in mind it's very computationally expensive.

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So it might only work well if you're pairing a powerful GPU with a low-res monitor,

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or if you're trying it on an older, easier to run game.

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If you have an NVIDIA card, super sampling is called dynamic super resolution,

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while AMD calls it virtual super resolution.

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And you can force these settings on even if the game you're playing doesn't offer them.

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A couple of other settings that you can force on outside of games are ambient occlusion

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and anisotropic filtering. Ambient occlusion is a technique

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that makes shadows look better by examining how bright pixels should be

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based on geometry, and then figuring out where light should be blocked.

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It's almost like a simpler form of ray tracing, almost. Meanwhile, anisotropic filtering

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helps make objects in the distance look sharper. Although many games do have an option for it,

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turning it on in your GPU settings instead can look better in some circumstances,

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and it's also not very hard on your frame rate. So why not?

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Another good thing to check is your power management settings.

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Typically, your GPU will operate at a fairly low clock speed

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and then ramp up when you're playing a game. And while this usually happens without a hitch,

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power management has been known to cause issues in some games that shouldn't be very hard to run.

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So if a game like this is behaving strangely, try turning the settings to max performance,

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though expect a little more fan noise. Moving on, one setting that you should probably

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always have turned on as long as you have the drive space for it is shader cache,

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which helps to speed up loading times, especially for larger levels.

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If you're rocking a Radeon card, setting it to AMD optimized means shader cache is turned on.

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And if we're talking improving frame rates instead of loading times, consider setting vertical sync to triple buffering

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if you're using v-sync to avoid screen tearing. Triple buffering keeps an extra frame

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in your GPU's frame buffer, so it's not waiting around for something else to work on,

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which can result in better performance if you're having slow downs with v-sync.

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However, do keep in mind, it can introduce input lag.

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So pick your poison. And speaking of tearing,

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verify that either g-sync or free-sync is actually enabled if you have a monitor

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and a card that supports these technologies. Sometimes they aren't active by default,

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and you obviously don't wanna have spent a bunch of money on a fancy variable refresh rate monitor

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just to discover that you've left the feature disabled for the last six months.

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And one last thing to check on, if some of your older games look a bit too dark

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and there's no way to fix it in the in-game settings, try playing with your GPU's gamma options.

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However, graphics cards only tend to let you adjust this globally,

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so you'll have to remember to change it back once you're done gaming.

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So that's it then. What are your best pro tips for getting the most out of your graphics card?

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Let us know in the comments and feel free to scream if we've missed your favorite tweaks.

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So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, hit subscribe and hit us up in the comment section below

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with your ideas for topics that we should cover in the future.