Gadgetory

what's up guys JC cents here and if I send a little nasally it's not my typical whining self I actually have I'm getting over a bit of a cold when Jerry came down and visited me he he left a present behind then we got it so with that said we're gonna get through this as best we can but you guys know I like to take topics straight from the audience and I got this random tweet the other day from tectonic 15 on Twitter he says hey Jay could you make a video about how to configure game settings and also maybe explain what some are explaining what some of the terminologies thanks.you few typos in there but I didn't want to you know I knew I didn't want a paraphrase but I think that's a great idea because you can often increase your gameplay experience by just decreasing or manipulating some of the settings we're gonna go through a couple of games we're talking about the game settings on a high level what they do and then how you can actually get better FPS and which settings are kind of not important and which ones really tax your graphics card so let's do it [Laughter] ms:i brings ultra-thin gaming to life at their new GS 65 stealth the four point nine millimeter bezel 144 Hertz 1080p panel nvidia graphics and 8th gen intel cpus make the new GS 65 self a true powerhouse with a small footprint find out more and how to preorder by following the link in the description below alright so I'm gonna use rise of the Tomb Raider here to just sort of demonstrate some of the general settings you'll find in most games and then we'll kind of talk about some other things as we move forward each game is gonna kind of have its own list of settings and that's obviously based on the developers and a lot of those settings are going to be specific to the games but there are quite a few settings that are also applicable to all games because it is general type of technology that you can kind of manipulate to give yourself a better gaming experience get better FPS without having to have an image that looks like crap I'm also using a gtx 1066 gigabyte because i feel like that's a graphics card that's going to really more accurately represent kind of the mid-range of what people are using out in the real world I'm also using 1080p for this because it's gonna have a better impact and showing you what happens with anti-aliasing we're gonna spend the time on things that are pretty much applicable to all games like for instance anti-aliasing all of your objects on the screen are being drawn by millions of different triangles the problem is no matter how many of those you make or how much you try and smooth the edges you always have what's called stair casing which is where they look kind of jagged it's like trying to make a round object in Minecraft so you have to rely on anti-aliasing to make that round object look round now there's different types of anti-aliasing technology is there's post-processing and then there's super sampling so right now with our post process are our anti-aliasing off you can see we're getting 157 FPS in this screen and that's one of the reasons why I'm using rise of the Tomb Raider because you can actually see the changes happen in real time without having to restart the game and you can get a better sense of what's actually happening on the screen so we're getting 150 758 FPS with anti-aliasing off if I turn it on and hit apply you can see it dropped down a little bit down to about a 151 now FXAA is just applying a slight blur to the image overall it's not actually actively processing anything it's just sort of tricking you into thinking it looks smoother the problem is the image overall also looks a little bit blurrier as well now we have s/m which is a much newer type of post-processing a that we've seen over the last several years where it's basically just a more enhanced fxaa it's not a huge impact of performance you can see the SMA a obviously gave us a bit more of an impact because we are down to 135 fps so that was about a 15 FPS hit right there now if we look at SSA 2x which is super sampling that means it's going to super sample the image two times to make it look even sharper we're basically blowing up the image smoothing it out and then shrinking it back down to size now watch what happens to the 8 to the FPS as soon as I hit apply to this one we just lost approximately 45 FPS so we went from 135 FPS down to 90 now if we hit 4x here our image is going to definitely start to look more sharp but look we dropped all the way down to 60fps so this is why SMA a is my recommendation in terms of middle-ground in terms of screen graphics quality and performance now me think is one of those things that get asked an awful lot J should I turn it on should I turn it off blah blah blah it really depends on a few different things first of all how strong is your graphics card if you have a 60 Hertz panel but you have like a 1080 Ti and you're running 1080p you're gonna be sending way more than 60 frames per second to the panel now Hertz can also be thought of as a frame per second so if this thing basically does is tell us a graphics card to wait until the monitor says it's ready for the next image before sending it the only problem with vsync being on in that scenario is if your graphics card is significantly faster than your panel then you can actually introduce input lag into your game and my recommendation here is if you're running a g-sync panel with an Nvidia graphics card turn on g-sync in the Nvidia control panel and leave vsync off in your games same thing goes for AMD if you've an AMD graphics card and a free sync panel then you're gonna want to leave free sync on turn vsync off in your games unfortunately if you have a free sync panel and an Nvidia graphics card or an AMD graphics card and a g-sync panel those are mismatched they won't talk to each other and you kind of lost out on that option so you would want to run v-sync if that's the case so let's talk about presets presets are basically a bucket of settings that the developers have determined like at this graphics quality and these different settings is what these settings down below should be and as you can see we are at the lowest fps like our lowest preset as I mentioned right here that basically means everything that could possibly be turned on in terms of like graphical or here we go again graphical enhancements is off now the second we switch this to low you can see there was a dramatic change on the screen look at that if we go from lowest to low there is a dramatic change and the reason for that is when you're on the lowest settings there are absolutely no shadows being drawn whatsoever shadows are the most taxing graphic setting that you can enable on your system fortunately now the games have been evolved to the point to where those graphics settings and those shadow settings can be split into different toggles so you can actually turn on some types of shadows and turn off others were in the past it was just shadows yes or no and that was it so as you can see even in low now versus lowest there is a very dramatic change because we have shadow quality turned on to medium which is off before and level of deep detail is also set to medium now if we go up to medium on the preset you can see we're increasing the overall depth of a lot of our colors foliage you could see her hair right here on low and medium there's no reflection on medium there's reflection on her hair high very high and obviously there was a significant hit to our FPS as well we're still running 70 FPS or 69 FPS with very high so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go back to lowest and turn these on one of the times you could kind of see what's happening here now these two settings right here texture quality and anisotropic filter they kind of go hand in hand texture quality is going to be the sharpness of the texture being applied to the objects in this case the rocks or pants dirt all of this has an image that's laid on it to say this is dirt this is a rock this is snow and that's how you know what you're actually looking at otherwise it's just a blob of an object as the tropical tree is going to be the processing of those images when they are not being looked at straight on I will typically set that to 16x it's a fairly low impact on your graphic settings but it can make a big impact in terms Graphics appearance on your screen so now if we turn up our texture quality with our anisotropic filter turned up to 16x you'll start to notice things overall on the screen look a whole lot better so you can see now it just finished reloading on the medium and things look a whole lot sharper and then if you set it to anything you know considered high then this game is asking for at least four gigabytes of vram and the reason for that is textures are stored in your frame buffer that is the amount of VRAM that is on your graphics card so the more vram the higher resolution textures and the more textures that can actually be stored into that frame buffer ready to be called by the graphics engine because it's already there waiting ready to go so not having enough vram can also lead to a lot of the stuttering that you would see in your games now the stuttering isn't necessarily the graphics card not being able to keep up as much as the vram buffer is constantly saturated so it's having to do a lot of file swapping in that buffer which is what's creating the stuttering it can't draw the images on the screen if it can't pull the data it needs from the buffer so that's where a lot of the stuttering actually comes from now let's talk about shadows because like I said shadows are the most taxing thing you can do on your on your game settings now you can see right here obviously there's some depth you can see that we've got rocks and you've got contour and stuff going on right here you can also see the Sun is coming in from the right right over here so we do have some shadow obviously being created but this is still a very flat looking image and the reason for that is because we have all of our graphics settings pretty much set to OFF so what happens if we start to turn on shadows well you'll notice that got a whole lot darker right there because the Sun is over here on the other side of these rocks which now means that just like you would expect in real life this side should be darker than the other side now this actually looks pretty good in my opinion this is actually a very good looking rent image right here and it's not doing a whole lot of terrible work to our FPS we're still getting nearly 100 FPS or almost 40 FPS higher than the refresh rate of this panel so I could turn on vsync be locked at 60 and never have a problem but if you want to know what can really make the the things look good but also really hurt your performance obviously you could turn this up to you know high very high and what you'll notice here the difference between off and medium it's just the whether or not the shadows even red but if you look at the difference between high and very high it's usually just the edges and the way the edges is being handled here now ambient occlusion you'll find this in pretty much any title within the last five or six plus years this is basically the way objects affect neighboring objects in terms of shadows so ma occlusion on you can see now we are getting even more depth to our shadows here so this is just a much smarter way of creating a very realistic looking shadow motion blur pretty obvious a lot of people don't like motion blur the reason being is it tends to be a bit ridiculous so as I'm moving the screen around right here you can see it looks like I'm just motorboating her I'm sorry guys that's not on purpose I swear it doesn't really do too much of a hit on your graphics card but it's really a personal taste thing I enjoy games allow you to actually tune the motion blur let's talk about tessellation because that's something that came out with dx11 a lot of people still don't really understand it and I have a really good demonstration for you on that alright guys so this is heaven benchmark and this is a free you guys can actually download this it's heaven benchmark so you can see we've got this cobblestone road not a very smooth one if you ask me in terms of trying to roll an old hand card or something on there that's because the tessellation settings right here are kind of cranked this is basically what this road would probably more so look like if it were a real medieval time type Road but you notice how the rocks and stuff here look extremely square and not very realistic tessellation is just the amount of angular detail that's being applied to objects it's actually taking the angles and the the structure of the object and just giving you more enhancement to it now heaven benchmark has a slider here which allows you to just completely make this as ridiculous as possible ooh that is a little low basis okay you guys get the point so this video is directly in response to you guys so this video that's a direct response to you tectonic 15 I thought it was a good subject to talk about there's a lot of ways that you can increase your graphics performance without having to necessarily sacrifice in graphics quality and not have to go out and necessarily buy a new graphics card but we all know that's fun we love buying new graphics cards guys if you have a topic you want me to touch on please put it in the comments below or do like tecktonik did tweet me and if it's a good one you'll probably see a video about it thanks for watching guys and as always I will see you in the next one I'm gonna do the best I can to not like sniffle and stuff cuz you know okay