Isn't that kinda obvious that turning off shadows and other effects (as well as reducing screeen resolution) would increase performance?

Not to everyone. Specifically, it isn't obvious to those who aren't used to doing this sort of thing, particularly more casual players.

One might think that turning off shadows would *decrease* performance, as shadows would hide things so they wouldn't have to render. (Of course, this argument is likely BS, but somebody not familiar with how computer graphics work might think along these lines.)

Also, the game has other options, but none have nearly as much of an effect as shadows, which was the only option that had a noticeable effect for me.

Remember that not everybody who is playing a specific game is familiar with graphics settings in games and how they effect performance; hence why the game should include a description that indicates which settings give the best performance.

The sweet spot for me is the early to mid 90s (SVGA and VGA).
Stuff before that EGA and CGA, while I can appreciate on artistic merit (e.g. Loom), I find the graphics more an obstacle to the playing than enhancing it.

After that, when 640x480/400 was unlocked, games used it as an excuse to go cartoony, which was not a style I appreciated. And after that is the era of bad 3D, which lasted till about 2003. I honestly feel that games should've kept away from 3D as a whole until technology had advanced to that level. The only 3D games from that era that I can appreciate were ones that chose a specific stylistic aesthetic that worked within the limitations of the time, rather than trying to go for 'realism' (which gets old really fast). Specifically, Grim Fandango, and Ocarina of Time.

I think that today even most game developers don't know too well. It's not like they wrote their engine or renderer, they just took an off-the-shelf engine and started slapping assets from asset store onto the scene. As long as they don't run into a performance issue that affects them during development, they can be totally oblivious.

Bloom can go rot, I always turn it off when possible. The only time I ever thought it looked cool was when I first saw it in the early 2000s in Age of Empires 3.

Graphics?

Since I never have a top of the line system, it's usually a tradeoff between graphics quality and performance for me. Depending on the game I can tolerate different levels of performance - most first person shooters and frantic action I want 60fps with as few drops as possible, but if it reduces graphics quality too much I might compromise.

Vsync always off because I can't stand input lag - I use RTSS to cap framerate to 60 instead.

Motion Blur always off because I don't like it and it also hurts performance.

Depth of Field is off if it's too aggressive in the game. I don't like short & mid ranged objects being blurred, regardless of how "artistic" it is.

Film Grain depends on the game too.

Hellblade I played at max settings on 1080p even though it became a "cinematic" 30fps experience because I wanted to view it the way designers intended it to be.

Usually I'll prefer to reduce other settings rather than the resolution - I'd rather have lower shaders/shadows/SSAO/etc than drop the res below 1080p. Texture quality is the second to last one I'd drop before resolution. Anti-aliasing, SSAO and Shadows are usually the first things to go, though Shadows I prefer to have on at least Medium. Depending on the game, I'd rather take no AA than FXAA even without performance hit since FXAA tends to blur. And really, if I have to run the game at lower than 1080p or on lower than at least "Medium" graphics, I'll just put it back on my backlog to wait for a better GPU. Did that recently with Rime, of all games...

As for graphics styles - I like realistic and cartoony and retro, unless we're talking 90s/early2ks era 3D - not a fan of that. 8 bit/16 bit style retro pixel art - I'm all for that. And I prefer bright colors to gloomy or washed out ones.

I totally agree with the sentiment. Though on the other hand, I wouldn't hesitate to tell people to buy a 16-core ryzen or threadripper to run a software rasterizer or raytracer at decent resolution. I think GPUs are evil, and I would prefer to pour that money & power & effort into CPUs which are more likely to benefit all applications without massive drivers.

Yeah, well, I kind of look at a GPU as another specialised math-coprocessor for handling lots of 3/D matrices and floating point progressions/arrays. I think as technology progresses, it'll appear as just another socketable processor on a motherboard. . . not the clunky and over-hyped peripheral that it is today. Remember all the rigmarole with those goofy proprietary soundcards back in the '90s. . . tweaking Soundblaster, Adlib, or Roland with every other installation? Well, sound is onboard these days, and, unless you're running a recording studio, a peripheral card is scarcely necessary. But a soundcard was really just another clunky math coprocessor for digital>analogue conversion and high-quality polyphony output.

I'm kind of surprised that we still need a video "card" these days; but, at least they're not quite so fussy as those sound-cards were.

In the mid-late 90s and early millenium, PC gaming, for a period, was a mess: there was a high divergence between developer standards, and consumer standards. . . seemed like you had to upgrade something every time a new title came out. . . RAM, GPU, Sound. . . whatever. I got fed up, and bought a PS1. . . later, PS2; I loved these consoles: the PS game-library was packed with PC quality titles (RPG, FPS, Adventure, etc.). . . without all the hassle and expense. And they were incredibly stable! You could actually finish the game.

So, yeah, I agree that some games have excessive requirements for contemporary consumer standards; and, I think to some extent, it's due to the sloppy integration of a lot of 3rd-party software.

Right, the use of a graphical window manager does, somewhat, take a few points away from the message.

Anyhow... you could try having a match against alphago? I'm fairly sure the display of each choice is not handled by the machine running the calculations, even if it has a number of GPUs.

Yes, it is. I mean, you can probably find such a person, but you can also find all sorts of people with all sorts of craziest notions about game settings. It's simply impossible to account for all the variants.

And how exactly devs could know on which system which settings are most optimal? Look, I can agree that the game should make at least a hint, which settings are more demanding (and some games actually do that). But to make actual prediction what settings are the best for YOU, requires either a lot of testing, or some algorithm to check the specs. Both can be quite costly, especially for indie games.

Anything that gives me 50-60 fps.

e: I guess my bar is low, but there is a minimum.
12..80? or something by 720
It can't look super potatoey relative to what it would look like on a normal setup for the game. I don't need Quake 1 to look like Crysis, but if I played Crysis, I'd rather not have it look like Quake just for the frames.

Usually turning off shadows and anti-aliasing helps a shit ton.

Personally, I don't like pesudographics much. Too much things to remember. I couldn't play Dwarf Fortress at all. (

Sanctuary Black
edit: mark-up f***-up