When deciding which settings to use I tend to follow a simple hierarchy of priorities:

1) 60+ frames per second
2) Native resoluition
3) Best AA option
4) Max draw distance
5) 90+ frames per second

What is your top five?

1) Native resolution
2) Best possible look while still playable

How exactly that is achieved varies from game to game.

Since I switched to play in 4k, the AA option lost it's importance. Befor that, it was #2 as well. Nothing is more annoying than flickering borders.

framerate > 70
shadows, ambient occlusion
texture resolution
reflections
draw distance

We let GeForce Experience optimise the game settings for our NVIDIA RTX 4090 graphics engine. La Dolce Vita. ((;--))

I've given up the fight against TAA, games don't even look right with it turned off now. They expect the blending TAA does, among other things. I turned TAA off in Read Dead and sudden;y the trees had barely any leaves. Fun fun.

I also think with 4ks of pixels TAA looks a lot sharper and better too.

I would try to keep my (1) AA option as high as possible (but enough to not sacrifice too much fps), meaning I'll try to not have FXAA in my graphics settings and use TAA instead. However if the option happened to be available where I could use both FXAA and TAA at the same time, like in Monster Hunter Rise for example, then I would choose that over having TAA alone. As for the (2) texture setting, I prefer to have it on medium or normal, and (3) this is the same for my shadows. For (4) texture filtering, I usually leave it on default, so it depends on what game that I'm playing. And no matter what game I play, (5) dropping the resolution scaling will always be my lowest priority.

Lastly, I'll always cap my fps to 60fps even if my refresh rate is higher than that. I just think that 60fps is already smooth enough for me and that I'd rather not sacrifice too much of my graphics settings just to achieve a very very high framerate.

Gameplay above all.
Performance / graphical fidelity etc second.
Thats it.

I was keeping everything at 60 for a long time despite having a 144hz monitor. Just nice to have a consistent experience. My new PC though, I'm leaving a LOT of fps on the table. It's hard to know you could have 90fps at 4k native and not use it. So I've been giving in.

1. 1080p
2. Motion blur off. Anything else that likes to cover up what the game looks like.
3. A stable, playable framerate. 60fps? Never heard of it. Not on this PC since even older games like to chug. WH40k Space Marine is probably the most optimized game installed on my PC that still looks good.
4. Game looks good. I'll turn graphics down for the above, but I still like to get everything to look as good as possible.
5. Shadows and lighting if I can get away with it.

Randalator said it quite well. Native resolution (or integer scaling down, though on my monitor that wouldn't really be applicable), then best possible quality while still being playable. And "playable" for me may well mean 20 fps or so in most cases, and even less for those where response time doesn't exactly matter, and will definitely go for a higher quality setting, if it exists, than for over 30 fps. In games where draw distance is relevant though, like for seeing enemies or other things that are useful to spot from farther away, then I will push that as far as possible before anything else. And tend to keep AA off or on the lowest setting unless I can set everything else high without problems even with it higher.

* First of all, the game needs to not crash or fail to run because of graphics settings. I will not play a game if I can't get past this step (in fact, I *can't* play a game in this state).
* I need to be able to see what's going on. (This means that I will want to enable settings that provide useful cues to the player, and disable any settings that might make things harder to see.) Similarly, if there's settings that affect accessibility, the game needs to be accessible to me.
* Game needs to be in the original aspect ratio. I can't stand it when games stretch or squish the display just to fill the screen; it makes everything look distorted (because it is distorted).
* The game should be running at full speed, and should not have physics problems due to the framerate. (Apparently, Skyrim has this issue if you uncap the framerate, which is probably *why* they put in the framerate cap in the first place.) Worth noting that the Godot engine (and possibly other modern engines) solves this by having a physics process that runs at a fixed framerate regardless of what the graphics process is doing.
* Get to a decent framerate. Note that the framerate needs to be higher for action games than it does for turn-based games.

The problem I have with integer scaling is that, if the ratio between resolutions is not an integer, you end up with black bars on all 4 sides of the screen, making only a small portion of the screen being usable.

Personally, for scaling, I prefer to preserve the aspect ratio, use as much of the screen as possible while preserving the aspect ration, and I think I prefer nearest rather than linear filtering. (I note that nearest is definitely better for pixel art games; using linear just looks too blurry.)

By integer scaling down I was referring to a lower resolution that's a result of dividing the native one by an integer, like 800x600 if native is 1600x1200 or 1280x720 if native is 2560x1440 or full HD if native is 4K.

1. 60 fps
2. Native Resolution

That's pretty much it. I'll turn down/off AA, shadows, whatnot to get that.
Also FOV that doesn't give me a headache for first person games.

Yeah there's a lot of older games that break above 60fps. That can make using a 144hz monitor kind of annoying, since you're bouncing back and forth between 140fps and 60fps, which is VERY noticeable. That's why I used to just cap everything at 60 and be done with it.

Hard to resist high framerate now though since I have a PC to run it and more games support it.