1) Native res. For older games made for 4:3 res, I use the highest that fits on my screen (so 1920x1440 in my case).

2) Disable some terrible post-processing effects. Especially Blur, Depth of Field and any shitty form of AA (FXAA, TAA etc.).

3) Max everything EXCEPT AA (I find I don't really need it at 1440p, 27 inch display, at most something like 2x MSAA) just to see how it performs. If it's about stable 60 FPS or more, I leave it. Although I will usually check how much FPS lowering shadows from ultra to high gives me. If it's a lot, then I might keep the shadows lowered.

4) In FPS games, I might lower some other stuff to get more FPS as FPS is very important in.. well.. FPSes :D TAA has just become the new FXAA it seems. Shitty blur that completely kills texture quality. In Psychonauts 2 for example, the game looks immensely better with no AA than TAA.

Yep. Always sad when I have to go to 60 FPS in NVidia control panel because a system in some game is bound to framerate. Just recently went back to Titan Quest and the physics get sped up past 60 FPS. Everything else is fine, but the physics break a lot of things (ragdolls, projectile speeds etc.). A damn shame because the game is otherwise soooo smooth in 240 FPS.

But hopefully, those days are past us. Devs these days should 100% avoid tying anything to framerate due to how wide it can be these days. Anything from 60-360, is available on the market nowadays. If they do, all it tells me is that the main target for the game was consoles.

Will be interesting to see with Starfield. Elder Scrolls and Fallout are two of the most obvious examples of physics breaking gameplay over 60fps, and Starfield is the same engine. Will they put effort into it? Who knows.

1) Disable "film" effects: chromatic aberration, motion blur, depth of field, lens flares, bokeh, bloom (if overdone), grain, VHS effect, etc.
2) 4k resolution
3) Max texture resolution
4) Max view distance
5) 60 fps minimum

In short, I want my games to have as high a resolution as possible. The one thing I absolutely can't stand about a lot of modern games is the way they ruin that with post processing crap. What's the point in having a 4k screen if the post processing reduces the resolution down to VHS level? What is this obsession with making everything a hazy/blurry mess?

Can you imagine being an artist on one of these games, making high resolution textures, etc., only for someone up the chain to flip a few game engine "switches" and destroy all your hard work? It's truly awful.

1. Motion blur OFF!
2-5. Refer to "1."

1) FPS match screen refresh rate
2) native resolution
3) HIghest graphics settings that I can run on my current system

I just want a smooth experience but I like good quality graphics.

Bloom seems pretty necessary nowadays to me. Stuff like neon signs often don't glow at all without it.

I know that the Godot engine (at least version 3, as I haven't checked the just released Godot 4, but I'd imagine this is still the case) has a separate physics process, which runs at a fixed physics framerate, regardless of the graphics framerate (unless the graphics framerate dips *really* low, to the point of being unplayable for most players). Games not using that engine ought to implement something similar. (I know Hollow Knight does.)

I have not checked whether Unity and Unreal do this, but I would be surprised if they didn't.