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hinch on 07 October 2021
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Chazore said:
Captain_Yuri said:

Ultra vs. High Settings in PC Games

https://www.techspot.com/article/2338-ultra-vs-high-settings/

The jist of it is that most people shouldn't be using Ultra settings due to diminishing returns for the performance hit that you get. Of course, they don't factor in Ray Tracing or DLSS which imo is different. Ray tracing in games that are properly implemented combined with DLSS will give you a pretty noticeable visual upgrade while maintaining decent performance. If you turn on Ray Tracing on AMD sponsored games like RE or Far Cry 6, then yea, it's useless and you really need a magnifying glass to see the difference. But with something like Cyberpunk? Oof. Looks incredible! And of course, if you play something like Spiderman or Ratchet and Clank on PS5 with RT on, it can show you what console optimization can do with RT.

Tbh I've been running high for a lot of AAA games these days, because there really isn't that much difference between ultra/high. I just bought and tried out Days Gone, and if you follow Alex's "optimised" settings from DF, you only change two options, but gain more perf and the game hardly looks that much different.

I do wish games were made with Ultra settings in mind, to really show us much of a difference, but those days are long gone and probably won't come back for a long time (Talking Crysis low to Crysis Ultra style differences, and don't anyone @Me with the shoddy Crysis remasters that still sport single threads either).

Also, dunno why the author thought it wise to include any Ubisoft game, when they hardly look that much different from the console versions, and don't tend to perform as good on PC, so the metrics of changing from very high to high look to give minimal perf gains. 

Include Red Dead and other games, but I'd leave out the Ubi games until they get their shit together.

Same. Pretty much been running most modern titles on high and its nigh indistinguishable from Ultra settings in terms of IQ. I feel like you probably need a 4K display to see a small differences in UQ textures but even then unless there's an abundance of extra horse power its not really worth it. And even then, I'd opt for high for a more smoother and responsive gameplay experience. Ambient occlusion being one of the more demanding thing you could dial that back with negligible difference. Shadows too. 

The great thing I love about PC is that there's a lot of options you can pick and tweak options. Something you can't do on consoles.

There are some outlier games that push the boundaries that aren't constraint by the limitations by consoles. Star Citizens being one - if you can call it one. Recommended specs are 16GB Ram (32GB recommended), SSD and relatively good spec to run well on max settings.

Last edited by hinch - on 07 October 2021