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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesWhen a game is GPU-limited, the first settings worth testing are render resolution or render scale, ray tracing and advanced lighting, demanding anti-aliasing, shadows, and volumetric effects. There is no universal ranking: the impact depends on the game, your hardware, resolution, and video-memory capacity. Test changes one at a time in a repeatable scene; if FPS barely changes, another limit may be holding performance back.
Which settings should you lower first?
Use this as a testing order, not a guaranteed ranking. A setting has a large FPS impact only if it is limiting performance in your game and on your PC.
- Render resolution or render scale: Reduce the number of pixels the GPU renders. Try a modest reduction before lowering the display resolution. The image may look softer, although some games keep menus and other interface elements at native display resolution. Upscaling options vary by game and hardware.
- Ray tracing and advanced lighting: Test lowering ray-traced reflections, shadows, or global illumination if the GPU is the bottleneck. These effects can be demanding, but their cost depends on the implementation and scene.
- Anti-aliasing: Try a less demanding anti-aliasing mode before turning edge smoothing off. Supersampling and some hardware-based methods can cost more than other approaches; image sharpness, edge quality, and motion artifacts also differ by method.
- Shadows and ambient occlusion: Compare lower shadow resolution or distance, contact-shadow quality, and ambient-occlusion levels. They can affect both performance and how convincingly objects sit in a scene.
- Volumetric effects: Lower fog, clouds, light shafts, or volumetric-lighting quality if they are costly in the game you play. Their impact is implementation-specific.
- Textures, filtering, and detail: Lower texture resolution when video memory is under pressure. Texture filtering quality is often a smaller performance lever; level of detail, tessellation, and object detail should be tested in the specific game rather than judged by their names.
Why the order changes by game and PC
Render scale and resolution are especially useful tests when the GPU is doing too much pixel work. If reducing resolution barely changes FPS, that can indicate a CPU limit, frame cap, or another constraint, but it is not proof by itself. A graphics setting may also have little effect in a scene that does not use the feature heavily.
Published figures illustrate why results should not be generalized. In NVIDIA’s 2019 Control graphics and performance guide, SSAO is reported to cost 4–5 FPS with ray tracing disabled and about 1–3 FPS with it enabled. The same guide says increased volumetric-lighting sample counts, resolution, and quality can reduce frame rate by as much as 11 FPS. Those are Control-specific measurements, not predictions for another game or PC.
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Anti-aliasing also has no single FPS cost. AMD’s Radeon anti-aliasing documentation describes supersampling as the highest-impact option among the driver AA modes it covers. NVIDIA’s GTA V graphics and performance guide notes that hardware anti-aliasing can carry considerable performance and memory costs in that game. Different games and methods are not directly comparable.
Does lowering texture quality improve FPS?
Sometimes, but texture resolution is not automatically the best first setting to lower. High-resolution textures primarily matter when the game’s video-memory demand approaches or exceeds the GPU’s available VRAM. That pressure can show up as stuttering, pauses, or crashes rather than a simple, steady drop in average FPS.
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Texture filtering is a different setting from texture resolution. AMD’s Radeon graphics documentation describes anisotropic filtering as improving clarity on angled or distant surfaces at a small performance cost, and says texture-filtering quality has a small impact. If you are not running short on VRAM, test more expensive lighting, resolution, shadows, or AA before assuming that lowering texture quality will help most.
How to measure the impact on your PC
- Choose a repeatable scene. Note the game, display resolution, graphics card, processor, current FPS, and the route or benchmark segment you will use.
- Check for other limits. Look for a frame cap, unusually high CPU load, VRAM pressure, or thermal and power limits. GPU usage can help, but no single utilization reading proves the cause.
- Change one setting at a time. Let the scene settle, repeat the same route, and record average FPS plus frame-time lows or percentiles if available. Avoid comparing runs made in different scenes.
- Keep useful trade-offs. Judge the visual change at your normal viewing distance and keep a setting change only if the performance gain is worth the image-quality loss.
- Retest demanding gameplay. An easy built-in benchmark segment may miss slowdowns in busy scenes. NVIDIA’s GTA V guide specifically warns that its benchmark does not capture some demanding gameplay.
AMD’s Game Advisor documentation describes recording gameplay, reporting average FPS and a 95th-percentile frame-time measure, and suggesting changes such as AA, ambient occlusion, render scale, and display resolution. The page lists compatibility limitations, so check availability against your current AMD Software version and game.
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When graphics changes do not raise FPS
If lowering resolution and several GPU-heavy options barely changes performance, investigate CPU limits, frame caps, VRAM usage, thermal or power limits, and game-specific problems before changing hardware. A CPU bottleneck can keep FPS from rising even when graphics quality is reduced. For context, NVIDIA reported a CPU bottleneck at around 80 FPS at 1920×1080 in its tested Control setup in 2019; that figure is specific to the game, hardware, and test conditions, not a universal threshold.
A graphics-card upgrade is relevant when repeatable testing shows that the GPU is the limit and you want more rendering headroom. The right choice depends on your current card, budget, target resolution and frame rate, and the games you play; lowering settings is not evidence by itself that new hardware is required.
Quick Recap
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