Corner Confessions is for sharing guilty gaming secrets. Secrets like… I yearn for the days when graphics options screens consisted of nothing but a resolution selection, and a detail slider with three choices: low, medium, and high.
Dynamic global illumination, post-processing, upscaling method, FSR quality, AMD FSD frame generation, AMD FSR anti-lag technology, NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency, Panini projection intensity… even if a dev has been thoughtful enough to provide explanations of every arcane instrument on their list, the prospect of spending an hour speculatively tinkering with them in the vain hope of achieving the perfect balance between speed and spectacle, really doesn’t appeal.
Remember those 3D preview windows that used to accompany graphics setting screens? What happened to those? Nowadays, the form seems to be…
1. Take a mental or actual screenshot of the current in-game view.
2. Go into settings and move a lever or two.
3. Sigh deeply on being informed a game restart is required.
4. Restart.
5. Ponder the new-look vista, wondering if it’s A) superior to the previous one, and/or B) less taxing on your hardware.
6. Return to 1 and repeat the process.
“Suck it up, sunshine! You’re a PC gamer with a penchant for sims. This sort of tweaking has always been part of the hobby.”. Yes, I realise that, but the range of tweakable things has grown so long of late, I think it’s high-time new approaches were trialed, or old ones – such as preview windows – reintroduced.
I’ll leave it to more technically savvy Cornerites to suggest viable alternatives to the current tiresome, text-heavy tweak-and-check orthodoxy. Are rolling demos with real-time, key-triggered settings changes practical? Are they preferable? Should Luddites like me simply be able to choose an image from a gallery of screenshots (all showing the same scene, natch) embellished with FPS impact advice? “That’s the look I’m after, and the frame-rate consequences appear acceptable”… one click, and, potentially, the lazy and the technophobic are good to go.
Readers, am I just an old geezer yelling at clouds, or are the graphics settings pages in PC games in need of a rethink?
If you use Nvidia graphics, their app can automatically set most games’ graphics settings for you based on a single performance/quality slider.
Now I’ve never used it though because I don’t like other people touching my things, so I can’t say how well it works. Maybe I should try it sometime though because I’m also getting less and less patient when it comes to fiddling with stuff just to enjoy my game/sim. It’s one of the main reasons my VR headset continues to gather dust.
I tend to only reach for the Nvidia Control Panel if a game refuses to, say, anti-alias satisfactorily. Maybe I need to fully embrace it and switch on ‘Use the advanced 3D image settings’ for all titles. As said settings don’t include things like motion blur (which I loathe) presumably some things can still be set via the settings menus of individual games.
Don’t most games offer predefined profiles though?
As for hardware impact you’d need even more fun stuff like things to find out if you’re limited by the CPU or GPU (or both). Thinking about tools like Nvidia FrameView and Intel PresentMon for some objective metrics. And there there are the things that can absolutely destroy performance outside the game settings, like third-party overlays or multi-monitor setups that prevent independent flips.
“Don’t most games offer predefined profiles though?”
True, but I always seem to find myself doing further tinkering.
In the game I’m currently developing ‘developer mode’ lets me tweak all the graphics settings on the fly.
I was already planning to translate that into a rendered scene in the options, so the player can see in real-time what changing the options results in. Albeit most of the options are going to be crude – shadows on/off, black borders on objects on/off, etc. But it’ll help people choose the aesthetic they want, and I’m also going to look at providing ‘this is the impact on your average FPS’ feedback too (in real time).
Although I’m getting 1100fps with all prettiness turned on right now. I can’t be doing with low framerates.
It’s a very much not a Corneritetype of game, but Spider-Man 2 impressed me with many* QoL features, and one of them was that the settings app is overlaid on an in-game scene, so you can see real-time changes when you change graphics options.
There’s no technical reason why more games can’t do this, or at the very least give a direct link to a benchmark mode. (Unless like the Forza games, it will then insist on restarting the game after each benchmark run, WHY!?).
I’m also going to praise Satisfactory, for pretty much ever possible settings option having a sensible explanation of what each setting does at the bottom of the screen.
*(Another one is when you boot the game, right under the ‘Continue’ option there’s a ‘Previously On…’ option which gives you a quick recap of the plot up to that point. Seriously, the devs clearly put a lot of effort into removing pain-points in this game and deserve to be lauded for it.)