So I don't have the world's best hardware. I'm living in the core of a system I built back in 2011. It's got an i5-2500k (not overclocked), but I recently doubled the RAM to 16GB and last year I put an 8GB Sapphire R9 390 in it.
When gaming, I can get to a playable range. For example, I can get 45-50 FPS in GTAV pretty easily, but when the game chugs for whatever reason it pulls me out of the experience at <30FPS (and that 45 is sort of ugly right off the bat). What I have a tough time with is finding that sweet spot for game settings where the game cranks along at great FPS, and when it chugs dips only to an FPS that doesn't kill the experience. In GTAV, finding this sweet spot is especially frustrating as each significant setting change and each benchmark requires a game restart.
What strategy do you guys use to find that sweet spot for games that max out your system? What effects/filters provide the slimmest visual benefits but most demanding of system resources? How best can I find that zone with consistent 60FPS gaming and the highest visual quality possible?
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Edit: I'm only playing at 1080p for the most part. Rarely I'll stretch a game to 5760x1080 to utilize my three-monitor setup (F1 2016 for sure).
I find setting like ambient occlusion offer subtle visual differences that can be turned off. I also don't worry too much about shadow detail, reflections, AA, motion blur etc.
I would think an i5 2500K and R9 390 would be fine for gaming, but if you want any better performance, turning AA low or off is a good start, no motion blur, maybe lower shadows and tessellation if the game has overkill levels of tessellation.
I always turn off the AA and AF. The benefit doesn't outweigh the performance loss. That and settimg things like shaddows and particles to medium looks the same as high
Is there any systematic knowledge for which of these effects/filters/settings are most intensive on your system?
For example, say I install a game from like 2 or 3 years ago and max out the settings on everything expecting it to run smoothly, but then do a benchmark and see that I'm only hitting like 45FPS. What settings are the first ones that should be lowered or eliminated in order to bring the FPS up drastically? Is it best to change one or two settings by a large amount (x16 to x2 filtering or something) or lower a large number of settings by one notch?
Also, is using v-sync, thus capping my FPS at 60 for my monitors, a good idea or does that hurt performance overall?
Figure out which are settings are bound to which hardware
CPU Bound
View Distance
Physics
AI
Object/Model Detail
More stuff here
GPU Bound
Shading & Post Processing
Stuff like Grass Detail etc
Ambient Occlusion
FSAA / AA, etc
Model detail and skinning (animation related settings)
Texture Detail
Terrain Detail
Resolution (less so)
Note on games like ARMA, on low settings, shadows are actually CPU calculated instead of GPU calculated because ARMA is weird and old
GPU RAM Bound
Texture Detail
Object/Mesh Detail
Resolution & Texture resolution - depends both on GPU ram speed, PCI-e bus speed and GPU RAM size
RAM and HDD Bound
Texture Detail for open world data streaming
View Distance
There's a whoie bunch more but that's just off the top of my head. Basically adjust them according to your hardware (CPU,GPU, etc) but also know that they are all chained together. If you have a good CPU with a bad GPU, crank up the CPU bound settings but keep the GPU ones low, but in the other case (bad CPU, good GPU) that may not be the case, since th CPU is the ultimate bottleneck in any system, everything that gets loaded for any purpose needs to pass through the CPU first, so streaming data open world games may perform bad with CPU bottlenecked scenarios while static loaded games like CSGO where everything is loaded to ram at load-time may be less affected once everything is loaded into working RAM.