Should I let GeForce Experience optimize my settings, or should I customize them myself?

[lacanseven]

Just curious how you guys have your graphics settings decided. Personally, I'd probably have mine set lower than what Nvidea tells me I can do. But I was wondering, how do you decide an what graphic settings are just right for your computer?

[PanPan]

It's usually not the best, better to tune yourself.

I currently have a 7900XT (had Nvidia before) and use the following game settings :

4K, FSR quality, everything to high except pop density to normal, only local shadows RT.
I usually don't drop below 60fps.

I would recommand to put some settings to normal like volumetric fogs, decals, reflections... (result is stil great) if your GPU struggles.

[funkynutz]

As PanPan says: Do it yourself.

GFE isn't worth the hassle it causes in some games, just for the few it works well in. I don't even let it install... Give me the drivers and control panel, everything else is just bloatware to me.

[lacanseven]

Great, any other recommendations of what to scale down to ease up the burden on my laptop?

[Tokenn]

I've never had a problem with GfE. I've used the optimise feature to set a baseline for settings, and tweaked it from there. I think it's valuable if you don't have any real idea of what to do with your settings...and optimising again easily takes you back to the baseline.

[Cooperal]

Sorry I typed this yesterday when steam discussions was having a meltdown and couldn't post, so I kept it to the side and am posting it now:

I always prefer to customise. Start with an ambitious graphics preset and then chip away at the quality manually until I achieve the balance between graphics and performance that I find most pleasing in a taxing location.

It definitely helps to know what settings are the most taxing and as these are often consistent across a lot of games graphical settings. For this reason understanding graphical settings in one game can help you best appreciate most of your other games.

I am sure there are more than just one video on the tubes that breaks down the visual and performance hit of every setting in this game. It isn't always possible to find benchmarks from people using an identical CPU/GPU to your own but I find that looking for one with same brand hardware can still give a sufficient ballpark idea of the performance impacts.

Original post ends here.
--------------

Originally posted by lacanseven:

Great, any other recommendations of what to scale down to ease up the burden on my laptop?

The best texture quality will be largely dependant on your VRAM. Maxing out things like shadows, volumetric effects, lighting, reflections can use a frivolous amount of resources at their max setting compared to nearly-as-good high/medium settings.

Make sure you are in a decent place to test the effects that you are playing with. Water effects can be quite expensive too but you are obviously not going to see the performance hit if you are not near water when testing out that setting. You don't want a game that only works decent when you are not near water.

It is hard to be more specific without knowing your specs but I personally would not recommend not using pathtracing even if your PC can play it acceptably. Worse performance and much buggier than psycho raytracing. Combined with DLSS and frame gen it causes ghosting out the wahzoo even if your FPS is breaking triple figures. They definitely made improvements over the pre-2.0 'preview' pathtracing but I think it should still be called a preview in its current state.