Help!! Going mental with game settings.....

[Aloysius1974]

Hi

So I have bought my young kids ( 5 to 8) a gaming laptop rather than a console so they can play games and also become more computer literate. However, I fear I may have underestimated just how technical it all is. I grew up on the Specturm 48K remember.........so yes....get all the LOLing out the way now.

So the computer specs are this: GTX 1070, i7-7820HK, 16 GB Ram, 1920 x 1080, 60Hz

So I think this is a mid range type of rig??

So I have researched the hell out of this stuff....but I am none the wiser.

1) How do I set it up so each game is played at the best settings? Geforce Experience seems annoying and I have no clue if it is even doing what it says on the tin. Should I let the games themselves set the graphics settings or what? Do the setting in Geforce Experience over-ride any changes the game might make?

2) I assume that changes in the game settings in the game, or by geforce changes all those setting found in the Nvidia Control Panel under "Manage 3D Settings"??....which is a scary place.

Is there an all singing, all dancing (simple to use and effective) piece of software that will look at my system...and set the gpu to the best settings for each game automatically??...or do most new games have an option to do this?

2) What should I have vsync set at? If I have a 60Hz screen I guess I can't get FPS past 60....which I think vsync currently limits it to (green number in top left of screen when playing games)

Hope this isn't to long......any patient help appreciated.....

If not, I might have to dig out the old Spectrum and the kids can play Manic Miner....

[[R] Nerva]

Okay, I can tell you're pretty new at this, and are probably finding all the jargon and technical stuff a bit daunting. That's okay - we're all new once.

Now, as far as Geforce experience goes, that's kind of just another layer on top of a game's own graphics settings. By default, the NVidia control panel (despite what Nvidia tells you, you don't really need GeForce Experience) lets applications (games themselves) handle their own graphics settings. For some games, it has a profile for them that specifies what specific graphics settings those games need for best performance. You can override these profiles if necessary - they're totally user-changeable - but for most games that won't be necessary.

In your NVIDIA Control Panel, go to "adjust image settings with preview" and click "Let the 3D application decide" if that radio button isn't selected already. That should let your games handle their own graphics settings according to profiles registered within the configuration program. With this setting in place, games override anything that the Nvidia control panel says - this ensures that nvidia doesn't try to saddle them with settings that they're incompatible with.

From there, it's just a matter of setting the graphics settings in the games you play. Some games have locked framerates - in some games, this is selectable, others it's not. Sadly there's little rhyme or reason to it, and unless they make it selectable it's not worth worrying about. The point being is to identify the highest framerate your game is capable of, and then raising or lowering graphics settings until you've got a smooth, stable framerate, at or near the cap.

If you're hitting the cap easily, then it's time to turn up settings like texture size, texture detail, model detail, and possibly pretty effects like bloom, ambient occlusion, depth-of-field effects, motion blur, detailed shadows, water reflections, etc Exactly which ones appear are game-dependent. The higher you crank these settings and the more pretty effects you turn on, the more GPU the game will use and the prettier it'll be, but if you use too much, you'll suffer framerate drops, which should be avoided if at all possible.

If your framerate is way far away from the cap, then you need to reduce or turn off the same list of features as above. Again, they're game-dependent. Keep turning them down and testing, turning them down and testing, until you've got the desired framerate and the game looks as least-crap as possible. If you hit the absolute minimum settings, and you still can't get the desired framerate, then chances are the game's requirements are a bit too intense for your system to handle comfortably. You'll either have to deal with the lowered framerate, or look into a hardware upgrade.

Once you've got an individual game set, and your settings saved, you shouldn't have to mess with them ever again, unless you run into a spot in the game that's significantly more intensive on your graphics card, in which case you might have to tweak a few settings back a bit.

As for framerates, don't worry about going past 60. Humans can't even see framerates past 60 anyway, there's literally nothing to gain. According to studies, the human eye and brain actually processes data roughly between 38 and 53 FPS, depending on a number of factors including age, eye health, brain health, stress, visual acuity, even things like how well rested you are, your mental state, and even the time of day. 60 FPS is more than you'll need, significantly more in the right situation.

Sadly there's no one-stop shop to handle all game's settings perfectly. There's too much individual variation in applications and coding and a metric crapton of other variables to allow for that to exist.

Now as far as VSync. VSync is a setting that most modern monitors don't need, and it exists largely for compatibility's sake. It forces the vertical refresh rate to match the horizontal refresh rate. This prevents things like screen tearing in 3D games, where you'll spin the camera around and it'll look like the image is divided in two, because the upper half of the screen has updated faster than the lower half. If you start seeing this symptom, or other graphics weirdness, turn on vsync and see if that helps. If not, leave it off.

Does that help any?

[Masentaja]

Id say thats a fairly average system, you should be able to play almost any game on medium-high settings.

Im not sure about this but I think atleast all steam games automatically use the best settings for your computer.

I reccomend you download GeForce experience since it allows you to update your GPU's drivers fast and easily.
GeForce experience is alao the program you want to use if you want to "optimize" the all of the game settings.

As for your question about Vsync, i cant help you with that, I personally keep it on since it locks my fps to 60 and prevents larger fps drops in games.

[Aloysius1974]

Nerva - Thanks for putting the time into that response mate......very much appreciated.

[B1nary_Weap0nry]

Originally posted by R Nerva:

Okay, I can tell you're pretty new at this, and are probably finding all the jargon and technical stuff a bit daunting. That's okay - we're all new once.

Now, as far as Geforce experience goes, that's kind of just another layer on top of a game's own graphics settings. By default, the NVidia control panel (despite what Nvidia tells you, you don't really need GeForce Experience) lets applications (games themselves) handle their own graphics settings. For some games, it has a profile for them that specifies what specific graphics settings those games need for best performance. You can override these profiles if necessary - they're totally user-changeable - but for most games that won't be necessary.

In your NVIDIA Control Panel, go to "adjust image settings with preview" and click "Let the 3D application decide" if that radio button isn't selected already. That should let your games handle their own graphics settings according to profiles registered within the configuration program. With this setting in place, games override anything that the Nvidia control panel says - this ensures that nvidia doesn't try to saddle them with settings that they're incompatible with.

From there, it's just a matter of setting the graphics settings in the games you play. Some games have locked framerates - in some games, this is selectable, others it's not. Sadly there's little rhyme or reason to it, and unless they make it selectable it's not worth worrying about. The point being is to identify the highest framerate your game is capable of, and then raising or lowering graphics settings until you've got a smooth, stable framerate, at or near the cap.

If you're hitting the cap easily, then it's time to turn up settings like texture size, texture detail, model detail, and possibly pretty effects like bloom, ambient occlusion, depth-of-field effects, motion blur, detailed shadows, water reflections, etc Exactly which ones appear are game-dependent. The higher you crank these settings and the more pretty effects you turn on, the more GPU the game will use and the prettier it'll be, but if you use too much, you'll suffer framerate drops, which should be avoided if at all possible.

If your framerate is way far away from the cap, then you need to reduce or turn off the same list of features as above. Again, they're game-dependent. Keep turning them down and testing, turning them down and testing, until you've got the desired framerate and the game looks as least-crap as possible. If you hit the absolute minimum settings, and you still can't get the desired framerate, then chances are the game's requirements are a bit too intense for your system to handle comfortably. You'll either have to deal with the lowered framerate, or look into a hardware upgrade.

Once you've got an individual game set, and your settings saved, you shouldn't have to mess with them ever again, unless you run into a spot in the game that's significantly more intensive on your graphics card, in which case you might have to tweak a few settings back a bit.

As for framerates, don't worry about going past 60. Humans can't even see framerates past 60 anyway, there's literally nothing to gain. According to studies, the human eye and brain actually processes data roughly between 38 and 53 FPS, depending on a number of factors including age, eye health, brain health, stress, visual acuity, even things like how well rested you are, your mental state, and even the time of day. 60 FPS is more than you'll need, significantly more in the right situation.

Sadly there's no one-stop shop to handle all game's settings perfectly. There's too much individual variation in applications and coding and a metric crapton of other variables to allow for that to exist.

Now as far as VSync. VSync is a setting that most modern monitors don't need, and it exists largely for compatibility's sake. It forces the vertical refresh rate to match the horizontal refresh rate. This prevents things like screen tearing in 3D games, where you'll spin the camera around and it'll look like the image is divided in two, because the upper half of the screen has updated faster than the lower half. If you start seeing this symptom, or other graphics weirdness, turn on vsync and see if that helps. If not, leave it off.

Does that help any?

Holy crap bruh, thanks a lot for these details. I just sent u an award 😀

[D3AD]

i do gotta say whoever said you cant see past 60 fps... clealy is living in 1920... as that theory has been proven wrong DECADES ago...
their is a huge performance difference between 60 fps and 100 fps ( the 99% fps not the shown ) and EVEN a bigger difference between 120 fps and 240...... ONCE you have a rig that can hit those frames... * steadily * you WONT be able to go back to 60 ( 0r console ) cause you can legit see the graphic drag. render delay...

[D3AD]

as well as you NEED nvidia Experience to do your updates...


UNLESS you feel like manually loading EACH one each week/month from the website....

[Snapjak]

Originally posted by D3AD:

as well as you NEED nvidia Experience to do your updates...


UNLESS you feel like manually loading EACH one each week/month from the website....

Or just be smarter about driver updates and only do them when you actually need them (specific game improvements, bug fixes, got a brand new GPU). There's usually little reason to continually update drivers.

[Kargor]

Most settings are just rubbish.

Set the game to low/medium/high depending on what you think the box can handle, and just try how the game runs. Luckily, most games have this kind of summary-setting nowadays.

[Bibo1]

The thread was necroed after 3 years people.