Very much depends on the game, if it's a racing game I try to maximize fps output, for just about everything else I go for the prettier picture.
But yes, a lot of graphic options are just idiotic, for NFS Undercover for instance I had to turn a lot of crap off to actually make it look better. =/
Also especially when playing flightsimulators or console ported fps I try to increase the fov so it won't make me nauseaus.
And I will always try to go for the maximum resolution possible which is more or less a shortcoming of modern flatscreens, old crt's could display any resolution within their scanning range sharply, lcd's not so much.

"Easy landing" set to ON whenever possible.

In Flight Sims, I set everything to Realistic. Even if that means I won't survive the landing! (And I don't even want to explain the details of carrier landing! - embarassing overshoot or plain bang on the carrier's hull) 🤣

I spend hours trying to land. Just the landing itself is like three quarter of the game already for me. And I enjoy making the approach.

All graphical detail settings to highest or at least high. If it's not possible to play the game without significantly compromising the visuals I don't play it (used to lower details a lot though). Currently 1280x1024 or 1024x768 depending on the game. Always some amount of AA, 16x AF; in newer games I use FXAA a lot because it's so cheap and the quality falls somewhere between 2x and 4x MSAA. In most games I turn motion blur off. Always fullscreen, VSync always off save for very few games where I don't necessarily mind the mouse delay. Music always on, mouse smoothing off. Finally, I always use the arrow keys.

AA/AF to the max possible with frames still 60+. For racing/air combat sims it's the main thing you spend your $$$ on GPUs for IMHO. In driving all the important graphics are squashed into a thin strip of horizon, and the higher the clarity the better. It's also imperative in air combat to make out the details of distant targets. I turn these down only as a last resort if the frames fall too low too often.

Vsync=ON or OFF depending on the game, though I'd say generally OFF

Blur=OFF

In-Game music=OFF in any real-world sim type game

Invert Mouse is useful *IF* the game default is 'pull back' mouse=UP [emulating a joystick]. I always set it mouse forward=UP if it isn't alredy

View 3D Hands? / View moving steering wheel?=OFF in any racing sim that offers the option - I hate the sensation that there is someone in front of me doing the driving! I'm not into the third-person POV in games to begin with and even things that interfere with the "being there" feeling in a first person game is a downer for me. It's less of an issue in flight sims since you don't spend much time looking down at your lap, unless you have the field of view so wide that you continuously see the stick moving around.

POV=First-Person in *ANY* game that offers the option

Jump=Right Mouse Button / Use=Space: instinctive for me in WASD setups

Something that hasn't really been talked about in this thread is FOV. Since I recently got sick of the 5:4 format of my old 19" and finally caved in and got a nice 23" 1080p screen this suddenly became very relevant for me. Now I find myself adjusting every single game and it can be a real pain to find the optimal FOV setting for every one (even with sites like WSGF), not to speak of other HUD related settings. It's also quite amazing how ignorant developers can be about widescreen support and in some cases older games are actually better off. The UT series is an example here, with UT99 w/ UTGLR offering full control of resolution, FOV and HUD size, UT04 being limited to 1680x1050 and FOV 100 in the menu (setting higher resolutions will cause issues, while setting a higher FOV in the ini should be fine) and UT3 supporting all widescreen resolutions, but again limiting the FOV to 100, with no possibility of changing it without some mutators. I also recall Crysis having some ludicrous value like 65 as default, just like good old Turok 2.

well, you can always type 'setres 1920x1080' in any UnrealEngine game you ever encounter.

Anything id tech before 5 are pretty bad when it comes to non-4:3 aspects. I think there's only 3 ports for Quake that do proper Hor+ 16:9... and 2 for Quake2.

Strange, I clearly recall there being an an issue with >1680x1050 in UT04 where the moon on FaceClassic would be oval etc., but now that I tried it out myself everything seems normal (aside from the FOV not being properly applied to the weapon)...

If I'm playing an FPS, I usually set the movement controls to WASD with E for use, ctrl and C for crouch, F for melee attacks if the game has them, and sometimes the right mouse button for jumping if the game doesn't have any form of secondary firing or scoping in (like Quake). As well, I usually turn up the mouse sensitivity a bit, enable "always run", enable mouselooking, disable lookspring, and disable mouse smoothing.

For pretty much any game, I'll turn up the resolution as high as it will allow me, and tweak the graphics settings for either best performance (in newer games like TF2), or best visuals (in older games like UT, Quake III, etc.) I will also mention that I hate bloom and motion blur with a passion, and disable them whenever possible.

A couple of years back, I would've said that I make sure to turn up all the graphics options to max. Now, well, it's more a case of finding a balance between quality and playability. Funny how my PC that used to be a monster 3-4 years ago, now is more like an old lion. It can roar when it feels like it, but too often it prefers to just nap in the shade 😜 I don't really like blur type effects, especially not the few times I play fps games (hardly ever), because I often suffer from motion sickness. For games here it applies, I turn on subtitles. Also like "always run" or something like that if it's an adventure game. Looking at the character walking from one end of the screen to the other gets boring after a while. 😁

LunarG mentioned motion sickness. Which reminds me I ALWAYS disable that annoying 'Head Bob' effect if there's an option for it. I don't suffer from motion sickness EXCEPT with this weird feature...

You just don't experience 'bobbing' like this in real life at all - the same goes for head jiggle in racing games. Topic for another discussion...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DWTWBpXZV8&t=15s
cannot tell i see any difference 😉

robertmo wrote on 2020-12-31, 13:44:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DWTWBpXZV8&t=15s
cannot tell i see any difference 😉

I can see differences and thats even taking into account that its a crappy compressed youtube video in 1440p max.

I often keep vsync on in old games because a lot of old games get screwy with high frame rates., but I turn it off for newer games if I an maintain a frame rate well above my monitor refresh rate.

Motion blur, depth of field, vignette, film grain, basically anything that tries to make the image less sharp for artistic effect I turn off.

If you can get your card to use a work station driver, I like forcing super sampling in the graphics control panel. For whatever reason nvidia removed the option (in favor of DSR I guess), but not all games like running at 4k resolution.

In Unreal and UT99 I set GameSpeed to 0.909091 to negate DeathMatch's "Hardcore" mode changing the GameSpeed by 10%.

Because 0.909091 * 0.1 = 1.0 in terms of the floating point precision Unreal Engine 1 uses.

I also set Difficulty to "4" (otherwise known ingame as "Adept") because it's the only level in UT99 that doesn't make the bots cheat by having more GroundSpeed than players have.

In the recent years, many games have started using Chromatic Aberration as a post processing effect.

I utterly despise that crap and turn it off whenever possible. Just looking at pictures of it makes my eyes hurt.

Chromatic aberration and vignette just make the image look objectively worse and I turn them off all the time. Motion blur too, and I am staring to turn off bloom and DoF too.

Also, invert mouse 😉