Why you shouldn’t be afraid to run games on medium settings

No one wants to play their PC games on the “low” preset, and most PC gamers would probably hate to drop below the “high” preset, but regardless of whether you have a couch potato or a powerful rig, you will be making a mistake if Never looked at the “medium” settings.

Game settings are just labels, use your eyes

What does “medium” or “high” even mean? Everything is relative. Today’s average setup was “ultra” just a few years ago. Graphics presets and levels are related to the game itself, not to some objective external criteria. So you should not put any arrow in the name of the setting, but in the actual way it looks and affects the game performance.

If “medium” water reflections look great and “high” reflections look even better, but they eat up 10% of the frame rate, why not balance it out unless you have a spare fps. In the end, eyeballs are the only thing that matters when it comes to visual settings in a video game.

All game settings look good these days

There was a time when the “low” setting in a video game meant blurry textures everywhere, with no lighting or shadows at all. These days, the basic elements of an attractive presentation are present even on the lowest settings in the game. Consider the preset “low” screenshot of Days ago. A game from the PS4 era that works on PC.

Of course, some games now have “ultra-low” settings designed for small-spec esports gaming laptops or internet café PCs, which look more like traditional “potato” settings. However, the games generally look good at any level of detail.

The gap from average to super is often smaller than you think

Of course, I don’t think anyone should just pick a preset and be done with it. Anyone who cares about getting the best balance between image quality and performance will need to tweak individual settings to create a custom preset. Here you can get something that sounds very close to the game’s highest preset without massive performance penalties.

For example, texture detail should always be set to the highest level that your graphics card’s VRAM allows. On my Lenovo Legion GO laptop, I may have mostly medium settings, but I push the texture detail as high as possible without running out of VRAM. Texture detail is one of the most impactful visual settings, but it doesn’t really have a huge impact on performance unless you have a GPU with very little memory bandwidth.

Other settings don’t make such obvious changes. For example, it’s rarely worth improving from medium shadow detail to ultra-high detail. Likewise, ambient occlusion (which shows decent dark shadows under and between objects) makes a huge difference when turned on, but going from average to ultra results in seriously diminishing returns.

It’s also important to remember that while you’re playing a game, you’re not checking out every little detail. So think about what the game looks like during normal gameplay, not when you have a magnifying glass.

Medium settings can make games look much better when playing

Why all this attention to settings? Well, as you probably know, there has to be a balance between visual settings and frame rate. The higher the frame rate, the smoother movement appears on screen, and perhaps more importantly, the faster the game world responds to you. A video game isn’t something you watch like a movie, you influence the game world, and it responds to your input. This means that games have a look and feel. If you want to get into that “flow” state and feel interactive, higher frame rates are always welcome.

Turning some or all of the settings to medium can dramatically improve the actual gaming experience, turning a game that feels like you’re trapped in a dream where you can’t run fast enough into one that feels powerful and powerful. However, don’t forget that there are some new modern tricks, such as AI techniques that allow you to get higher frame rates without dropping the game settings too much. So use all the tools at your disposal to realize the dream of having equally beautiful toys and fast.