YOU DON’T NEED ULTRA QUALITY
Depending on the game, the difference in visual fidelity between medium settings and ultra settings may not be worth the performance penalty. Those running extreme GPUs, like the RTX 3090 or RX 6900 XT, can safely set phasers to vaporize and carry on. But if your GPU is long in the tooth, dropping the settings a notch or two can do wonders for performance— particularly if you’re using a graphics card that doesn’t have at least 4GB VRAM, and some recent games even want 8GB just for 1080p ultra.
Take the GTX 1050, which sits at the bottom of the rankings in terms of
1080p ultra-performance and delivered just 15fps on average. Dropping to
1080p medium doubled its performance, and while a few games still struggled—
Warhammer3 and Flight Simulator still failed to break 30fps—most games are at least playable.
What can you expect from medium-quality visuals compared to ultra quality? There’s a bit less of all the finer details, like shadows and reflections, but in some games, the ultra settings feel like a placebo. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 essentially run at settings comparable to medium quality in most games, and millions of console users still enjoy playing games on those systems. 30fps at 1080p medium might not be much to brag about, but if the only other option is not to play, don’t be afraid to give it a shot.
Similarly, if you aren’t rocking top-shelf hardware, you’ll be far better off running at 1080p than at 1440p or 4K. Even if you have a 4K monitor, playing games at 1080p is a reasonable option, and upscaling technologies like AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) and Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS) can still provide a pleasing result.