Ultra settings suck!

some games and engines look " cleaner " on low sometimes.bf games especially.also unreal 4 engine games if you turn off aa can .depends what type they use.

some effects are there just to hide .
 
Some comments are properly hilarious but I'll try to be serious;p

I agree that in most cases there's not much between high and ultra and the performance hit can be rather extreme. I've learnt to accept having to drop some settings to get a smoother experience, 99% of games look pretty great on very high and don't cause my 1070 to combust.

There is an appreciable difference on ultra settings in some titles but those are far and in between.
 
And here I am playing most of my games on low (but out of choice mainly and a habit picked up from CS:GO which I play the lowest it goes, I don't care for it to look fancy, as long as it runs!)
 
Ultra or nothing for me ;). In all honesty though, I just find it hard to choose a lower option than ultra in a game menu if there is an ultra option there, isn't that just pc masteracery ;) . I think over the years it's just the power of pc that let you do that, but this last year or so has been rubbish for optimised games, so now you do need to indulge in a little menu tinkering from time to time. Freesync helps me out massively though, I find even running ultra when hitting 50 or 60, it does feel a lot smoother than that even if the numbers don't show, so its just second nature to whack all the dials to 11.
 
~>Dg<~ said:
some games and engines look " cleaner " on low sometimes.bf games especially.also unreal 4 engine games if you turn off aa can .depends what type they use.

some effects are there just to hide .
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AA is one of the first things I turn off now, most games for some reason have decided to drop SSAA, SMAA + MSAA in favour for blurry methods i.e. TAA + FXAA, saying that, I usually don't really notice any aliasing/shimmering issues anyway....

The only time I would ever use the blurry methods of AA are when you have extreme shimmering/aliasing going on i.e. GTA 5, if a game needs some AA and doesn't have a good AA option like SMAA then I'll look for a good sweetfx config.

Mafia 3's AA is hilarious, the highest option completely blurs the screen, it really does look like someone has smeared vaseline over your screen :o And the performance hit with it lol....



Here are some screen comparisons between games high and ultra preset:

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This one is with TAA "on" as opposed to the auto set option of "off" with the "high" preset option.

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No need to mention which is ultra and which is high since you can tell from the FPS :p

Looking back, I probably should have done a better scenario for WD 2, maybe later!

As already been touched upon, if you were go into the settings and manually tweak the settings, you would get even better performance and very likely have a game that looks better than just sticking it to "ultra".


It's disappointing the PC gaming sector overall these days imo, especially when you look at digital foundry's PC comparison (which is a top end rig costing thousands) to a PS 4 pro, games barely look any better and certainly not worth the extra £500+ imo, the only very noticeable difference is usually the shadows.

I just wish "ultra" brought more benefit to the visuals, even if it completely hampered the performance more than current games on ultra today as at least the likes of £500+ GPUs + £300+ CPUs would be a lot more justifiable purchases then (imo).
 
Why bother with the inconvenience though mate, just buy the best card and whack everything on ultra on a low resolution monitor. This method offers the least hassle, high fps and most importantly maximum ePeen. Lol :p

Honestly quite a few people do the above :o:p:D
 
smogsy said:
Putting Witcher 3 on High (Foliage distance is Massive difference compared to Ultra)

witcher high vs ultra = 15Fps
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Yeah, we are not saying that every single game has the issue. You also need to play with many sliders and see which has a visual impact. Some may have a difference you can easily see going from high to ultra (as they should).

Just look at witcher 3 which you just brought up. When you mess about with hairworks you can optimise visual quality to fps. But most will leave it max, then either complain it is a performance hog or just go spend 1-2k on graphics cards to brute force it. When all one had to do was reduce it from 16x to 8 or 4 for example and would not even see the difference anyway.

Also one needs to consider, ever small improvements to IQ which you see in stills, you probably won't see or appreciate when actually playing as you move about. Again it depends from game to game, setting to setting.
 
Although an old title, when tinkering about with the poorly optimized Clear Sky at the weekend, it illustrated just how little difference there is between ultra and high. This can vary between mods, though.

I like the highest visual quality available, but not at the expense of performance (especially when the difference is minimal).
 
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Nexus18 said:
It's disappointing the PC gaming sector overall these days imo, especially when you look at digital foundry's PC comparison (which is a top end rig costing thousands) to a PS 4 pro, games barely look any better and certainly not worth the extra £500+ imo, the only very noticeable difference is usually the shadows.
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There aren't a lot of games that run at 60fps at all though, even with the PS4 Pro (I own one)

Most are locked to 30fps or unlocked with wildly variable framerates in the low 40's that have frame pacing issues.
 
There is heavy Youtube compression so often the difference between High/Ultra is even harder to see when watching via Youtube.

Same with 4k Youtube vs native 4k res on your own PC.
 
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