Video games come in all sorts of visual styles. Most of them look very realistic and almost indistinguishable from real life. Others have a more stylized approach to graphics, like anime-style art, etc. But almost all of the, especially on PC, come with ultra graphics setting that you can turn on to get the best-looking graphics possible.
Photo taken from Cyberpunk 2077 Steam page
But the real question here is, should you? Is it even worth getting a good-looking game if the game runs like a slideshow? This article will explain whether ultra graphics settings in video games are worth it after all.
Quality Vs Performance Balance
According to Tech Times, PC gaming will always need to have this balance in mind. You will always want to make sure that your games runs as smooth as possible, while also looking its best. You can still choose to have one or the other, but you will have to make sacrifices. Either way, this balance is a great rule of thumb.
Turning on ultra settings in video games will give you the best-looking game. But it will do so at the cost of the game's performance. And therein lies the problem, because most of the time, Ultra settings don't even look that much better when compared to High or even Medium graphics settings.
Here is a video from the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed which tackles ultra settings and how they don't look as good as you expect them to be:
Perhaps the most glaring example is that of Ubisoft's Watch Dogs Legion. In that game, Ultra settings didn't look too different from Very High and High, all while costing as much as 47 percent of the game's performance when switching from Ultra to High. In layman's terms, you don't get a prettier game while your frame rate is almost slashed in half.
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Basically what happens here is simple. If you turn on Ultra settings in most modern games, you won't even notice the visual upgrades unless you actively look for them. And most of the time, you're too busy playing to even notice - all while your game's frame rate tanks and your overall experience feels slow and painful.
What About Ray Tracing?
Ray tracing is this gaming generation's biggest buzzword, and there's none that come close. And it also tends to be included with Ultra graphics settings in modern games, which is why we included it here.
But ray tracing as a whole is an extremely demanding setting, even to the most powerful graphics cards. This is why NVIDIA shipped their last two RTX series GPUs with the performance-enhancing DLSS, so you could turn RTX on without your games looking like a slideshow. Which then brings us to the question: is ray tracing even worth turning on?
In this video by Linus Tech Tips, they discovered that not even turning ray tracing on is worth the cost when talking about the balance between quality and performance:
At the end of their video, it was revealed that ordinary people can barely tell when RTX is turned on. But those who have been gaming with ray tracing-enabled hardware at home for a considerable amount of time could, given their prior experience and exposure to the technology.
Conclusions
So what's the verdict here? Simple: unless you have an uber-powerful graphics card, there's no point to Ultra settings in video games. High or even Medium settings are more than enough and they net you way more performance than you can get.
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Story posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce