Not all graphics options automatically consume a lot of processing power. Even simple filters can result in visibly better graphics.
Privateer
The technical reason for the low power consumption is fascinating: modern GPUs have specialized hardware units for texture sampling. Since the necessary texture data is already stored in the extremely fast graphics memory (VRAM), additional sampling from different angles requires almost no processing time. Whether you set it to ‘8x’ or ’16x’ often makes a difference of less than a frame per second on current graphics cards, while visual clarity increases dramatically.
Therefore, we strongly recommend that you always force this setting in the controller, as many games use too low values by default. For Nvidia graphics cards, right-click on the desktop, open the “Nvidia Control Panel” and navigate to “Manage 3D Settings”.
In the native graphics driver (in this case for Nvidia graphics cards), you can usually force the use of anisotropic filtering in applications.
Foundry
Under “Global Settings”, find the “Anisotropic Filtering” option and set it to “16x”. AMD graphics card users should open the Adrenalin Edition software, then navigate through the “Games” tab to the “Graphics” section and expand “Advanced Options.”
There, set the anisotropic filtering mode to “Override application settings” and also select the “16x” level. Another important point is the overall texture quality – many gamers are wary of the ‘Ultra’ setting, but a simple rule applies here: as long as your graphics card’s video memory is large enough to accommodate high-resolution texture packs, this setting won’t affect performance at all.
The ‘Anisotropic Filtering’ graphics card setting ensures that gaming surfaces that are at an acute angle to the camera remain sharp.
Foundry
Only when VRAM overflows and data must be flushed to the system’s slower RAM does serious stuttering occur. The same applies to SSAO, screen space ambient occlusion. This technique calculates subtle shadows where objects are located. At the same time, it adds depth to the scene so that objects don’t appear to be floating in the air.
SSAO is the resource-saving variant of ambient occlusion and typically costs modern chips only 1 to 2 percent of their processing power. If modern post-processing techniques, such as TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing), make the image appear too soft, you can also use the driver’s sharpening filter.
