Preformance vs Quality

[MrRazot]

I was fiddling with my Nvidia settings and I thought about an argument i had with a friend a while back about what was more important when it comes to playing a game.
I was all for performance and getting the highest fps possible whereas he was all about getting as much detail as possible while keeping it playable.
what's your take?

[Nrein]

I don't think I've had to worry about performance vs. quality in quite some time, but I'd have to say if anything, I prefer an equal balance between the two.
You don't need the highest Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic settings, since really, as long as you've got 2x/4x on, it'll look fine enough. If you can pull off 8x/16x, then sure, go ahead. But you don't *need* it.

If you can splurge the extra money on a graphics card that can, without harming other funds you might need, then that quality is a nice bonus to go along with it.

[Timmy Fox]

I believe what those settings do are simply they try and improve on what's already there. Setting it all to performance should (at least on my AMD card) simply disable all extra tweaks and let the game manage the graphics completely (though possibly some few performance optimizations here and there) but otherwise I like to set it all to make an as small impact as possible and then let the game play as it was designed to play.

[White Wolf Guardian]

I don't have any of these issues, I go for highest quality possible

[Timmy Fox]

It's what you prefer, but from my experience, for an average game today, it adds very little extra (minimal to none) to use quality but you will get worse performance and lower fps.

As said before, setting it to performance should make the game run as it was made without any improvements or modifications by the drivers. As these settings doesn't affect the in-game settings but is only optimizations and improvements done by the driver software on top of the game settings.

[Kite]

I'd say a smooth FPS should probably come first as without it the game basically becomes unplayable. However, goochie graphics are always nice to look at, and I'm a sucker for stunning visuals, more so since starting my course x3

[drenteɳ]

I'd go for graphics quality, until the framerate gets below about 45fps - enough for me but the eyecandy is awesome in modern games. Anything above 60 is wasted on most monitors anyway.

[Timmy Fox]

My point is though that the "quality" name is misleading.
What it does is it applies extra filtering and AA and such which makes minimal different for a substantial performance hit above how the game already looks. It's not gonna make any objects or textures look better but just attempting to make what's already there look slightly better.

[Kite]

When it's tiny adjustments like that then there's no point applying them really. I mean the major differences that make the game overall better substantially.