Windows 10: What is your preference, higher FPS or better graphics quality?

No I prefer quality over FPS if at all possible, but I would lower the quality to get rid of stuttering. Not really a contradiction, since it rarely happens in normal gaming use.

 

Thanks for the replies. I normally prefer better visuals over FPS, as long as performance is good. But if performance drops noticeably then I'll do what must be done to increase FPS. For me FPS correlates to performance, the higher one is, the better the other will be. I only use an FPS counter initially when playing a game, only as a gauge of sorts to help me determine the best settings, after that I don't use one for that game. I'm just getting used to my new laptop, getting a feel for how it will handle certain games. For the most part the GTX 1080 plays most games with everything maxxed, but occasionally I have to turn a few things down. Almost any game that runs at less than 4K can be maxxed, no problems, but the 1080 can sometimes struggle to maintain a consistent 60 at 4K. Oftentimes it drops into the low 40s or 50s. I think longer term I will either need to upgrade to a 1080 TI, or run 2 1080s in SLI.

 

I normally go for eye candy but tweak where I can get the frames as well. For example, I never use shadows or motion blur and thus turn those off or low to keep high frames while allowing for eye candy.

Anyway no matter which game you play you're bound to run into a performance issue somewhere where frames dip. This can happen for a myriad of reasons and thus why you should always keep drivers updated. Same goes for patches, it's usually a good idea to keep the game updated as bugs continue to get fixed.

Bottom line is there really is no one fix that can guarantee you max eye candy and max frames on a consistent basis. That even the highest end machines with the best hardware in the world my struggle with a game from time to time. That's because we can't control the whole where one part is you, another hardware, another software, another game / game vendor. We can only do our part and hope everyone else does theirs.

My two cents.

 

@sygnus21: I'm quite religious about keeping my GPU drivers up to date, but I only use stable versions. I may use a beta if it fixes a specific issue I'm having, but other than that, nope. I may need to look into doing some slight overclocking for the 4K-capable games.

 

I don't overclock and only run a 24 inch monitor @ 1920 x 1200 so 1080P Works for me. Haven't gotten into the 4K thing yet.

 

Its really all relevant to the game to be honest, For example. Cs go, I run everything on low at around 280fps. I went back and turned on vsync to see the difference, and damn it felt like a laggy mess, Racing games? Fps over graphical, Anything else, im happy with a balance of two, nothing under 50fps for me. Just a personal preference

 

@Devlin1888: Yeah I would agree, for fast-paced games (like racing, as you mentioned), FPS is more important. I'll go for higher FPS in Mortal Kombat X, but dont care about it in Skyrim, because it's slower and therefore less important (to me).

 

I wouldn't expect 4k gaming from a laptop even with a 1080 in it. 4k still requires beefy hardware and suitable cooling usually in the form of AIOs etc.

 

@swarfega: Yeah, I didn't exactly expect a consistent 60 FPS at 4K even with a 1080. I knew it was a powerhouse card (at the time the best on the market, less than a few months ago, at which point the 1080 Ti wasn't released yet if I'm not mistaken). But still, 40+ at 4K is still very good so I'm not complaining. I know 4K takes alot of horsepower. I've checked, I can upgrade to the 1080 Ti if I want, I can even have 2 GPUs, but it's not a necessity. Almost every game except the 4K ones runned maxxed out anyway.

Before I forget, who can name a good FPS counter/video recorder for DirectX 12 games? I need something that works with games from all sources, with both DX11 and DX12 as well as older DX versions, so I'd imagine NVIDIA ShadowPlay is out (GeForce Experience doesn't detect alot of my games, but I already know why). I mainly use Fraps, but it doesn't work with DX12 and is quite outdated.

Thanks!

 

I lean forward to FPS over quality especially on competitive online games. But if it gets jittery then I will try to balance it out to equally distribute the load of the GPU and CPU so it wouldn't cause a bottleneck.

 

FPS has always been vital to me.. it's what ensures how smooth your game runs.. I only lean towards visuals in singleplayer games where i can care less about extremely high FPS but enjoy how the game looks while playing through the story.. but FPS all the way when it comes to Multiplayer games.