Why You Shouldn't Be Afraid of Running Games on Medium Settings

No one wants to play their PC games on the "low" preset, and most PC gamers are likely loathe to drop under the "high" level, but regardless of whether you have a potato or powerhouse rig, you'd be making a mistake if you never even look at "medium" settings.

Game Settings Are Just Labels, Use Your Eyes

What does "medium" or "high" even mean? It's all relative. Today's medium setting would have been "ultra" just a few years ago. Graphics presets and levels are relative to the game itself, not to some objective external standard. So you shouldn't put any stock in the name of the setting, but in the actual way it looks and affects game performance.

If "medium" water reflections look great and "high" reflections look better, but eat 10% of your frame rate, then why not strike the balance unless you have fps to spare. In the end, your eyeballs are the only thing that matters when it comes to visual settings in a video game.

All Game Settings Look Good These Days

There was a time when the "low" setting in a video game would mean blurry textures everywhere, with no lighting or shadows at all. These days, the basic elements of an attractive render are present even at the lowest settings in a game. Consider this "low" preset screenshot of Days Gone. A PS4-era game running on PC.

Of course, some games now have a "very low" setting designed for min-spec esports gaming laptops or internet café PCs, which do look more like traditional "potato" settings. However, by and large games look fine at any detail level.

The Gap From Medium to Ultra Is Often Smaller Than You Think

Of course, I don't think anyone should just pick a preset and call it a day. Anyone who cares about getting the best balance of image quality and performance needs to tweak the individual settings to make a custom preset. Here's where you can get something that looks pretty close to the game's highest preset without the enormous performance penalty.

For example, texture detail should always be set as high as your graphics card's VRAM will allow. On my Lenovo Legion GO handheld PC, I might have mostly medium settings, but I push the texture detail as high as I can without running out of VRAM. Texture detail is one of the most impactful visual settings, but it doesn't really have a huge performance impact unless you happen to have a GPU with very little memory bandwidth.

Other settings don't make such obvious changes. For example, the improvement from medium shadow detail to ultra is rarely worth the difference. Likewise, ambient occlusion (which shows proper dark shadows under and between objects) makes a huge difference when you turn it on, but going from medium to ultra has serious diminishing returns.

It's also important to remember that while you're playing a game you aren't scrutinizing every little detail. So consider what the game looks like during normal gameplay, not when you have your magnifying glass out.

Medium Settings Can Make Games Feel So Much Better to Play

Why all the fussing with settings? Well, as you probably know, there has to be a balance between visual settings and frame rate. The higher the frame rate, the smoother on-screen motion appears and also, perhaps most importantly, the snappier the game world responds to you. A video game isn't something you watch like a movie, you are influencing the game world, and it responds to your input. That means games have both a look and a feel. If you want to get into that state of "flow" and feel engaged, then higher frame rates are always welcome.

Turning some or all of your settings down to medium can greatly improve the actual gameplay experience, and turn a game that feels like being trapped in a dream where you can't run fast enough into one where you feel sharp and empowered. That said, don't forget that there are some new modern tricks, such as AI upscaling technologies, that let you get higher frame rates without dropping game settings as much. So use all the tools at your disposal to pursue the dream of having games that are both pretty and fast.