Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - WTF Does That PC Setting Mean?! - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

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It's Kind of Funny's Patreon Pledge Month. Support us at patreon.com slash Kind of Funny. We really appreciate it. What's up and welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast for Friday, July 24th, 2026. Of course, I'm your host Tim Getty. I'm joined today by Greg Miller. Hi, Tim. I love the shirt. Andy Cortez.

Hello, Tim. The star of the show today, Mr. Andy Cortez. Classes in session. This is an edutainment day. We're going to be entertained. Order in the court. Classes in session. I want to set the stage here for everybody.

This is a judgment-free zone, whether you are in the chat, whether you are at this table. We are asking questions to try to learn. Will Andy have all the answers? I assume he will. I have about 80% of them. 85. We are looking to you as the highest level of, knowledge when it comes to PC technical settings

at kind of funny. In the land, there are always levels to do. Of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And this man's got one eye. Yeah, there we go. There we go. So that's what today's episode's going to be about, everyone. PC game settings, what the fuck are they? What are the good ones? What are the bad ones?

What causes the most effects on your performance, the things that you're looking at? If you have any questions, if there's ever been a setting you're looking at and you're like, why is it called this? What does that mean? Please, super chat in, and we'll get. to those throughout the show. Of course,

shout out to our Patreon producers, Carl Jacobs, Omega Buster, Dillianee the Somm twining, and lax nomad. Barrett's here, so I'm not going to toss to the Tots, Tots, Tots, Tos.

Tos, Tos, Tos. Well, while Bear is here. Mental Gear, this is Barrett in the office today. I have an important question for him. This is your shot. Wow. This is your shot.

Don't blow it. Don't blow it. Don't blow it. Don't blow it. Don't blow it. What's your one question? Give it to me. There's that delay.

So you might want to. Yeah. You can go back and hit the button. I can read it, see what it happens. Smurgy, thanks for 69 months. Thank you for the service, Debronis. Thank you. Smurgy.

Thank you, everybody else supporting us. Look it. We have a superjats coming in already. Love this. Yeah. Beautiful stuff. I mean, uh,

Mira writes in saying, please just help me understand what steam deck settings should I mess with. Yeah, that's exactly what this episode's going to be about. And again, and he's going to try his best to answer the questions. And the reason this episode's even happening is because recently we're on games cast and we're talking about some PC settings

and I was like hey there's a lot of stuff I don't even know let's get Andy to talk about it Greg what is the question for Barrett Barrett the question for you was how do you feel about the new no pressure album that was for mental mental gear gaming I believe was I was unaware that they made a new album that's exciting that is the offshoot band from the story so far

which is a local Bay Area legend oh nice okay you're excited for it yeah you know about it no I know about it I know what I'm listening to on the way home today thank you yeah love that well now it's time for topic of the show What's that setting? What's that setting? What's that setting?

Andy, where do you want to start? Setting is upsetting. What's PC stand for? Personal computer and personal computing. And then PCHO stands for personal computing and home office. That was when I worked at Best Buy. Yeah, exactly. I worked at PCHO three years.

That's cool. So a lot of my knowledge just comes from watching people like Digital Foundry and other people that are good in the tech space, there are certainly a lot of settings that didn't come naturally to me when I was in game development because I was not on the tech side, I was on the art side,

but you still have a general grasp of what things are, and then suddenly you submit a file of some shit, and everybody's like, oh, dude, whatever you submitted is tanking performance, why is that? And a tech artist looks at it, And they go, oh, you got this thing fucking doing something. I was like, oh, my bad.

Let me take that back and try to, you know, edit some things or whatever. And so a lot of my knowledge comes from the art and the visual side. But there's, like, a lot of daunting options whenever you open up any game nowadays. And I really appreciate, I want to shout out Ubisoft. Congratulations, Ubisoft for getting a shout out. They just keep winning. Um, you, Ubisoft and, um, I would say even something like Resident Evil Requiem, uh, with Capcom,

they do a really good job of allowing you to see what some of the visual differences look like whenever you're scrolling through the different options. Um, I think we will be in the best spot possible whenever you are not just getting images that switch whenever you get like, here's a real time character model. then whenever you hit that little next arrow, then you see the shadows change. You're like, oh, that's what it's doing. Oh, the shadows are more jaggy.

I'm on low settings now or whatever. I think, like, that's like the ultimate video game utopia for people to be able to see every game do that in real time. And only a handful do. Only a handful try to be that, you know, I would say educational, I guess, to let the user know exactly what's changing and how it's looking. But I also love Capcom for showing up.

that setting is going to affect your GPU a lot. This setting is going to affect your CPU a little bit. And every setting kind of going through of like, all right, well, I know I'm playing on this machine. I know I have 28 gigs of V-Ram, which is what you need to run games at a really,

really high quality. And when you do so, it says you have 28 gigs of V-Rand. That setting is going to bump you up to 8 gigs of V-Ram. It's like, all right, cool. I'm still in the, clear. I love it when developers and publishers make that shit a lot easier to kind of consume.

Sure. A lot of times you're like, why would that setting tank my performance? And sometimes it's optimization or a weird bug from the studio. I think of Monster Hunter and Dragon's Dogma having a lot of PC issues. And it turns out there was a file there that checks to see if you have the DLC downloaded. And that was tanking people's performance. And that's like an unforeseen circumstance, but, you know, it's also, it's always really nice to know, well, that thing that I just switched is going to be really, really GPU heavy or that thing is going to be very, very light. So put that shit to max, you know. So there's a lot of like different things to kind of look at. And I think a lot of it comes down to just what questions do you have when you open

something up. I will be your son and you can be the father going, how do I get this Apple TV? I think that the big. problem there is it's gotten so much more case by case where I feel like back in the early 2000s or just even just 2000s like PC gaming I look at the settings and I'm like I'm an Nintendo boy yeah I don't know what V-sync is I don't know what like so many of the words they were using we should always be turning V-sync on yeah no no you don't you don't need to I mean it's a case-by-case basis because uh v-sync uh if you have a 60-hurt monitor and you are experiencing, like, screen tearing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You turn on V-sync, and that makes your frame rate match up to the refresh rate of the monitor. Okay. And doing so adds a little bit of a response delay, you know? You get a tiny bit of one, but it's not like anything major. It's going to ruin your experience. And, but sometimes you're, the game's just running fine, and you don't have screen tearing. And so you don't need to turn V-sink on.

Okay. And that's always like best case there when you don't have to do that. But I was always surprised at looking at the settings. And a lot of this even, most of this I would say, came from me like learning how to emulate stuff. And like being in DSNS or whatever and like seeing the options that they would have there.

And like they don't at all explain to you what's better and what's worse. And I know a lot of it is subjective. And a lot of those filters and stuff would be hideous. You know, but it was like higher resolution, but it wasn't really. And you just kind of had to tinker and figure out what you liked. With modern games,

on the PC and on the console side. Like it is always wild to me how burying console experiences for AAA games can be where you can boot one up and there's two options. It's performance mode or fidelity mode and that's it. Or there's one option with like Astrobot or something like that. Or there are as many options as the PC has

and the words they explain to use things. I'm like, this feels like it was, this menu was made for game designers. Like I don't understand how normal people, how gamers are understanding what this stuff means, like the different types of shadows, like when they're using words that are so just... You're thinking of like bi-linear and bicubic

and tri-linear and all that. Like, how am I supposed to know what's good? And I appreciate your shout-out for Capcom and Ubisoft where there have been examples like Avatar, Frontiers of Pandora. Like, I was very surprised playing that where I'm like, there's a lot of options here, but they are trying to present them in English to some extent, right?

And even if you don't understand what the words are, Like this, there are plenty of words that I still don't fully understand, but I know for the most part what they do and how they affect visual quality. I think that might be a good place to start for this because like there's a ton of things we can get into. But like what are the basic, basic things that you feel people should know? Because you just mentioned things that I don't know if Greg understands V RAM. Come on. I'm right there. Estimated V RAM requirement.

There it is questions. What game is that? This is Diablo for. Oh, nice. Okay. Is it? What is it? What's nice?

I got the Razorblade 16, right? I got the Rogg, Xbox, Ally X, and I had the Rogg, Ally X before that, right? Uh-huh. The whole reason I'm in this fucking PC goddamn sewer is because these two devices are amazing. And our games just work on them. Everything's great.

Diablo crashes like a motherfucker on this thing. And I need... So I've been jumping through. I've been going. I had to go adjust my Windows virtual memory page file size. You ever heard of this shit? I had to go in there, and I went in, and I said, I'll take it.

I had to figure out how much G. be ram I had. And then I was like, okay, well, then I'm going to go to $32,000 for the fields. And then the subreddit found success with 32. And it didn't work. And so I deleted the, they were like when you launch. Were you modifying like notebook, like notepad files and stuff? No, this is in the advanced settings or whatever.

Okay, got you. Of Windows. Okay. And so then somebody else, there's a bunch of different threads of people trying to fix this throughout the fucking years of Diablo 4. And somebody was like, oh, well, make sure when you do it, it closes battle. in BattleNet, there's a thing on the launcher that you should say automatically close when I do it. And I did that and it's still crashed and I just uninstalled it.

And then I asked for a steam code and I put it on Steam. But Steam crashed last night differently. But then I went through it because I had it. Or a different reason completely. I don't know. Who knows? The fucking thing doesn't talk to you. So I dialed it down from ultra settings to high settings on my quality preset.

And that brought my V, my estimated V RAM was never, you know, all the way full or anything. But it was definitely higher on that. So I brought that down and I was able for two seconds to butts around last night and not have it crash. But it really seems like the crashes when I was using the blizznet version or battle that version were when I would play for a while and then fast travel somewhere and then it would crash. Well, yesterday I ran around. I killed some stuff. Then I fast traveled. It didn't crash.

But I was like I don't know if that's the thing. It was a very specific issue. That sounds more like a game issue. It is. It is. I'm just saying I know what V-RAM is. It's that thing. Okay.

You don't know what it is. It's virtual RAM. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's virtual RAM. But again, like try to be as just simple as possible with this. PC components, right?

To build a PC, it requires a bunch of different things. But the things that affect video games, because that's what we're talking about, what are they? So you would want a really good GPU, your graphics processor, whether Nvidia or AMD or Intel has one as well. But usually everybody goes for either Nvidia or AMD. So the GPU is a graphics card. Yeah.

And then there's the CPU. Yeah. And that's the central processing unit. And Intel makes them. So does AMD. And the more you spend, the more power you'll get. And then sometimes you'll spend a lot of money on both things. And then you go, why is it still running like shit?

Yeah. And then it turns out the game is GPU is a, sorry, it's CPU bound. And now you're bottlenecking. And that creates a whole other. And that's where I'm into Greg Miller getting frustrated, looking at Reddit because my Diablo keeps crashing. That's where I'm like, why did I spend all this money? And that's usually on the game developer engine side where it requires patches and things

on their end to kind of make your experience a bit smoother. But yeah, your CPU is the brain of it all and the GPU makes the stuff look really, really nice as nice as possible. And then there's storage, SSD, hard drive. am I wrong in saying the only way that that really matters is at this point you probably want your games running on an SSD and it's kind of like doesn't work or does not work

it's like not like settings are being changed from that stuff so we can kind of put that storage solid state hard drive aside and then there is physical RAM how is RAM affecting games so well it's expensive it's real expensive

but RAM is essentially the more ram you have the more things you could have open at the same time and or sometimes games just require a you know like I think one of the biggest issues people had when the steam machine is getting released when they were like oh damn this only has

this only has that amount of RAM on it like that's I think it's 16 gigabytes one 16 gig stick right pretty sure double check that for me if you don't might I'm a Diablo. I can't do that. I don't know.

Oh, got you. I'm pretty sure the steam machine is a 16 gigabyte machine, and there's two slots for RAM or whatever. But, like, I would say that for someone like me or for someone like Roger or somebody who's doing a lot of, like, not necessarily just gaming related things, like more of just I am rendering stuff, or I have OBS open as well.

16 gigabyte DDO 16 gig, yeah, okay, so I would say RAM is like Not the most important thing But it's still like very important So having a decent amount of RAM These days you would say For gaming would be 16 gigabytes

At the minimum At the minimum Recommended 32 recommended 32 recommended for sure Right, yeah And then more than that is like You're enthusiastic Yeah stuff

But okay so the RAM Are settings affecting RAM Because there's settings that are affecting CPU stuff and GPU stuff are settings affecting RAM stuff? Yes, but I usually see GPU and CPU being the main culprits, the main things that you want to watch out for. Whenever you are, and that's not to say that memory is not important.

Obviously, we're in this big crisis right now because RAM is being used by data centers. But whenever you open up your MSI afterburner or your. or uh, Nvidia G-Force like, you know, parameters to see what exactly what's happening on your machine. First thing, the most basic setup is always like,

what's the frame rate? And then if you're like, I want some more information, then they show you how much of your CPU is being used, how much of your GPU is being used. And then like, maybe the, the temperatures of,

of the power, or, you know, the amount of like heat, those things are causing it, whether they are kind of going overload or not. So I'm asking you all that to kind of just build the case of really we're talking about GPU and CPU, right? Yes.

When it comes to. Yeah. Again, not to underplay memory or RAM. You need these things for the computer to work. But it's like in terms of the settings and what they're affecting, it's like they're affecting the GPU and CPU. And those are the things that are making all the stuff go in this way. Yeah. Where does V RAM come in?

Is V RAM connected to RAM or is V RAM connected to CPU or all? VRAM. by the way is video RAM. I of course knew that in the chat didn't teach me. Yeah, V-RAM is on your GPU. And the more powerful your GPU is the more V-RAM it will have. And I don't really, I think back to like when the Xbox Series X is coming out and it's all about the tariff-flop talk or whatever. That was always a statistic I'd never fully under.

So, but like V-Ram is, I feel like, a bit easier to understand and go. I have this much VRV RAM. I'm going to be okay playing these amount of games. I think one of the big issues that I believe it was, like whenever a game launches and it says we require you, we recommend having 12 gigs of V RAM and it's like, oh shit, my, you know, whatever, my GPU only has eight.

My lower end version GPU, my RTX 4060, which is like, you know, a bit more of the affordable option. and I wish I could tell you the AMD equivalent to the, I just don't know AMD numbers, unfortunately, but you want to have like

a good amount of V-RAM to run a lot of things. If you want your game to look super duper awesome, like the RTS-4090, which is what I have, has 24 gigabytes of V-RAM, which is like, that's a lot of, that's a lot of space to put in a lot of things

to make your game look better. Think of it as like, customizing a gadget and spletoon, you know? It's like you have, I have 24 slots there to put a lot of cool modifiers in there. You have 24 gigabytes of RAM to put

in, to max out the lighting here, to put on Nvidia hair processing, to put on you know, global illumination and shadows and, you know, all that stuff. You can max all that out and you'll probably only, I don't know, get to maybe 12

to 14 gigabytes. I mean, sometimes like, 8 to 10 or whatever, gigabytes of RAM, depending on the game, depending on what you're trying to process. But I would say, like, V RAM is the most important indicator.

Yeah, the metric for, or I guess, like, the easiest thing to know, do you have a lot of V RAM? If no, that's why your game is likely crashing

because you're trying to run that game at insanely high frame rates, and it's like, you don't have that much V RAM here, Big Dog, we're going to have to crash this. So if you have an Nvidia card, a G-Force,

it doesn't matter let's just say 5080 is it the correct assumption that any setting that has an invidia version you should be going with that I'm just going to look up 5080 virtual RAM or our video RAM sorry 16 gigs of V RAM

so what was your question Tim like when you're going through the settings there'll be like a bunch of different options I can't even think of what they are right now but like some of them involving like the DLSS type things I mean you have it here in Diablo if you want me to throw it up for you. Like, right, resolution scaling and they've got Nvidia DLSS or AMD or AMD or FSR, yada, yada, yada. If you have an

Nvidia card, you always want to go Nvidia. If you have an AMD, you always want to go MD. That's my assumption. Is that correct? Um, uh, I would say like I've had personal, I've had good fortune using Intel's scaler on the, on the Steam deck with some games.

And it just really comes down to some games have the better scalar, like, built in or whatever, you don't have to use whatever thing you have if you don't have that car. Like, for example, a game I'm looking forward to, Valor Mortis.

They have teamed up with AMD to like, we're going to bring you the best out of the AMD technology and stuff, but you can still use DLSS. It'll be there as well. Will it work as well or is, I mean, like, well, it depends. We don't know yet.

Yeah, we don't really know yet. But in other instances, has there been a difference or is it um like you don't have to use am d's fsr if you have an amd card like amd's upscaler is just not as good as d ls s again this is not sponsored by nvina it's just like it's just universally known that invidia is doing much better work as far as like how their upscaler works and how much crisper it looks and less noisy and you notice it. There's a game out

that is redacted that we can't talk about yet, but one of the settings kept on, oh yeah, one of the settings kept on breaking on me, and it kept on defaulting back to AMD FSR. And whenever I would reboot the game, it would look really kind of jaggedy and noisy and a little bit lower file.

I'm like, did it? Oh yeah, it sure did. It went back from DLSS to FSR or whatever. And upscalers are a completely different conversation, but no, you don't have to, stick with whatever upscaler your GPU brand is.

Some games do work better with others and it's just like, that's where we get into the real case by case basis because for, you know, there are some games that'll ship where it's like, yeah, if you use Nvidia DLSS on that setting, it's just going to crash a machine and it's just a weird

game developer thing that they have to go and fix some bullshit. If you have the beefiest PC possible, would you want to start without any of the upscaling stuff on and see if you're happy with the frame rate you get from that? Or are there other advantages to DLSS or FSR or the Intel one? So, I would say I always try to just see how things run natively. Yeah, absolutely.

That was what I wanted to start with you, honestly, is like when you boot up a game is that you just jump in, because my problem I find is when I'm using the rock, but more of the razor blade, right, which is fucking beefy, right? I jump in and never think to go fuck with stuff. And I'll often be playing for like 15 minutes,

like, oh, wait, and I pop out and turn on, turn it to Ultra or fuck around the frame generation. And I don't know if that's the right thing to do, but I come back and I'm like, oh, like even resolution. Like I was playing something last night,

the default resolution was like on my giant TV downstairs was still like 19-20. It was like, oh, no, we went up and put it to 30, you know, whatever the fuck it is on under the numbers. Okay. Yeah, exactly. I always just try to see how things run. Like, I will try to max it out. The 49 is like, that's still my GPU because it has more V-Ram than the 50-80.

And the 50-90, I believe, has more V-Ram. I don't know the exact numbers. But whenever I boot up a game, I try to max everything out, some games will let you do benchmark tests where you hit you know you set the settings how you want them and you do benchmark and then there will be a kind of pre-animation of the an in-game camera going through in real time with explosions and they try to kind of really stress test and see how bad things can get frame rate wise and how good things can be and how consistent are they and so i usually try to max it out and see how it runs natively without any upscalers.

Okay. And, you know, this year as I've been playing older games that were like from last generation, like near Automata or The Witcher or, you know, playing Red Dead Redemption 2 right now, you can max that out and get a really adequate frame rate for someone like me who, if I'm playing a single player game, I try to have at least minimum 60, you know, in an ideal world I would have 80 to 90. If I'm playing a multiplayer game, a shooter where I need like the fast

Twitch responses, I want 120 or up. And that's kind of like my baseline. Capped, uncapped, like when we're dealing with frame rates, like what matters there and is it preference? So because I stream, I like capping my frame rate

because I don't want to overdo anything and maybe cause a crash as I'm streaming because I have other things. I have, I might have Spotify open. I might have a Chrome window. We know Chrome is not, Google Chrome is not the most, you know, memory heavy or memory light thing ever. It's pretty taxing nowadays.

I didn't know that. So when Google Chrome first debuted, it was like, oh, dude, Google made a web browser and it's so light compared to like Internet Explorer. Yeah. It is like, oh, it's such a diet version of everything we've experienced. And Google Chrome over the last. like decade or so has become like a real big resource hog and it really stinks but it's kind of all I use still because I'm afraid about moving elsewhere because of like all the saving bookmarks

and all that bullshit. I know it's easy to move over but I'm like I'm okay with it for now but because I have a lot of things open I don't want to overload my system usually when I'm either streaming or playing a game and so I always just try to cap my frame rate anyway because I don't want there to be a moment where maybe something happens on screen that causes crazy frame rates to go really, really, really high. And usually when I have uncapped, I will see my GPU operating at 99% if it's a more recent video game.

And I'm like, ooh, I don't want to be at 99%. Yeah. I don't want to cause it to like go too far and then, you know, say like, hey, encoding overloaded or we ran, you know, we ran into a V RAM issue and we had to crash the game or whatever. So I always try to cap out by game. And it's a bit.

of a nerdy thing, but I do it where, like, I have a 240-hurt monitor. Refresh rate is 240 hertz, meaning I could get 240 frames per second on something like Valorant or something really, really light, you know, a small,

tiny indie title. But if I'm playing a single-player game that I know can't get 240 frames per second, whenever I try to whenever I cap the frame rate I try to do it at like integers that make sense mathematically

and that's more of a personal thing that's like if I have a 240 hertz monitor I'll cap it at 60 because 240 hertz divided by 4 is 60 or I would cap it at 120 um sometimes like some people will do 90

because that's you know whatever you know there's a lot of like weird ways to do it but that's more of like a personal preference thing. And it's almost like a, I wear these dirty socks that have my team win, you know, like, because they haven't lost it. It's more of like, I'm just like paranoid about that sort of thing.

And there's no real reason to be paranoid, but that's how my brain works. So I've heard, I don't understand, but I have heard that like there are actual advantages to that because I know the Steam Deck OLED is 90 hertz. 90 hertz. And a lot of games recommend capping it 45. 45, yes.

Instead of trying to get 60 and it is a lot smoother because of that integer. Yeah, and I'm not sure if that has to do. That's why I get kind of lost on, like, for example, I wonder if that has to do with like frame pacing. And if you watch Digital Foundry, you'll hear a lot about frame pacing. What is it? And it's a, like, Bloodborne runs at 30 frames per second. You're using a lot of air quotes there?

In air quotes, it runs a 30 frames per second, but it has like really bad frame pacing and you will see micro hitch it. You will see micro hitches in the movement. Okay. And it's not necessarily because you're like dropping frames. It's just there's something off about what is doing computationally. Okay.

And that's where I'm like, that's a bit of a league above me, where I'm like, I don't fully understand why that is looking wrong. But also the stuff I'm talking about right now, the Steam Deck being at 90 frames per second, or 90 hertz, drop it to 45 frames per second. I think it's like, you don't need to worry that much. That's just like going kind of the extra mile. What you would need to worry about is it's a 90 hertz screen on the steam deck

and it's 1200, 120 by 800. Sounds right. Something like that. 1,200 by 800 by 800, I believe. Yeah. It's not a 720p screen. It's a bit taller than your normal thing. So it's like, you would want to worry more about what resolution you're running the game on.

Or if you're using like an upscaler. And Steam deck is like, for me, it's still a very experimental place to kind of like, if I run the game at standard resolution at 800p on my Steam deck. But I use an upscaler. and what an upscaler does is it lowers the internal games resolution and there are really shitty upscalers that are

not doing you know any of the stuff that like FSR or DLSSS are doing and there are some internal game upscalers that just say run the game at 75% resolution and so 1080P would then become

I don't know the math but you know what I mean it would run the game at 75% of what it should be running at so things run a little bit easy easier. Or, and that's usually, that becomes like a real experimental thing on Steambeck where it's like, well, I have better luck running it at AMD, FSR, whatever, with an internal resolution of this. And that, it becomes kind of the Wild West with like testing out what things work because I think the Steam deck is so new and people are still trying to figure out how to make things run and look good

on it as best as possible. when you're playing indie games totally fine but anything like a Diablo or remember back in the day with Baldur's Gate Through I'm like man this looks like shit how am I going to make this look as nice as possible while not running at 10 frames per second I'm just yapping a lot

I like this is why I brought you on our sponsors I want to ask one more question in the realm of this conversation Jonathan says there's no point running at 500 frames per second on a 60 hertz screen correct correct yeah a thousand percent So whatever the hurts of your screen is, that's the limitation.

That is the max that you should be aiming for trying to get because that's all that it can actually show. Think of it is like, I'm not going to get the Lamborghini if I'm only driving in residential areas. Like you, yeah, ideally you would want to limit out your frame rate to 60. I always do like, I'll do like 64 hertz just in case there's a drop in frame rate. I don't want it to go below that 60 threshold. I wanted to stay above.

still somehow, you know? And so, like, if there is a hitch somewhere, I want that hitch to, I want the floor of the hitch to be above what my monitor's refresh rate is. So if a game is 60 and I only care about getting 60 because it's really, really intensive and I'm playing path tracing, all the shit maxed out, if I know I only want 60 frames per second because I'm doing a lot settings wise and running everything on Ultra, I'm going. I'm going to, I'm going to set the frame rate limiter to like 68 frames per second. Because if there is a big hitch, I don't want it to go below 60. I want it to be at 62 or something like that, you know.

So another thing, chat is bringing up that another benefit of running at 500 frames per second on a 60-year-ts monitor is for input lag. And it helps with responsiveness for like an intense level of counter strike play. Yeah. I mean There are some benefits But But if you

If your monitor is like If your monitor 60 You are not going to see that That input lag stuff Like I Unless you're like calculating multi You know Or the tiniest of milliseconds or whatever

But like You know that your monitor is on the wrong setting If you buy If you spend $1,000 on a really nice OLED 240 Hertz monitor And you like it was a lot harder for me to tell back in the day, but when my monitor fucks up and changes a setting

or I install a driver and something changes, and I move my mouse and I'm like, oh, this is, this is freemier, this is slower than it should be, or I hop into Overwatch after not having played it in a while, and maybe it reset its settings inside of Overwatch, and I'm like, oh, this is responding a lot slower, and I check and I'm like, yep, I am,

this monitor still set to 6,000, hurts right now. When you change the when you up the refresh rate then you will start to notice the much faster response because you have so many more milliseconds of your mouse being

of your mouse talking to your screen and like it's it's really really easily explained visually whenever any sort of company does like a here's why you should buy a really high refresh rate monitor and you have

a 60-hurt monitor and then if something's happening in the game that doesn't happen in those refresh rate like windows or whatever then you are going to see it happen a little bit later than it should

or your mouse is going, your game is going to respond to you moving a bit later because you don't have that many areas of like refresh rate. It's so hard to like explain vocally or verbally. It's a lot easier to like see yeah when that action happens and I have a 240 hurt monitor I'm going to be able to

react to it a lot quicker because I have the necessary horsepower to do so. Most of the monitors I have are 240 hertz and I have had nothing but problems with 240. I always just end up just default to 120 and just being okay with that because like always problems coming up but really we'll talk about that. Okay. I have a word from our sponsors. This week was sponsored by Patreon. com slash kind of funny because it's Patreon Pledge Month.

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a monthly call-in show where you can chat with the Kind of Funny crew live, which will be on Tuesday afternoon. Earlier this month, we announced a new perk coming to Patreon. The person who gifts the most Patreon memberships on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny in a month will receive a custom character in our Gamescast intro, done by the one and only Andy Cortez. Our first winner is Alex. Andy will be working on this during a gameplay stream this week, and it will be included in the slideshow between the shows,

as well in the game's cast intro for the month of august we'll have some fun surprises for the members of the month so join us over on patreon.com slash kind of funny tim one thing i'll ever understand is why manufacturers settled on 144 hertz and 165 that's one thing i don't understand i probably that's one where i probably need to like watch some historical video of like here's why you know film settled in at this you know like i don't understand those numbers at all. And so that's one that I'm like, that's a mystery to me.

Yeah, it's weird. Quick Google could help me at, but, you know. Yeah, what I was saying, like, leave it a mystery. Like, 240 kind of messes things up. Like, I've just noticed that oftentimes

when I set it to 240 settings in games or just settings across windows or just settings will just be great out. And there's not options anymore. And if I drop down to 100 or 60 or whatever it is, like just not 240, the options are back. And I'm just like, all right, cool. Well, and I've Googled it, tried to figure it out. I'm also like, I do not need more than 120. I simply don't.

So, especially for the majority of games I'm playing, like, they are, I don't think I'm playing a single game that needs over 120. And that's being generous. I don't think I play a single game that requires over 60. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, you're right. I would say so.

I got some super chats I want to get to here. Kabab says, why do PCs compile shaders and consoles don't? Because, consoles are one skew and you know any sort of game developer would have to account for all of those different permutations of that GPU with this

CPU or that GPU with this CPU and that's just like a lot of work on their end so it's just like they know this is what a PS5 has they know this is what a Series X has or a Series S and those get shipped with that and PCs are just there's a lot of moving parts.

Yeah. Greg. Yeah, buddy. What's a shader? Oh, I don't know. They drop me crazy. What's a shader, Andy? So a shader is like I dealt with a lot of shaders but that was always like on the technical art side. We had the we had character artists and environment artists

in game development and then we had tech artists and tech artists were always making shaders and it's essentially like just kind of the way something looks. It's a collection of like I guess materials are a collection of texture work like normal maps and albedo maps

and specularity and all that shit. Shaders like back when I was in game development it was like back in my day can you make me a shader that is a I can give you this texture of fire that tiles can you give me a shader that

makes it move and makes the fire look like it's animating. Because I want to put it on this thing that makes it. Or can you give me a shader that I want that piece of wood that's on fire to look like it's kind of the embers and glow. It's glowing on fire or whatever. But it's like I want it to look like it's pulsating heat or whatever. And so that's where the tech artist would come in and do shit. When I think of what shaders are nowadays, it's just like it's just what the game is made up. It's, um, there's one thing that whenever you're allegedly or unallegedly playing, uh,

games illegally or, or, or, legally, um, whenever you, whenever you, whenever, if you don't have the capability of pre-compiling your shaders, you would like run through an area, let's say, for example, um, Breath of the Wild, if you were playing that on a personal computer. Yeah. I could like run through an area and everything is going to be hell of chuggy because it's loading in all of these shaders. But once everything's loaded in,

I can run through that area completely fine. And then if I encounter an enemy that throws a bomb at me, boom, and that explodes, massive hitch of performance because my game had not loaded in whatever the shader was for that explosion. But once that explosion happens once,

then those explosions are fine because the game has loaded that in now. And then if I run to a different area of the Breath of the Wild map, I will get a lot more stutter because my game hasn't loaded in what the world is comprised of with those shaders, those different trees, those different textures, that metal texture on those buildings because I was in areas that didn't have that metal texture. And once all those are loaded in, then that area is super smooth now. So, like, that's just, it's kind of like just what the game is made of.

Tim's just like nodding at the chat a lot. There's just like a lot of chats don't have any that's just making me laugh in different ways. We got some like real bona fide experts in here, which I really do appreciate. Like I love the like the people that care about this a lot. And it's just like this fucking guy, Zach, I tell you what? Like he makes me laugh a lot. Zach's the comedian. He's a fucking problem.

Did you read a super chat? I'm not going to read his goddamn super chat. Really good. And I'll read a super chat. Thank you. If you aren't aware of everybody, there's a character named Zach in our YouTube chat who just only fucking just memes and does stand-up comedy all the time

and I love it. Here's my thing. Zach, I hope you're a good person. I'm a little on the fence. I'm not sure. So I really hope you're good because I'm like all great comedians. Zach pushes the line.

Sometimes you can't read what he says. We almost brought up a porn game on stream. Zach says, hi guys, 35, 35 male Fresno born. How do I tell my wife that she doesn't turn my floppy disc

into a hard drive anymore and that I'm falling out of love with her? Any advice would be great. Thanks. It's just like, you follow it up a bunch of shit. Exactly. He's constantly just live shitposts. Exactly. He pays the shit post. You gotta love it. You gotta love it.

Please be a good person. That's all about it. Are you a good person? That's what we need to know. I saw Jeff Bull Jr. say I am I am actually making a shader right now. It's a waterfall shader. And that's another example of like whenever I would go to some,

to my tech artist back at where I worked and I would say, I would love to have the, you know, as I'm building out this environment, I as the environment artist wouldn't make the water shader. That's for a tech artist. But I would put the polygon planes down the wall and maybe it's just like single big-ass blocks of a flat plane. And then the tech artist goes, all right, well, I could take that texture and make it look like it's moving and then it would like

animate in a tiling way and like keep on flowing. Greg's laughing now. So what's the deal with airplane food? Jeff Fool Jr. also has been super chatting a couple times saying as a technical arts for video games, I'm so happy to see this episode. I love tweaking those settings. Thanks for everything, guys.

I heard a story at a studio I worked at where frame rates were tanking. Turned out there was a one million poly water bottle on the floor. Yeah. Yeah. Shit like that'll happen. And that happens a lot whenever you, that happens a lot whenever you download assets from asset stores. That would happen to us a lot because we were a small team and we would use the Unity Store. And then when we moved to Unreal, we would use the Unreal store.

And we'd look at a pair of trees. I'll never forget, there was a really awesome artist that pretty much made a living just making environmental sets of things. When you think of that infamous quote from George Lucas where he was like, you pay people to make a tie fighter, you don't pay them to make a tree. We rent the trees from whatever Hollywood lot. You know, like we, all of that stuff is already made. We want the expertise to be used on making an X-wing, making, you know, all that shit.

And that's what we would do because we were a smaller team. when you hear of whenever you open up a game and you see SpeedTree and SpeedTree is a company that's been around for a long time that a lot of studios use because SpeedTree allows you to use their procedural tree system and that's all they do. They are just a tree maker and you could put in a bunch of different parameters and hit like generate and you're going to see

those style of leaves with that style of bark in a bunch of different ways. just going to be the same tree with the same amount of branches. You might say, I want three big branches going out into like separate, small, like, pieces of branches or whatever. And then you can hit procedurally go and then it's just going to autopulate with a bunch of different stuff. Okay.

But when we would buy assets from the asset store, there was this one dude who would make just like a set of rocks. And it's just, here's a bunch of different canyon type rocks that you would see, like, wherever in a Grand Canyon. And it's a bunch of different rocks like that that are really good and scalable and like the best artists would make their living just selling asset packs

to game development teams. And it's like this is 240 bucks. Have at it. Here's this set of like 20 rocks or whatever. And they're all different shapes of sizes. And then us and the environmental artists who didn't want to waste time on building the rocks. We would just use them to kind of build out the world. And then

the stuff that we would get paid for is like why I need to make that sword. I need to make that thing that you just can't download. But there would be times where we're like, ooh, I like the way that asset looks. I want to modify it and you would buy it. And it would be one of the worst 3D models you've ever seen just in terms of how it's made. And it's like, oh, I'm going to waste way more time trying to clean this up than I probably could have just making one from scratch. Bdub says, how do you get cohesive art style if you're using tools like that in your game? So because Beatree is very, very good at letting you

customize things so you could upload and change how the leaves look. And then your own game would tell those trees how to be shaded. If you're using a cell shader or if you are, you know, abide by this color temperature. You know, like that's kind of just based on the, you know, the, I guess, based on the art direction of whatever it is you doing. But like for a lot of games going for semi-realism, you'd be fine using a lot of their trees, but if you are making a game like Firewatch or something, obviously a realistic tree wouldn't look good in there.

So you would have to modify it a bit and say like, here's these different set of leaves that we would put in there to make those trees look like our game or whatever. Demon Hacker says, be sure to go through the AMD slash Nvidia control panel. And then Sam said, use the G-Force app to help with settings and then adjust in-game from there. Talk to me about that. I've never done that. And I opened it while we were talking because they were like, Greg needs to do this. And I'm like, you know what?

I don't think this has been updated in a while and updated my driver as well. Because the starting question here. Like there are these graphics apps that are for the different graphics you have that are system-wide, right? Yeah. And then there's the in-game settings. How do those settings interact with each other? So the, a lot of these apps, and I've obviously only ever worked with the Nvidia control panel and now the Nvidia app. I am really sad that the

Nvidia control panels go in the way of the dodo because it's such a familiar interface to me but a lot of people have been talking about how the Nvidia app and the AMD whatever their app is called have like how much they have progressed where back in the day you would hit recommended settings and shit was just never great and things never worked out as things were never as optimized

as you would like them to be but apparently these apps have gotten way better at knowing what you should be looking for, what you should be running. It just never works for me because of me streaming a lot of these games and knowing that I have to run other stuff. So I never do like just hit recommended settings and optimize because it goes, oh, you got an awesome machine. Let's pump those numbers up.

I'm like, well, I also got to be running a lot of other things in addition to that. And so that makes me change some things. But game wide versus system wide, you could tell your system. I want you to run this refresh rate. I want you to run all my games at 200 frames, 220 frames per second, 240 frames per second, except for cyberpunk. You could go into the game-by-game basis and say, I want you to just run at 62.

And that's what I do. I do it on a game-by-game basis in the Vida control panel because I know that every game is a different beast and everything's going to operate differently. So I never go system-wide because I just, I personally can't trust that because I don't want shit to crash while I'm streaming. So you're doing settings on the Nvidia control battle

and then settings within the game? Oh, yeah. Well, I'm only limiting the frame rate. I've experienced too many games that have frame rate limiters where the frame rate limiters don't work. I've experienced way too many games that have that issue.

I fucking hate. And... Not just PC gaming. I just hate gaming. Yeah, there'd be times where like a game has a... And don't get me wrong. It has gotten better over the last. couple years. But in my

past with PC gaming, there have been so many times where it's like, oh, let me, you know what, let me limit the frames to 60 because we're just, it's a single player game and I don't really need that crazy frame rate. And then I look up and it's getting, I'm getting 142 frame. I'm like, I told you to fucking limit it. So I always manually limit shit in the Nvidia control panel, which is this thing. I would now have to do that in the Nvidia app. The Nvidia app is their newer thing, which lets you

download drivers and also lets you hit Optimize to optimize for my machine. And I've heard really good things about the NVIDIA app Optimize and I've just heard experience, really good things. It seems to just be the closest thing to it just works that I've ever experienced. Yeah, it does seem like things have gotten a lot better, but I would say trust it more than you shouldn't. I'm not sure about the AMD one, but they have gotten a lot more user-friendly and a lot better about optimizing for your machine than I feel like they were in the past.

But again, because I do a lot more things and just play that game, I have to optimize things a lot differently, which usually means I am opening, like Greg, if you search for Nvidia control panel, it's a different program that the Nvidia app is kind of going to do away with. Got it. Where the Vidi app from now and it will be like their main method of doing things. But the control panel, I go in, I go to add,

and then I find the game and I go, boop, click that EXC, and then I go to max frame rate, 68 or 128 or whatever the hell, you know. Sometimes when I'm looking at settings, a lot of them will have some verbiage of low, medium, high, ultra, epic, whatever the fuck they want to call it, right? Everybody has a different...

It's always different. Yeah. And I'm always surprised how often it feels like games if I hit Ultra, I just try to start with the highest crazy thing. But the sliders aren't all all to the right. What do you mean? Like the, when you look at the setting by setting, like the, was that them?

Yeah. Yeah, it's Chip Yon. It was like, it was a yawn, yeah. Chip has the like yappiest, like, you know what he doesn't even bark. Like ambient inclusion or whatever. I don't even fucking know. Like I don't know what some of these words mean, but it's just like it's on Ultra, but it's like there's still steps I can push it on the like the, the, the, the visualizer of,

of like how much the bar is filled out at the bottom. I'll have to show you an example of it. Well, that just may be because you have a really good GPU and you have a lot of like it being at ultra, you can't push it past the ultra like you can't push that setting past Ultra. And if you put, if you play a 10 year old game at Ultra settings. You have like 24 gigs of V RAM. Ornell's coming in here saying Ultra doesn't necessarily mean everything is set to max. Like. So I guess that is my question.

Yes, that, that is true. Like, is setting everything to the right? Max, is that better? Okay. So Barnell brings up a great point because there are a lot of games where you push things to Ultra. And that's like the over the counter. retail ultra. But then you can always, with modding and things like that,

you can open up that doc file, that word doc file, that would open up a notepad, and then you could set whatever thing that's set to false to true, and then now you have all these other settings kind of unlocked that you won't really see in the game settings. It's always like in this weird doc app, but it's like, don't even worry about that. If you're here, you don't need to even ask those questions right now.

Like that's like for you Tim I would say like Just roll with the ultra You're gonna be fine with that If you are playing a much older game That had its ultra settings A lot more limited Than what it seems to be

Like for example Batman Arkham Asylum That I played for the first time last year Or this year This year? Shit it was this year Um A much older game That had its own idea of what Ultra was

And there's a bunch of mods that added things, but also unlocked a lot of settings that you couldn't see because you were using a PC from 15 years ago, 10 years ago or whatever. But it'll have mods that kind of unlock those things that say, no, no, no, unlock the,

pretty much unlock the limiter. I want this baby to go 250 miles an hour. I don't care if I'm in a neighborhood street. I can do that now or whatever. And so that's just like a different setting that I would say, if you're here, don't even worry about that yet. That's like much later down the line

because it's not the most complicated thing. You're opening a Word doc app and making a number go from four to five and then hitting save, but it's still like it feels cool because it feels like you're in the kernels. I mean, I will say I am firmly at the point and I'm just at this point,

I think this is just my reality and I'm comfortable with it where game by game, I am just Googling best settings for this on this and going from there because like it really just seems like there is not just no consistency it's the opposite of consistency. It is just like it's chaos.

It just seems like this is stuff that you can understand to the best your abilities. It does not mean anything. And like maybe I'm stupid but like at the end of the day it's like there's no consistency between playing spiral reignited

trilogy and uncharted and fucking god of war and it doesn't matter. Resident evil. It's like every single thing. It's like there will be something when I look at the best settings. I'm like, well, why is that this but not that? Yeah. Like I, I love the work that Digital Foundry does, specifically Alex Pataglia, who does a lot of the,

a lot of the recommended settings for things. And Alex will go, I have a mid-range PC and I have a really, really, really good high-end PC. And on my really, really good high-end PC, I have ambient inclusion set to medium and I'm getting 62 frames per second. When I set it to Ultra, three steps higher than that or two steps higher than that, I go from 62 frames per second to 63. And that means that like, yeah, you should set it to ultra or it depends on where you're at but you're like, is

the difference in visual quality worth the frame rate loss? that's kind of how he does his like math or whatever and in some case he's like look at this thing at medium settings looks pretty much identical to Ultra and but when he said it to Ultra you're losing a lot more frames leave it a medium

it looks like pretty much visually identical if you are in motion or whatever so he does a lot of work on those case by case basis whenever 007 first slide comes out and it's like I have here's the specs that I recommend for a mid-range machine or if you're running a really good and

high-end machine with one of the latest GPUs, we recommend these settings or whatever. That thing looks identical at medium settings than it does on Ultra, leave it on Medium and get those frames or whatever. And that's just you bring up the inconsistencies.

Yeah, that's absolutely true because some games, the textures being on Ultra don't even affect anything. Look that different, but tank the performance. Yeah, or the opposite. They will tank the performance. And that's all just dependent on how the game was built or whatever.

Like, when we talk about like path tracing and ray tracing, what's the difference between me, ray tracing and path tracing. And ray tracing is, path tracing is what films do, where it's, let's accurately simulate light and how it works in the real world. And ray tracing is like a very specific, sometimes cheated form of what path tracing does. like I always think back to when the Spider-Man games released on ES5 or, you know, and you get like, whoa, ray-traced performance. I can get 60 frames per second with ray tracing. And it's like, yes, but it's ray-traced reflections. And the reflection that you're seeing

is at a quarter of the resolution of what your act is what's being displayed. So that's why the reflection in that window, Spider-Man looks a lot kind of blockier and noisier, because it's able to do reflections, but we need to make it look really blurry in order to make this run well still or whatever. Or you could do ray trace shadows only. And that means that like if whatever light sources there are, they will be casting a shadow on things.

I think there's a great example out there of, here's what Ratchett and Clink looks like, Rift Apart on PC with Ray Trace Shadows on and off. And it's like whatever that sun source that's causing the light to go down, if you're under a lot of cover of trees, those trees will be casting shadows on you. If you have ray trace shadows off,

then it's like, it's the baked in lighting. There was like a really, really popular tweet that went viral last, or a couple weeks ago of like, man, look at how games used to look back in the day. And it was an example of Titanfall 2. And it looks phenomenal and they're like, we didn't need ray tracing back then.

And the kind of, actually answer is like all of that is ray traced just not in real time it looks so good because the older way of doing things and a lot of studios still do it is like when you

bake lighting in you have your light sources out there they are not going to be if I can't blow up that building and then the shadow will disappear that building is always going to be there that tree will always be there it will always be casting that shadow because I hit

I set up my world and I said, all right, cool, I'm going to hit bake lighting, I'm going to go for my lunch break. And that's how we used to do shit back in the day. And a lot of games still, like I mentioned, do bake lighting. But what adds a lot of computational, you know, horsepower or issues rather is like trying to do the lighting stuff in real time, trying to do ray tracing and pat tracing in real time. If I, again, if like I mentioned, if I blow up that building, it's no longer to be cast. a shadow because that shadow was happening in real time. And that's why things are a lot more expensive nowadays to run because people want. Ideally, like, ray tracing is supposed to make things a bit easier because you don't have to worry about setting all your light probes up, then hitting bake shadows or whatever, or bake your lighting in it.

Ray tracing is supposed to be like, well, I set those lights up and now those lights do stuff the way they should be doing automatically without me having to tweak a lot of things. You still want to do some tweaking, but it's going to be kind of a pain of the ass to run, which is why upscalers are awesome. And, you know, DLSS and AMDFSR and Intel with theirs trying to, I would say, catch up to how good DLSS is. But the, like all that stuff just takes a lot of computational power. How expensive and taxing is it on your GPU or your CPU? And is it worth is it worth the frame rate loss? Is it worth, you know,

do I care about how those shadows look? And I would say that, like, I usually don't until I see what it could look like. I prepped a bit of a video to, if Barrett, if you could bring it up whenever you get a chance, it's a video from downloads. I did like some, I was pausing in real time to show what the games look like

with path tracing on and off. and like once you see the way when there are objects against the wall that are casting a shadow and the way that it lights characters as well it's hard to kind of like go back once you know that like oh this is what it could look like um

you know I look at like that little book show the stack of books and notebooks on the left of like whenever patracing is on everything is casting a shadow the way it would be in real life. And a lot of that is very taxing on the machine, but it looks so fucking good. And if there's a room that isn't near a light source,

that corner of the room is going to be much darker because light isn't traveling over there. And that's kind of like, you know, I think it's easy to kind of be, to look at the differences and go, who gives a shit, man? It's like, okay, I get that. There's a big difference there, though.

I get that, but it does look really, really awesome whenever the light is acting accurately. Now, not all games need this. There are, you know, obviously there are tons of stylized games that aren't. It looks worse, right? Like, there's a ton of examples I've seen of, like, the extra lighting and stuff, like, takes away. Everything looks bloomy.

Everything is like, it's distracting. It's like, all of a sudden, everything looks too real by not even be the right way to say it, but it's like, it loses the style. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of that is, like, how good is your art direction, you know? and I look at something like like Eldon Ring being or from Software just having such a god to your art direction

that the tech isn't really like the limiting factor but there are tons of games where I walk into a room and I'm like I wish all of those items were casting shadows correctly and I wish this had some you know when I went back to Dark Souls 2 to play with path tracing on and it was like whoa this is fucking crazy and awesome but not every game needs it. And that's okay.

We don't need every game to strive to have the most realistic lighting possible. Now, you can still have realistic lighting while still being stylized. And I think that gets lost in the conversation. There's a lot of people that go like, oh, that game just totally lost all of its visual sauce by switching to path tracing.

And it's like, well, that's still on the developer to tweak things. The developer can still go in there and manually change color temperatures, change, they can add light probes that maybe aren't casting shadows. Because it's really up to the developer to say what lights would be casting a shadow here? What objects are receiving, what objects are going to be able to cast shadows in the scene? What objects are receiving that path tracing source?

Like it's all, it's all game developer dependent. So like, I hate the notion that like, well, you added path tracing, you lost all your art direction. No, that's based on the developer. The developer can go in and tweak stuff as they want, you know. When I was posting before and afters of my Pragmata play-through with Patracing on and off, one of the responses was like, man, this room is like, it looks so much less dark. And I was like, well, it is a little less dark because the lights acting naturally here.

But the developer could also make it as dark as they wanted to, by tuning knobs and things like that, I think you're just mad that you just don't want path tracing to be a thing. And like, I don't know, that gets into a whole like, why are we going for this extra power and these extra visuals when things are just costing more and that goes into a whole different conversation.

Sure, sure, sure. But whenever I play a game, looking at the way Cympunk looks with and without pat tracing is like, oh shit, this is a different video game now and I'm loving the experience that much more because I'm loving everything that I'm looking at, you know. I got two more super chats I want to get here. There's been an awesome episode.

I feel like we definitely got kind of a surface level of questions answered here. But before you get into the super chat, I have one more thing I want to mention. Anti-aliasing. What is F-X-A-A-A and M-X-A-A and T-A-A? And they're all just different ways of making the jagged lines on your screen look smoother. when you have a really, really high-resolution monitor, harder to notice those jagged lines because, you know,

it's like back in the day when you would see everything shimmering. It's like, well, yeah, the game was running at 720P, and all of those lines on that wall weren't straight are very jagged and odd-looking, right? And so you use anti-aliencing to make those lines look smoother. And so, like, M-X-A-A-A is, multi, I'm blanking on the fucking word, but it's like, it makes things look a bit blurrier than it should.

TAA is temporal anti-aliasing, and it's like one of the nicer ways to make lines look smoother on your screen and not have jaggies or whatever. Multi-sample anti-aliasing. Yeah, so, like, you would get like some blurrier results, but some better performance and things like that. I kind of like had some notes that I was taken. So FXAA, we don't really use a whole lot anymore because it makes shit look really, really, really blurry.

Makes the image look a lot softer than it should be. DLAA is something that DLSS has built in, and that's their deep learning anti-alicing. So if you have DLSS on, do you need to have any of these AA things on? If you have DLSS on, it overtakes whatever your anti-aliasing is. And if you're playing a game that doesn't require a whole lot of uprising because it's a much older title, but it's still a D-L-S-S, then you would want to turn DLAA on because it does like provide a, it does provide a cleaner image.

Oh, it's Kevin, you know, Kevin. T-A-A is temporal anti-aliasing and that's where like, it could cause like sometimes ghosting whenever you're moving the screen and you see like, maybe like a trail on on images and that's because it's like it's approximating what the frame was looking like before to try to make that edge look really clean and sometimes it adds a little weird kind of ghosting effect but usually whenever you add an a super sampler on it like fsr or dLSS it makes things uh it takes over

whatever your your anti aalisting was going to be so the super shot i got here is from Mike saying can we have Andy boot up RE9 or Black Flag Resynct and run through each graphics and display settings. They have a lot of settings that can be explained that applied to many games. I'd love to do that. I feel like this was such a great episode.

I feel like we should do a follow-up, whether it's a gamescast or a gamescast plays in the lab and literally just having you go through the options with us and talk it through because like there's just so much. I do think that those are two great example games that are modern that I think would help a lot of people ourselves included.

Yeah. Understand. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'd be down, absolutely. I think they also do a really good job of, like, RE9, I took a bunch of screenshots of how their settings look, and I think they do an awesome job of showing the user what the before and after would be. And it's atropic filtering is how textures on the ground look further away from you

because they're at like an otter angle. And that didn't, I assume that was an issue back of the day. Now you just leave that shit max, and it's not really a big issue. Just forget about it. Just shove it up. Something like ambient occlusion is not using lighting.

It's using math to add darker space to areas where services are touching. And so like, um, so like, let's say this is a flat surface. And if I didn't have like a light source,

if I didn't have a, a lighting source in here casting a shadow, I would turn anti-ali-as or I would turn ambient inclusion on and there would be the game mathematically would say there's an object here that's Greg's laptop

and there's an object that's the table and because they're close to each other there should be darkness here because those objects are just kind of close in nature and it adds like it makes the images look less flat you know whenever there's like you know

lighting on hair or things like that. That's really, like, ambient inclusion does a great job of making the, adding more depth visually. And I, I love ambient inclusion. And I try to, whenever I play like Dark Souls 3 rematch, or Dark Souls 3 on PC and I added like a bunch of mods, I added in ambient inclusion to kind of like, I like seeing darker spaces wherever objects are kind of close to each other because it just adds depth and that's how light kind of acts.

But it's not like a, it's not a physical. real life implementation of how light acts is just like a mathematical adjustment thing and when you're going through reshade and you could turn on I want to see just what ambient inclusion is doing here on the screen

and it would say like this person has a jacket on and the polygon here on their collar is close to their t-shirt so we'll put darker spaces here because those objects are kind of creating a right angle or whatever and so that's kind of what it does.

those mathematically. And there's stuff like screen space, ambient inclusion of screens. I want to get it like that. I feel like we need, we need that. That requires a lot more like moving of the mouse and like showing you what it's doing. But thank you so much. This was awesome. Very helpful.

A lot of great questions answered. The last two things I want to say here, Sky says, Greg was right about PC gamers. And Tundra Boy says a lot of words. A lot of words. There were a lot of words. But thank you so much for hanging out with us today. The day's not over. We have a lot of fun stuff coming up.

So stay tuned. Until next time, I love you all. Goodbye. My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink. Pre-K drop off. Then straight to the gin. Back home to meal prep before heading to the fire station for my shift. When the three alarm comes in, I'm ready.

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