Cheap games, much more freedom and almost the same selection of titles: Anyone who gambles a lot or only on a PC instead of a game console knows why. However, newcomers often experience a culture shock before their first virtual adventures on the Windows computer.
Because unlike consoles, the menus of many PC games offer adjustment screws that can be used to adapt the gaming experience to computers and preferences.
This fiddling around is a point of honor for many PC gamers: "There is a group of hardcore gamers who don't shy away from constant upgrades and the tinkering around it for the last bit of performance," says Florian Dickgreber, managing director and gaming expert at the consultancy AT Kearney. Knowing every technical term in the menus is not a prerequisite for gaming fun on the PC.
However, even laymen should know a few tricks. Because if the settings are right, even a mid-range PC can hold a candle to current consoles. "Technically, PCs are still further ahead than consoles when it comes to games," says Dickgreber.
However, PC gamers should first clean up their system before venturing into the game's graphics settings. The most important thing is to always have the latest driver installed for the graphics card. Especially shortly before the release of new blockbusters, AMD and Nvidia like to bring new software to the market, which shows their strengths to their best advantage.
If you don't want to install new drivers manually, you can get the free programs Geforce Experience for Nvidia cards or for AMD models on your computer. They not only download new drivers on their own, but can also automatically adapt selected games optimally to their own system.
Where this does not work, manual work is required. The first question is usually about the resolution. Which pixel number is the right one depends massively on the graphics card in the PC. "Expensive graphics cards have more processors on board and can therefore do more computing work at the same time," explains Michael Guthe, professor for graphics data processing at the University of Bayreuth. "This is how higher resolutions or more details can be displayed in."
The standard resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (Full HD) can often be handled by the cheaper cards without any problems. The expensive top class is especially important for quad or ultra HD monitors. Full-HD gamers, on the other hand, need a fast graphics card primarily for realistic shadows and reflections: "Today, it's more the effects, i.E. The shaders, that are technically demanding, not so much the geometric details of the game world," says Guthe.
In practice, this means that you can often achieve more by switching off one or two rather inconspicuous effects than by turning down the resolution. It pays to try it out. By the way, this doesn't only apply to graphic effects, but also to other decorations. Games like "Tomb Raider" or "The Witcher 3", for example, have special techniques on board to realistically simulate the long hair of their main characters. The result looks impressive, but also costs a lot of computing power.
A very important effect is (anti-aliasing). This prevents, for example, the annoying staircase formation or annoying flickering in the case of diagonal lines in the game world. Depending on the game and graphics card, various methods are available for edge smoothing, which have cryptic names like MSAA and SSAA.
For a good compromise between image quality and performance hunger, the "Gamestar" magazine recommends the EQAA method for AMD graphics cards and MFAA for Nvidia cards. According to the specifications, the performance loss due to edge smoothing is even lower with SMAA. If a game does not offer the preferred method in the graphics menu, it can be forced via the control panel in some cases. However, this does not work with every game, warns "Gamestar".
Owners of particularly fast computers can also activate downsampling in the system control of Nvidia and AMD cards, which is hidden behind the abbreviations DSR and VSR. The graphics card initially draws the game world in a resolution that the monitor doesn't actually allow – for example Ultra HD instead of Full HD. Then the image is downsampled again. According to the "Gamestar" experts, the result often looks better than an original full HD image with edge smoothing, but eats up a lot of computing power.
How smoothly a game runs after all the tinkering is revealed by the refresh rate or frame rate. It can be measured by software like Geforce Experience. Gaming Evolved or with the free version of the popular program Fraps. Which value is ideal depends on the subjective feeling of the user and on the game. In a fast multiplayer shooter, a high frame rate is more important than in a leisurely adventure game.
As a rule of thumb, 30 frames per second, also known as frames per second (FPS), should be a minimum. Anything below that is usually perceived by the human eye as annoying jerkiness. According to PC Games Hardware magazine, a stable frame rate is also more important than peaking as high as possible. Smooth 30 FPS usually feels better when playing than when it fluctuates wildly between 20 and 50.