Frame Rate and Resolution Explained for New PC Gamers
Two numbers determine most of how a game feels and looks, and they compete for the same hardware. How to spend it sensibly.
Coming to PC from console, the disorienting part isn’t the hardware. It’s that a settings menu hands you thirty decisions that were previously made for you. Two of those decisions account for most of the outcome.
Frame rate
How many images your machine draws per second, measured in frames per second. Higher is smoother and more responsive.
The useful reference points:
- 30fps is playable, and noticeably choppy once you’ve seen better. Fine for slow, cinematic games.
- 60fps is the standard target. Smooth, responsive, and the point at which most people stop noticing frame rate as a thing.
- 120fps and above is a real improvement in fast games, and requires a monitor that can display it. Without a high refresh rate monitor, frames beyond your monitor’s capability are discarded.
Consistency matters as much as the number. A locked 60fps feels better than a figure that swings between 75 and 45, because your eye adapts to a steady rate and notices every change from it. This is why capping your frame rate slightly below what your machine can manage often feels better than leaving it uncapped.
Resolution
How many pixels make up the image. 1920×1080 is 1080p, 2560×1440 is 1440p, 3840×2160 is 4K.
Each step up is a large increase in work. 1440p is about 78% more pixels than 1080p. 4K is four times 1080p. That’s why resolution is the most expensive setting in any menu.
Run your monitor at its native resolution wherever possible. A 1440p monitor fed a 1080p image has to stretch it, and the result looks softer than a 1080p monitor showing 1080p natively.
The trade
Your graphics card has a fixed amount of work available per second. Spending it on more pixels means fewer frames. Spending it on more frames means fewer pixels. Every graphics settings menu is a way of allocating that budget.
Which to prioritise depends on the game. For competitive shooters, frame rate, without much argument. For a visually rich single player game, resolution and visual settings, with 60fps as the floor rather than the target.
Upscaling changes the maths
The most useful feature in a modern settings menu, and the one newcomers most often leave off.
DLSS, FSR and XeSS render the game at a lower internal resolution and then reconstruct a higher resolution image. You get frame rates close to the lower resolution with image quality close to the higher one.
Set it to Quality mode as a default. The visual cost at that setting is small enough that most people can’t identify it in motion, and the performance gain is substantial. Balanced and Performance modes push the trade further and become visible, particularly on fine detail and in motion.
Frame generation is a separate feature that inserts additional frames between rendered ones. It raises the frame rate figure without reducing input latency, so it’s good for making a 60fps game look smoother and not for making a 30fps game feel better.
Which settings to adjust, in order
If you need more performance, work down this list rather than dropping everything to low.
- Turn on upscaling at Quality. Largest gain, smallest visual cost.
- Ray tracing off. The most expensive setting in any game that offers it, by a wide margin.
- Shadows to medium. Consistently one of the heaviest costs for one of the smallest visual differences.
- Volumetric effects, fog and clouds to medium. Expensive and rarely load-bearing.
- Ambient occlusion down a step. Noticeable in screenshots, less so in play.
- Anti-aliasing down. Less relevant if upscaling is already handling edges.
Leave texture quality high as long as you have the video memory for it. Textures are close to free in terms of processing and they’re the setting that most affects how a game looks. The exception is if you run out of VRAM, at which point they become the first thing to reduce.
Two settings worth turning on
Variable refresh rate, called FreeSync or G-Sync, matches your monitor to your actual frame rate and removes both tearing and the stutter that comes with fluctuating performance. Most modern monitors support it and it’s frequently switched off by default. Enable it in your graphics driver control panel and in the monitor’s own menu.
Then set a frame rate cap a few frames below your monitor’s refresh rate. This keeps variable refresh working correctly, reduces heat and noise, and produces a more consistent result than letting the frame rate run free.