Not all settings are equal. A few cost a third of your frame rate; many cost almost nothing.
Every graphics option in a game menu spends one of three budgets: GPU time (how long your graphics card takes to draw a frame), CPU time (how long your processor takes to prepare it), or VRAM(how much video memory the frame's assets occupy). Understanding which budget a setting spends is the whole trick to optimizing — because lowering a setting only helps if it spends the budget you've actually run out of.
Ray tracingis in a class of its own: simulating real light paths can cost 30–50% of your frame rate, and on GPUs without dedicated RT hardware it's often not worth enabling at all. Shadowsare usually the biggest cost among traditional settings — higher quality means re-rendering the scene from the light's point of view at higher resolution. Volumetric effects (fog, god-rays, clouds) and screen-space reflections are the other common budget-eaters. In our per-game breakdowns these settings typically carry impact weights two to four times larger than everything else in the menu.
Anisotropic filtering (keeps textures sharp at glancing angles) has been effectively free on every GPU made in the last decade — set it to 16x and forget it. Texture qualityis the most misunderstood setting: it barely touches GPU time. It spends VRAM instead, which means it's free if it fits your card's memoryand catastrophic (stutter, hitching) if it doesn't. That's why FrameCoach recommends texture settings based on your specific GPU's VRAM, not a blanket "medium". Post-processing toggles like motion blur, vignette and film grain cost roughly nothing — they're taste, not performance.
An RTX 4090 lowering shadows from Ultra to Medium might gain 4 FPS it doesn't need; a GTX 1650 might gain 15 it desperately does. And if your CPU is the limit — common in esports titles and busy open-world cities — lowering GPU-side settings changes nothing at all (our bottleneck guidecovers how to tell). This hardware dependence is why generic "best settings" lists disappoint, and why the FrameCoach optimizer asks for your GPU and CPU before recommending anything.
Enable upscaling first (see the upscaling guide— it's the biggest single win), then trim the heavy hitters one notch at a time — shadows, volumetrics, reflections — until you hit your FPS target. Leave textures as high as your VRAM allows, and leave the nearly-free settings alone. That's essentially the algorithm FrameCoach runs for you, tuned per game with each title's real menu.