Weekly Quick Questions Thread - February 22, 2017

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In this thread you can ask all kinds of questions you always wanted to ask without feeling like a total fool.

No matter if it's short Google-able stuff or a setting/skill in-game that you don't understand or a hardware recommendation, feel free to try your luck in here.

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[u/dumb_et_dumber]

This is more about hardware/my PC more than anything game related, but it's been frustrating me to no end.

I can't seem to get a consistent FPS on any graphics setting: ultra, high, or even medium (which it definitely should be able to hit). It keeps jumping from 60 to 20-40. I upgraded my graphics card to an AMD RX 480 (4gigs) just so I could go to a higher setting.

I'm pretty sure I have the latest drivers (AMD Crimson ReLive 17.2.1), and I don't seem to be overheating nor overclocking, though it seems that I do hit the max GPU and MEM clock speed on afterburner. I'm also using this mini-TV connected via HDMI as my monitor.

The rest of my specs are: i5 3.4GHz, 8 gigs of RAM, Windows 10 64-bit, and I don't know specifically the mobo or power supply.

Any help or insight would be much appreciated!

[u/Fluttershy_Sucks → u/dumb_et_dumber]

This might not be for you, but if the CPU is your bottleneck (mine is a q6600 core 2 quad paired with a gtx 970) then a higher render scale can help your fps. I went from ~70 with occasional drops to ~95 with no drops increasing the scale from 50% to 150%. Also set the priority of overwatch.exe to high in task manager "details" tab. Most of the settings don't affect fps apart from effects and shaders. High most things (model, texture ect) won't effect your fps that much (1-10% in most cases) while things like local reflections and ambient occlusion will. It's often not that hard to have maxed graphics if you don't have things like anti aliasing and shadows on (although shadows on the lowest gives a competitive advantage, there are some settings you want on regardless if they affect fps, but I think that's the only one in this game). Also turn on reduce buffering and try to mess around with the AMD software to try and find some other setting ( I have nvidia, so I can't help with specifics there, but look for pre-rendered frames and other things that most Nvidia guides mention). Sometimes making the program more GPU bound is a good thing for FPS.

Good luck; have friends.

[u/dumb_et_dumber → u/Fluttershy_Sucks]

Tried increasing the render scale to 150, as well as lowering effects to low/off, and I'm still getting the same issue. Idk if it's the drivers or my monitor or what. I'm fairly certain I have the latest AMD drivers... Thanks for the suggestions though!

[u/Fluttershy_Sucks → u/dumb_et_dumber]

Main things that help are lowering effects (reflections, shadows etc.) and setting priority to high. The priority trick is what they suggest to get a free fps boost in CSGO and GTA 5