Adjusting settings sensibly requires knowing which ones are expensive and which are nearly free.
Resolution
The single largest factor in most games.
Which scales roughly with pixel count.
Shadows and ambient occlusion
Frequently expensive relative to visual gain at higher settings.
Textures
Limited by video memory rather than by processing.
Which means they are close to free if memory allows.
Upscaling
Rendering at lower resolution and reconstructing.
Which has become the standard performance lever.
Where the cost actually is
Resolution, shadow quality and any form of ray tracing dominate; texture quality, anisotropic filtering and most post-processing are nearly free if you have the memory and bandwidth.
Which means the sensible approach is to reduce the expensive ones and leave the cheap ones high.
Many players do the reverse, dropping textures first because it sounds like it should help.
Ray tracing
Physically accurate lighting at very high computational cost.
Which upscaling was largely introduced to make viable.
Upscaling and reconstruction
Rendering fewer pixels and reconstructing the rest.
Which has become standard rather than exceptional.
CPU against GPU limits
Knowing which component is constraining you.
Which determines whether settings changes help at all.
Finding your own settings
Change one thing, measure, repeat.
Working out what is limiting you
If lowering resolution improves frame rate substantially, the graphics card is the constraint; if it changes little, the processor is.
Which determines entirely which settings are worth touching.
Players frequently spend an evening adjusting graphics options on a system that is processor-limited, where none of them will help.
Memory limits
Texture settings exceeding available video memory.
Which produces severe stutter rather than gradual slowdown.
Draw distance and crowd density
Frequently processor-bound settings.
Which is why they behave differently from other options.
Benchmarking properly
The same scene, repeatedly, with one change at a time.
Preset starting points
Reasonable defaults before manual adjustment.
A practical order to work through
Set resolution and any upscaling first, then reduce shadows and ray tracing if needed, then leave textures and filtering high if memory allows.
Which addresses the expensive settings first and preserves image quality where it costs little.
This ordering will get most systems to a playable state faster than working through a settings menu from top to bottom.
Refresh rate and monitor
Frame rates above the display refresh producing limited benefit.
Which is worth knowing before chasing numbers.
Variable refresh technology
Smoothness at variable frame rates.
Which is now widely available.
Console equivalents
Fixed modes offering the same trade in simpler form.
Older hardware
Upscaling extending the useful life of a system considerably.
A note on how this industry reports itself
Games is an unusually opaque business for one with such a visible product. Budgets are rarely disclosed, sales figures are announced selectively, player numbers are quoted in whichever metric flatters, and profitability is almost never stated at all.
Most of what is publicly known comes from court filings, leaked documents, regulatory submissions and former employees speaking after the fact. That material is reliable when it exists and covers a small fraction of the industry, which means any general claim about how games perform commercially rests on a limited and non-random sample.
Where the better information is
Developer conference talks are the single best public source on how games are actually made, and a large number are freely available. Regulatory filings during acquisitions have disclosed more real financial detail than a decade of press releases. Trade publications with industry sources are considerably more informative than consumer coverage on business questions.
Treat anything presented as an industry-wide figure with some caution, including in this article, and prefer sources that say where their numbers came from.
Why the business side is worth understanding
A great deal of frustration with games comes from decisions that look inexplicable from outside and are entirely predictable once the commercial structure is visible. Why a game shipped unfinished, why a beloved studio was closed after a successful release, why a sequel dropped features the previous game had, why a service shut down two years in.
None of these are mysteries. They are the outcomes of funding structures, platform economics, publisher portfolio decisions and the fact that games are made by people working to schedules set before anyone knew what the game would be.
Knowing that does not make the outcomes better. It does make them legible, and it makes it easier to tell the difference between a studio that made a mistake and one that was never given the conditions to succeed.
One thing worth remembering
Games are made by people, mostly people who care a great deal about them, working inside commercial structures they did not design and frequently cannot change.
Criticism of a game is fair. Criticism of the decisions behind it is usually aimed at the wrong floor of the building.