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5 graphics driver settings you should never leave at default
There are few experiences that can eclipse that of firing up a new GPU and getting to see your favorite titles in newfound visual fidelity, or feeling your workflow efficiency increase significantly. Before that, however, like with any new component, installing drivers is necessary. Most settings that come stock with a fresh driver install will be good for most people, and that's the goal for Nvidia, Intel and AMD: to have a set of default settings that will cause the least number of issues for users out of the box.
However, whether you're looking to squeeze out extra performance in your workflow or make your games look that much smoother, some of the default driver settings may be getting in your way, and these are five of them that are absolutely worth changing.
Refresh rate
It's almost never set correctly upon first boot
If you've ever purchased a new monitor or graphics card, you're familiar with the tribulations of your preferred refresh rate being reset. Upon first boot of a new GPU or even with a new monitor, the maximum will almost never be selected in Windows, and certainly not in Nvidia Control Panel, AMD's Adrenalin, or Intel's Arc drivers. Setting it to prefer maximum refresh rate at all times, or manually selecting the highest refresh rate possible (whichever is possible in your drivers) ensures that your display always runs at that elevated refresh rate.
Power management
Consistent power can be important
While it doesn't always make a noticeable impact, changing power management settings can weed out any potential issues with performance, especially in scenarios where consistent clock speeds are required. While AMD's Adrenalin software doesn't have any power management of this type, both Nvidia and Intel's drivers have these types of settings. Setting them to prefer maximum performance won't give you gobs more frames per second, but it might mitigate some GPU-related stuttering you could be experiencing. Nvidia's "Normal" mode and Intel's "Balanced" mode can cause clock speeds to fluctuate as the GPU perceives opportunities to save power.
Resizable BAR
Essentially required with modern GPUs
Resizable BAR, or Base Address Register, is a setting that allows your GPU to share its entire VRAM buffer with your CPU. Before ReBAR existed, your CPU could only write to and access your GPU's memory buffer in 256 MB chunks, which is somewhat slow and inefficient, especially once you start to work with memory buffers above 4 GB.
While ReBAR is one of those settings that is turned on by default in a lot of modern systems, there's still a chance it's turned off for you, especially if your system is from an OEM vendor like Dell, or you built your system with parts that were released pre-2022 or so. If it's able to be turned on, you can do so in your motherboard's BIOS.
Adaptive sync technologies
GSYNC and FreeSync
Display sync technologies like GSYNC and FreeSync allow for your monitor's refresh rate and your game's framerate to be synchronized, eliminating any kind of screen tearing while also maintaining responsiveness. It's sometimes also called "adaptive sync" outside of Nvidia's ecosystem. This is usually off by default. Sometimes having it on can cause weird black screen issues with non-fullscreen applications, but if you're not having those issues, you should turn it on. You get all the benefits of V-Sync, just without the downside of the significantly increased latency penalty that comes along with it. For the competitive gamers out there, however, it's important to note that there is a small latency penalty with these adaptive sync technologies, so it's probably best to leave them off if you're trying to go pro.
Anisotropic filtering
Virtually no performance hit
Anisotropic filtering is a texture filtering technique that improves the clarity of textures viewed at oblique angles, like that of surfaces like roads, floor tiles, or brick walls that stretch away from the POV of the player in a game. Without anisotropic filtering, those textures can look blurry as they recede into the distance.
While in the distant past, anisotropic filtering came with a performance penalty, it no longer does on modern systems with decent GPUs, and so there's no reason not to max it out in your graphics driver settings. A word of caution, however: selecting x16 anisotropic filtering alone may not cause issues, but combining it with a negative LOD bias can cause shimmering in certain conditions. To mitigate this, avoid forcing negative LOD bias in your GPU drivers. For Intel's Arc driver, this isn't even possible, so you shouldn't have an issue. In AMD's Adrenalin, LOD bias isn't exposed to the user anymore, but there is a setting called Surface Format Optimization, which you can turn off, effectively "clamping" the LOD bias.
The defaults are a guideline
Default settings are set by GPU manufacturers based on the average user in order to give the most stable experience possible out of the box. They are by no means the most optimized, they're just there to get you up and running. While most of them are just fine, these five are certainly worth changing for most use cases.