How to make PC games run faster and smoother
Two other important and popular settings are draw distance and specular distance. Draw distance, also called view distance or sight distance, determines how far out you’ll see objects. If a tree is a hundred feet away in the game, it will only show up on the screen if you chose to draw objects out that far. Until you get close enough, most games will replace it with a horrible looking single color fog. This really cuts down on realism but putting the distance further out creates exponentially more calculations so the game can get really slow, really quickly if you turn it all the way up to the maximum. Typically sight/draw distance is the last option you’ll alter because it affects the framerate so heavily and can usually be adjusted very specifically with a slider. So it’s usually easy to keep turning it up or down just a little bit until the game just barely runs at the maximum framerate to perfect your configuration. Specular distance is very similar in that it determines the distance out to which the specular effect is drawn. Specular just makes objects that are supposed to be shiny or wet look shiny or wet by displaying extra light on them. It’s mostly for show so if you’re having trouble getting the framerate up higher, disable it completely. The effect it will have on performance relies on how many objects in the game are supposed to have specular effects and if it’s a lot, you may want to turn it way down or disable it completely.
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