I’ve never really used it…but I was updating my old man’s computer tonight with new drivers and happened to see the “Optimizer” thing pop up where it scans your system for games and then (apparently) sets the ideal settings for the graphics card. Is this legit or bogus? I haven’t tried it on my home computer…but was wondering if it was worth doing?
BeachAV8R
I use it for certain games, probably more ideal for people like myself who want the games to look as nice as possible but actually still after all these years don’t know a darn thing about most of the settings, other than high, medium, low. Pretty legit imo.
Just an example, Dirt Rally the optimizer has it running in 4k resolution with DSR to normal size. not something i ever would have considered since my monitor is 1920x1080 and didn’t think such a thing would work, but i gotta say, dang it looks nice.
I think if the resolution rendered is larger than the screen resolution you get sort of an MSAA effect.
Yes, this is called SSAA and in general it is more GPU-intensive than regular MSAA, but it has some benefits.
I recall when this DSR feature was introduced, people used it back in DCS 1.2.x to be able to spot aircraft at greater distances.
Maybe it also looks better than regular MSAA.
Wikipedia pages: SSAA, MSAA
Quote from MSAA wiki:
Initial implementations of full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) worked conceptually by simply rendering a scene at a higher resolution, and then downsampling to a lower-resolution output. Most modern GPUs are capable of this form of anti-aliasing, but it greatly taxes resources such as texture, bandwidth, and fillrate. (If a program is highly TCL-bound or CPU-bound, supersampling can be used without much performance hit.)
sorry, that is all a bunch of gibberish to me, hence why the optimizer is pretty good 
This is basicly what Anti-Aliasing (AA) does for your games
The auto settings things (There is a AMD Radeon one too that comes installed by default) are ok. They are usually best used when:
New cards, new games, as in the settings work great for oversampling an AAA release that came out last week on something that Geforce or AMD want to sell like a 1070 etc. Tweaks for an old 400 series card on IL2 Forgotten Battles, not so much.
You don’t know/care about the word salad of graphics settings intricacies or want to try to find where a game developer this time chose to put the Anisotropic filtering quality preset slider.
Games are getting better at picking decent defaults though, so these things are less vital I think.
Some it just doesn’t work in, too. There’s games I’ve clicked optimize a thousand times and it just does nothing. I mean my settings are the same as what it recommends (or close) in most cases so it doesn’t matter, I just like having all the green checkmarks.
When it works it works fine. It’s actually upped my settings in a few games and made it better.
This is definately true, especially for larger titles. I remember a time when you would have to set everything yourself or you’d be stuck at minimum settings. Nowadays, at most i tweak a few parameters and that’s it.
One thing I’ve noticed with the GeForce optimisations is that they don’t always target 60fps. Given its an “optimisation”, and the most alluring thing about PCs is their buttery smooth rendering, it’s always seemed odd to aim for 30fps.
That said, they can be good starting points for further fettling.
Thanks for all the replies. I’m not too big of a “futzer”…so it might be a good starting point for me.
To be honest I find it useless as it just turns down a bunch of things to get you up and running, while you in many cases could run at higher settings. However, optimizing individual games to run well on pc’s is pretty much like building a small space rocket, so you have to have some patience.
In my opinion, running a constant gpu and cpu usage monitor (I use Msi Afterburner to display this externally on my logitech keyboard), while testing out different settings, is a more viable solution. Then you can see when the gpu simply cracks under the pressure of raising the fsaa to high, or if there MIGHT be a cpu limitation going on (for instance, since dcs use only two threads if I recall correctly, 50% cpu usage is… well, not so good).
Lastly, simply learning to identify all these fancy new 3d engine expressions help a lot. For instance; in my experience, if you value your fps, run away screaming if you see an option called “screen space reflections”. You pretty much need a post-Pascal card to run this effect well in complex games. Thing is, most games look beautiful these days, even with a handful of options turned down or off, and some take an exceptionally high toll to run compared to the visual gains. Its still hard to have to “let them go”, as we all want EVERYTHING. Hehe. I now realize that I just killed my initial statements, but this is apples and oranges, depending on your setup I guess. Running gsync changed everything again for me, as I now want to run my games at 80-90fps if I can (yes, I CAN spot the difference between 60 and higher fps). Oculus Rift did the same, as its quite heavy to run at the optimal 90fps, even with my 980 ti.
Anyhow, I hope that my input may be at least somewhat helpful. Just my two cents. 
Good info. I’m a mixed bag. I like the quick and dirty…but I also like tweaking…so there is probably no one good solution for me. Fortunately, my gaming is limited to a few items at the moment…so it isn’t too hard to spend a bit of time working on things to get them working.
you can still tweak the settings after you hit optimize, guess it’s a bit like raising the baseline