Hmm. Let's go through them and I"ll tell you what I found.

The extShadowQuality CVar must have been a holdover I forgot to purge; It's documented in the older wikis but I don't see any effect using that one any more.

I did try the graphicsShadowQuality 1 vs 4 vs the shadowMode setting I was using and I can't really tell the difference.

farclip vs graphicsViewDistance
  • If I set graphicsViewDistance to 1 and then toggle farclip between 1000 and 2700, things pop in and out of view, so they do not appear to 100% overlap. Setting both as above does get you lower or higher detail/distance than setting one or the other.
  • You are correct about farclip having a floor of 1000, though I don't know how that would cause additional overhead. Guess this was another leftover I just didn't bother changing as it had the desired effect.
  • If I set farclip to 2700 and then call /console graphicsViewDistance 1, my FPS hovers at 186 90% of the time. If I set farclip to 1000 and then call /console graphicsViewDistance 1, my FPS hovers at 195 95% of the time. There does appear to be a performance difference when using both settings together, though very minor overall.


groundEffectDist+groundEffectDensity+environmentDe tail

  • If I set the environmentDetail to the default of 100, then set graphicsViewDistance to 1, and then set environmentDetail to 0, a few things drop out of the scene. This was how I tested when building the macro.
  • After reading your post, if went back and toggled graphicsGroundClutter between 1 and 2 without touching the others and it does seem to do the same thing. Less typing at any rate.


waterDetail does seem to be covered by any others I'm aware of, and it's basically 3 different water reflection features rather than a quality level slider like some of the others. Did you have more detail on that one?


At any rate, thanks for pointing that out. I trimmed 4 lines in those macros, so even if my GPU doesn't notice it's still less to manage and moves more things into the forward-compatible options.