Overwatch Settings
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Overwatch Settings
By Eddy Baker February 14, 2017 7 Comments
It doesn’t matter if you have the best gaming monitor already, as you also need to change the Overwatch video settings in order to get an advantage over your opponents. With these Overwatch settings, you will ready to stomp your opponents if you have the necessary skills for it. Applying these settings definitely helps, but it does not make you a pro immediately.
Also, if you have a good gaming mouse , you may want to optimize your mouse settings as well. We are going to list the best mouse settings for Overwatch in this guide as well very soon, so stay tuned.
Your main goal is to get as much FPS as possible and remove as much clutter on the screen as possible. This will optimize your view and will give you a slight advantage over others. These settings will maximize your FPS and at the same time minimize screen clutter on your screen. And don’t worry, these settings will not make the game look horrible.
Reaching that magical 144 FPS should be your main focus. Therefore, it is important that you invest in a 144Hz monitor if you want to get the most out of your gaming rig. Once you buy a 144Hz monitor, it’s certain that you’ll never be able to back to 60Hz again. If you have a 60Hz monitor, you should aim at getting 60 FPS instead, and this isn’t had to get.
This guide is intended to give you the best and perfect settings for competitive gameplay. We have analyzed professional Overwatch players and seen what settings they use. Here are the best video settings for Overwatch:
We recommend that you pick the highest possible resolution as long as you can choose the highest possible refresh rate your monitor supports and you can get frame rates that high. If not, you can lower your resolution to get get frame rates in Overwatch.
Just set this setting to the highest value as a higher number means a wider vision you are able to see in your monitor
Use an aspect ratio of 16:9 (widescreen). Using an aspect ratio of 21:9 (ultrawide) will cut off roughly 30% of your field of view as opposed to giving you a wider FOV, which is what you would expect from an ultrawide monitor.
Having Vsync enabled will increase your input lag, which is the last thing you want in competitive FPS gaming. Vsync will eliminate screen tearing, but it’s simply not worth it. It’s better to use better alternatives, such as FreeSync or G-Sync .
This can cause an increased input lag as well, so disable this as well. Only turn it on if you want Vsync on, which you shouldn’t do anyway
If your monitor supports FreeSync or G-Sync, you will have the option to pick “Display Based” here, which you should do. This will synchronize the FPS of the game with your monitor’s refresh rate and thus eliminating screen tearing. If you can’t pick that option, set it at “Off”, as you want the highest FPS possible.
Clicking on the “+” symbol next to “Advanced” in order to see all the graphics quality settings. Here are the best settings you can select here:
Setting this to lower than 100% will make everything look very bad and pixelated. Having it set above 100% will make your FPS decline drastically and you won’t be able to see the difference anyway.
Only set this to higher if your GPU can handle it and do so consistently. You need those 60 FPS (on a 60Hz monitor) or 144 FPS (on a 144Hz monitor) numbers! If you need more FPS, you can set it to low, but it will make everything look bad and pixelated.
The quality improvements are not really noticeable. Keep this at low for optimal performance, unless your GPU can handle a higher setting.
You don’t want fog blocking your vision, do you? And on top of that, it will decrease your FPS. Keep this on low.
It’s not worth it to have this setting enabled.
You don’t want this off, since you want to be able to see the shadows of your enemies (in corners, etc.). Setting it to low is optimal in terms of FPS.
When this setting is on anything else besides “Low”, you will get your vision blocked by random bushes around the maps. You will also get a little more FPS.
The effects will still be clearly visible even on the “Low” setting, and you will see great performance gains.
You don’t want to get blinded by looking at light, do you?
Having this setting on “Low – FXAA” is definitely worth it, as you will only see a drop in FPS of around 3 percent. This will give you smoother edges in Overwatch and if you turn it off, the edges will look really bad.
This is the quality of light as it passes through objects or mediums. Having this setting at “Low” is the most optimal setting.
The quality of in-game screenshots.
Having this setting turned off is the most optimal setting as it provides no real value and you will get better FPS if you have it disabled.
This will add more depth to light and shadows in Overwatch. It will also increase your FPS by quite a bit, so it is worth turning off.
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Maxing out high refresh displays for a competitive advantage.
Overwatch (opens in new tab) hardly needs an introduction. After more than a year Overwatch continues to receive regular updates, graphics card drivers have been tuned for the game, and with more 30 million registered players, it's not going away anytime soon.
The good news for people looking to get into Overwatch is that it's not too demanding when it comes to hardware. If you have a PC built in the past five years with a decent graphics card, you can probably get at least 30 fps. For 60 fps, you'll either need a faster graphics card or lower quality settings.
But what if you're the highly competitive type, and you're running a 144Hz or even 240Hz display? That will require a pretty powerful system, and that's why we chose Overwatch for a performance analysis.
Looking at the features checklist, Overwatch does a lot of things right, but there are a few areas where it really comes up short. Resolution support is good, but the FOV setting is locked to a maximum of 103, which means ultrawide displays and multimonitor support ends up with vertical cropping rather than a properly scaled experience. Blizzard chose to go this route in order to prevent owners of ultrawide displays from having a competitive advantage, but personally I find that argument specious. Owners of fast PCs and people with fast Internet connections also have a competitive advantage, for example. Regardless, don't expect an ideal ultrawidescreen experience.
The major missing item however is modding support. Blizzard has said it knows modding is a big deal, but that it hasn't found an effective way to support modding in Overwatch without compromising other aspects of the game (eg, cheating). Considering the whole MOBA genre spawned from a mod to WarCraft 3, it's a sad and unfortunate loss. There's a slim chance Blizzard could change this in the future, but don't count on it.
As our partner for these detailed performance analyses, MSI provided the hardware we needed to test Overwatch on a bunch of different AMD and Nvidia GPUs, multiple CPUs, and several laptops—see below for the full details. Full details of our test equipment and methodology are detailed in our Performance Analysis 101 article . Thanks, MSI!
Overwatch has a fairly comprehensive collection of graphics settings that can be tweaked, with 11 individual settings. There are five presets for ease of use: Low, medium, high, ultra and epic. However, many of the settings have very little impact on performance or visual fidelity. Dynamic reflections is the most demanding setting to enable, providing up to a 50 percent boost to frame rates when it's off, and it's not something most people will miss. Local fog detail can also have a 10-15 percent impact on performance, followed by shadow quality and ambient occlusion.
The remaining settings only cause a small drop in performance, even at maximum quality, though texture quality does need sufficient VRAM—typically 4GB or more and you can set that to max. I'll discuss the various settings in detail below, if you want additional information.
MSI provided all of the hardware for this testing, mostly consisting of its Gaming/Gaming X graphics cards. Unfortunately, many of the cards are currently showing wildly inflated pricing due to cryptocurrency fever, and quite a few are out of stock right now. The above price tables show the current best prices we're tracking, however, so they'll populate when the cards are back in stock.
MSI's Gaming X cards are designed to be fast but quiet, and the fans will shut off completely when the graphics card isn't being used. All of the GPUs are factory overclocked, by 5-10 percent. Our main test system is MSI's Aegis Ti3, a custom case and motherboard with an overclocked 4.8GHz i7-7700K, 64GB DDR4-2400 RAM, and a pair of 512GB Plextor M8Pe M.2 NVMe solid-state drives in RAID0. There's a 2TB hard drive as well.
MSI also provided three of its gaming notebooks for testing, the GS63VR with GTX 1060, GT62VR with GTX 1070, and GT73VR with GTX 1080. The GS63VR has a GTX 1060 6GB with a 4Kp60 display, the GT62VR has a GTX 1070 and a 1080p60 G-Sync display, and the GT73VR has a GTX 1080 with a 1080p120 G-Sync display. For testing higher resolutions on the GT-series notebooks, I used Nvidia's DSR technology.
For CPU testing, MSI has provided several different motherboards. In addition to the Aegis Ti3, I have the X99A Gaming Pro Carbon for Haswell-E/Broadwell-E testing, Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon for additional Core i3/i5 Kaby Lake CPU testing, X370 Gaming Pro Carbon for high-end Ryzen 7 builds, B350 Tomahawk for budget-friends Ryzen 5 builds, and the new X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC for Intel's Skylake-X platform.
For the benchmarks, I've used my standard choice of 1080p medium as the baseline, and then supplemented that with 1080p, 1440p, and 4K epic performance (though it's worth noting that even epic doesn't max out every setting). As with other competitive multiplayer games, some people will want to disable certain graphics settings to try to gain a competitive advantage. Lower quality shadows and lighting can make it easier to spot opponents, for example. The performance difference between the low and medium presets is pretty small, however, so I've stuck with that as the minimum.
Testing performance of a game like Overwatch is a bit tricky, since the critical moment is going to be in the heat of battle with explosions and particles flying everywhere. Online multiplayer isn't exactly repeatable, so I ran a custom battle with 11 bots on the King's Row map. I grabbed a 60 second benchmark of framerates multiple times and took the median result. The variation between runs is less than five percent, so if two results are close to each other, it's effectively a tie. Remember that in less hectic moments framerates can be up to twice as fast, but the numbers here are what you'll get during intense firefights.
For the maximum framerate junkies running on 240Hz displays, only the fastest graphics cards will suffice. The 1070, 1080, and 1080 Ti all break 240 fps averages, though periodic dips keep minimum closer to 200 fps. Since the only 240Hz displays currently available also support G-Sync or FreeSync, however, that shouldn't be a problem. If you want to maintain 240 fps, you'll also want to stick with Nvidia GPUs, at least for now, as none of AMD's GPUs could break the 240 fps barrier.
In general, at most price tiers the Nvidia GPUs hold a clear performance advantage (and that's not even taking into account the current cryptocurrency inflated pricing). I haven't (re)tested with AMD's latest drivers, so these results are potentially two weeks out of date, but the GTX 1060 6GB beats the R9 Fury X, and the GTX 1060 3GB beats the RX 480 8GB (overclocked).
All of the dedicated GPUs are clearly hitting playable framerates, but the 1050 and 460 are usually pretty similar. Here the 1050 holds onto a nearly 50 percent performance advantage, indicating better optimized drivers. AMD will need more than a faster GPU to close the gap, so hopefully new drivers will improve the situation when RX Vega launches next month.
What about those running integrated graphics? I have bad news for you: at 1080p medium, Intel's latest HD Graphics 630 (found in most 7th Generation Core processors, and with similar performance to the HD Graphics 530) comes up well short of 30 fps. It's not playable at less than 20 fps. You can improve things by dropping the resolution, however—at 1366x768, the HD 630 manages around 45 fps. If you're on an older 4th Gen Core processor, graphics performance will be about 20-30 percent slower, but that should still get you at least 30 fps. AMD's more recent APUs should also be able to hit 30-40 fps at 1366x768.
Cranking the quality to 1080p epic drops performance on the fastest card, the GTX 1080 Ti, by about 25 percent, as it was bumping into the 300 fps framerate cap before. Slower GPUs like the RX 470 can lose up to half of their performance compared to medium quality. All of the tested graphics cards are still playable, but if you're looking for 60+ fps, you'll need an RX 470 or GTX 970 or equivalent to get there. And if you were hoping for 240 fps on a 1080p 240Hz display, sorry, it's not happening. All of the extra graphical effects prove too much for even the 1080 Ti.
Looking at the budget cards, the Radeon RX 460 2GB sits on the 30 fps fence, which for competitive gamers is going to be too slow. Nvidia again performs better than AMD in Overwatch, with the mainstream GTX 1060 models easily beating the RX 470 and 480—and by extension, the RX 570 and 580. VRAM isn't a major factor if you look at the 1050 and 1050 Ti, though that will change at higher resolutions. Not that I'd recommend going with a 2GB card these days, as many other games have started to benefit from 4GB VRAM.
1440p Epic quality obviously demands a powerful graphics card. Those with a 144Hz display will need a 1080 Ti to max out the refresh rate, and for AMD the only hope right now is that RX Vega will be in that same ballpark. But if you have a G-Sync or FreeSync display, the RX 470 and above and GTX 970 and above all run quite well. I'll get into more detail in a moment, but for 1440p gaming, even with a GTX 1080 Ti, nearly any modern CPU will be fast enough to max out the graphics card.
If all you want is 60 fps, the 1060 6GB and R9 Fury X will get you there, but Nvidia's hardware is clearly delivering better overall performance—at least the Fury X is able to beat the 1060 this round, no doubt helped by the massive 512GB/s of bandwidth that HBM provides, but I'd normally expect the Fury X to be closer to the 1070 in performance.
I've said that Overwatch isn't as demanding as some other games, but that doesn't mean 4K epic is a walk in the park. A GTX 1080 will nearly average 60 fps during the most demanding sequences, but if you want a steady 60+ fps you'll need a GTX 1080 Ti. This is actually one of the few recent games where a single fast GPU can run well above 60 fps at maximum quality, but if you're willing to disable dynamic reflections then the Fury X and 1070 should also break into 60 fps territory.
I also have some good news for those running multi-GPU solutions. GTX 1080 SLI showed excellent performance scaling— a bit too excellent, actually, as GTX 1080 SLI nearly tripled the performance of a single 1080. It's hard to tell what's going on, but I'd guess certain graphics effects are disabled with SLI, probably dynamic reflections. If your main concern is framerates, that's not a problem, and it would allow for 144+ fps on 1440p and 4K displays. Now if only the Asus PG27UQ and Acer Predator X27 were available for purchase—those will be the first 144Hz 4K displays.
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What about the CPU side of things—does Overwatch benefit from additional CPU cores and SMT/Hyper-Threading? I've decided to use the GTX 1080 Ti for CPU scaling tests this time, as that will move the bottleneck to the CPU side of things as much as possible. Using the 1080 Ti, I tested that five Intel CPUs and three AMD Ryzen CPUs. The above gallery shows results at all four test settings.
The critical moment is going to be in the heat of battle with explosions and particles flying everywhere.
The biggest difference is at lower resolutions and quality settings. At 1080p, the i9-7900X and i7-7800X are basically tied, with both CPUs bumping into the 300 fps cap. That's interesting, considering the lower clockspeeds and additional cores, so Overwatch is clearly able to benefit from more than four CPU cores. On the other hand, the 4-core/8-thread i7-7700K still easily beats the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 1800X, so don't neglect clockspeeds and IPC.
At 1080p epic, the i9-7900X and i7-7800X still take top honors, but the Ryzen 1800X moves ahead of the i7-7700K. All the extra graphics effects appear to tax the CPU cores differently, with minimum fps on the 7700K clearly taking a hit. But at 1440p, most CPUs start to look the same, and only the i3-7100 is moderately slower—not that I expect anyone to pair a $700 GPU with a $120 CPU. Also keep in mind multiple GPUs like GTX 1080 SLI will need more CPU than a single GPU, which is why I recommend Core i7 or above for SLI and CrossFire builds.
Of course, most of these CPU limitations are only visible with an ultra-fast graphics card. Using a slower mainstream card like a GTX 1060 3GB or RX 470 4GB (or RX 570 4GB), Core i5 and Ryzen 5 are more than sufficient. There's almost no difference in performance between the i5-7500 and i7-7700K using a 1060 3GB or RX 470.
Swipe left/right for more images.
Swipe left/right for more images.
Swipe left/right for more images.
Swipe left/right for more images.
Shifting over to the mobile side of things, there are a few oddities. First, the GS63VR is the only notebook I tested that uses Nvidia's Optimus Technology, which basically renders the game on the dedicated GPU and then copies the resulting frames over to the integrated graphics' framebuffer. At moderate framerates, this isn't a problem, but there's a clear bottleneck in Overwatch that limits framerates to around 72 fps. Basically, don't get too hung up on the GS63VR numbers at 1080p.
Given the mobile CPUs are slower than the i7-7700K in the desktop system, it's no surprise that the GTX 1080 notebook falls behind the GTX 1080 desktop at 1080p medium. Things are a lot closer at the epic preset, though the desktop is still a bit faster. The mobile 1070 and 1060 aren't clocked as aggressively, and in the case of the 1060, in addition to Optimus it has to cope with significantly reduced cooling performance as the GS63VR is a thin and light gaming notebook. The desktop 1070 ends up being about 10 percent faster than the GT62VR, while the desktop 1060 is about 20 percent faster than the GS63VR.
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