Optimizing Game Settings

Most players on World of Tanks jump right into battle using the default game/graphic settings which the game developers have dished out. The more adventurous ones may play around with the preset Graphics Quality, such as High, Medium, Low or use the Auto-Detect feature and then leave it at that.

In reality, there’s really much more to optimizing your game settings than using the crappy defaults. For the serious gamer who wants the best performance possible for in-game battles, realistic graphics such as smoke, barrel flash, foliage only serve to restrict visuals and lower frame rates. These are contradictory for an effective battle gameplay. In this issue, we’ll explain on how to optimize your game settings to get the best battle performance.

Game Settings

To open your game settings, press Esc and click on Settings.

For the most part, you can select your preferences without any impact to game performance - but for optimized battle settings, I’d like to draw your attention to those shown in red boxes above.

Enable post-effect in Postmortem mode – OFF.
When you die in battle, notice how the screen becomes all grayed out like you were watching a zombie movie on Resident Evil? Leave this unchecked to retain the original color which provides better visuals.

Enable vehicle vibration in Sniper Mode - OFF.
When you fire a gun, it recoils. This kickback or knockback effect will rock your tank momentarily due to the backward momentum of the gun. While looking realistic, all it does is to throw off your aim in World of Tanks. Uncheck this to disable the kickback effect so you can aim much better between rounds.

Enable battle recording - ON.
Automatically records your game battle for playback later. This enables you to replay a particularly good or particularly bad battle so as to deduce the proper lessons from it.

Show vehicle tier - ON.
Show vehicle icon - ON.
Show vehicle tier - ON.
Show destroyed vehicles’ info - ON.
All these switches should be on. Experienced (and also not so experienced) players can press the left-Alt key to show these invaluable details.

Graphics Settings

Full-screen mode - ON.

Vertical Synchronization - OFF.
Causes frame rates to suffer. Use this only when outputting to TV and only if the image appears corrupted during fast movement.

Triple buffering - ON.
Provides speed improvement and reduces lag.

Colorblind mode - OFF.

Texture Quality - HIGH.
Texture quality is the amount of visible details in a 3d polygon. Consider the two examples below.

The Low Texture has rendered the tree leaves as bushy blocks (left picture), compared to the High Texture which is so much clearer (right picture).

Texture Compression - ON.

Texture Filtering - Anisotropic 16x.
This setting enables distant objects to appear sharper. Similar to depth of field in photography, it reduces blur in distant objects. Here’s the scale :-

Point - worst
Bilinear -
Trilinear -
Anisotropic 2x - better
Anisotropic 4x -
Anisotropic 8x -
Anisotropic 16x - best

This setting however is quite memory intensive and is to some degree a trade off between quality and performance. Choose the best setting you can afford without causing a drop in frame rates.

Shadow Quality - OFF.
Enhanced Shadows - OFF.
Set these to off as vehicle shadows makes it more difficult to see in contrasting situations. It also steals frame rates and does nothing to help battle performance.

Water Quality - VERY LOW.
Water Simulation - OFF.
Likewise, these should be off, or set to the lowest to improve frame rates.

Foliage Quality - LOW.
Flora Density - OFF.
Set to low and off, as these obstruct ingame visibility and steals frame rates.

Advanced Post Processing - OFF.
Leave this as off. Causes objects to appear annoyingly blur when activated.

Post processing is the process of combining individually rendered objects to apply a more natural look. This natural look causes distant objects to appear blur as the eyes can only focus on one point in space, and the rest appears out of focus. This naturalism is quite annoying in games because it causes many objects to become blur. You should set this to Off.

The two images above show the effect of Post Processing. The left blurry image has Post Processing on, whereas the sharper right image has Post Processing off.

Post Processing - LOW.

Draw Distance - HIGH.
This setting determines the distance of the terrain that will be rendered. It doesn’t affect enemy vehicle detection, just how far into the terrain you can see.

Notice you can see the hills, tree, bushes, and flag in the distance when set to high.

Object Level of Detail - HIGH.
Similar to texture quality, this setting renders objects more clearly.

Notice the branches on the left are so much clearer with high level of detail. More than just pretty graphics, this detail enables you to see better.

Extra effects quality - OFF.
Extra effects in Sniper Mode - OFF.
Both settings set to off. These extra effects refers to stuffs like barrel flash, barrel smoke. Enabling smoke only obscures vision. You should set it to off so you can see so much better.

Display grass in Sniper Mode - OFF.

Enable track effects - OFF.
Another cosmetic feature, this shows dirt and gravel thrown up by your tracks when rushing through muddy terrain.

Enable track traces - ON.
Track traces may be useful to show the last seen direction of an enemy tank after it disappears out of sight.

Reticle Setting

Finally we come to the reticle setting. Reticle simply refers to the pattern in the eyepiece of your gun sight. Its also commonly referred as the crosshair.

For this, most of the settings are preference based, and don’t really affect game play – except one.

Gun Marker - Crosshair I (with armor penetration indicator).
Choose this setting because the crosshair changes color to show its penetration potential – from green (good) to orange (average) and red (poor).

Often times you’ll be peering at distant enemy tanks, or through bushes. With obscured vision, its difficult to clearly see modules, or aim at armor weak spots. This color changing crosshair is a great guide which WW2 tankers would have given their favorite toe for.

Notice in the image above, how the crosshair changes color from red, orange and green depending on where the gun is pointed, showing the penetration potential.