With 16x AF, it retains its nice crunchy texture much further into the distance. With AF switched off, it’s just a few feet before the path’s textures become murky (marked by the red line). Look at the path in these two shots from The Witcher 3. This is ostensibly done to improve performance, but these days your average GPU should be able to handle 16x anisotropic filtering with little trade-off. It’s a bit like being short-sighted, but specifically for surfaces at angles. The less texture filtering you have, the shorter the distance at which textures become blurred. In first- and third-person games, you spend a lot of time looking at walls and floors at oblique angles, with the given surface stretching off into the distance. So if we don’t mention a particular option, just stick with its default settings. Many of the 3D settings in NVCP just don’t work universally enough or have a tangible enough impact to recommend. ‘Optimal power’ is a good balance between performance and power. It’s overkill, and bad for the longevity of your card.
You may also be tempted to crank ‘Power management mode’ up to ‘maximum performance’, but this will make your GPU run loud and hot at its max clock speeds when gaming.
