What Do Competitive Players Do With Their Settings? A Multi-Game Esports Configuration Survey

Presenter: Ashish Rajpurohit

Competitive PC games typically expose twenty or more graphics settings to players, each setting representing a tradeoff between visual quality and interactive performance. How players actually work through making these tradeoffs is not well documented. We report findings from an ongoing survey of players across 14 esports titles spanning five genres, combining self-reported configuration preferences with parsed configuration files uploaded from participants’ machines. Across 44 game-level responses, 75% of players prioritized frame rate over visual quality, and 86% of the configuration files uploaded had VSYNC disabled. This preference is not uniform across genres: every tactical shooter and battle royale response favored performance, while MOBA and sports game responses were more divided. We also asked players to rate their own understanding of the graphics settings and the usability of each game’s settings interface. More than half rated themselves Advanced or Expert, though this varied by genre; players reporting a stronger understanding were more likely to prioritize performance. For rendering engineers and game designers, these patterns argue against treating “competitive defaults” as a single target. Responses to the usability question suggest that the complexity of current settings menus may affect different player populations differently.