Graphics Settings & Visual Effects Glossary

By Treesz · Updated Oct 12, 2026

A graphics menu is a list of names that mean little until you know what each one changes on screen. Some settings decide how good the picture looks, some decide how fast the game runs, and a few decide whether you can see an enemy standing in the grass. This glossary explains nine effects and techniques you meet in settings menus and patch notes, and links to three related articles.

Each entry says what the term is, what it looks like in practice and when it is worth changing. If you only want a quick answer, use the table: it separates the settings that cost performance from those that are about taste or comfort.

Term	What you see	Cost to performance	Change it if
Bloom	Bright lights glow and bleed past their edges	Low	The picture looks washed out, or bright effects hide targets
Clip map	Nothing, or an invisible wall	None for you	You are asking why you cannot walk somewhere
CRT filter	Scanlines and a curved screen on retro games	Low	You like the retro look, or find it tiring
Grass culling	Grass appears a few metres in front of you	Saves performance	You want a denser look, or clearer sight lines
Particle culling	Smoke and sparks vanish at a distance	Saves performance	Effects disappear when you need them
Screen shake	The camera jolts on explosions and hits	Low	It makes you dizzy or hides targets
Terrain mesh	The shape of the ground, and how far it stays detailed	Medium to high	Distant hills pop in or look blocky
Volumetric fog	Visible light beams and thick, lit fog	High	Frame rate drops in foggy areas
Shimmering	Fine lines and distant textures flicker as you move	Fixing it costs a little	The flicker bothers you

Bloom (the glow effect)

Bloom in a graphics menu is a post-processing effect that makes bright areas glow and spill light past their edges, the way a very bright light overwhelms a camera lens or your own eyes. The game takes the brightest parts of each frame, blurs them, and blends them back over the picture. It works best with high dynamic range (HDR) rendering, where the game knows how bright a highlight really is, so a sun or a muzzle flash can glow more than a white wall.

The technique reached mainstream games in the early 2000s. A 2004 chapter called "Real-Time Glow" in NVIDIA's GPU Gems book, written by Greg James of NVIDIA and John O'Rorke of Monolith Productions, described the method the studio built for the game Tron 2.0. Heavy-handed bloom became a trademark look of console games in the years that followed, and reviewers still use "too much bloom" as shorthand for a game that smears light over everything.

What to do with the setting:

Story and exploration games: keep it on. Bloom is part of the intended mood in many of them.
Competitive shooters: many players lower or switch it off, because glow around explosions, muzzle flashes and bright windows can hide an opponent.
Look for other names. Menus may call it glow, light bloom or post-processing quality.

A word of caution: in shooters, "bloom" also describes something unrelated, the random widening of your crosshair that spreads bullets while you move or fire. That is a gameplay mechanic, not a graphics setting, and it is explained under bullet spread. The two share a name only.

Clip map

"Clip map" is used for two different things, and the search results often mix them up.

1. Clip brushes (collision boundaries). In level editors for games built on Quake-style tools, level designers add invisible surfaces called clip brushes. You cannot see them, but the game treats them as solid. They stop players walking into places the designers did not finish, smooth awkward corners so you do not catch on small ledges, and keep players out of areas where the map would look broken. If you have ever hit an invisible wall at the edge of a map, you met a clip boundary. They are not a setting, and you cannot turn them off in a normal game. Some games use separate clip volumes for players and for projectiles, so a bullet can pass a barrier that you cannot walk through.

2. Clipmaps (a texture and terrain technique). Written as one word, a clipmap is a way of storing a huge texture or height map by keeping only the part near the viewer in fast memory. It was introduced in a 1998 SIGGRAPH paper, "The Clipmap: A Virtual Mipmap", by researchers at Silicon Graphics, who used it to display a very large texture in real time. In 2004 Frank Losasso and Hugues Hoppe applied the same idea to terrain geometry ("geometry clipmaps"), caching nested grids of terrain centred on the viewer. Games with large landscapes rely on related ideas, and you can read more under terrain mesh.

If your question is "why can't I walk through this gap?", you are looking at the first meaning. If you read a technical article about rendering large worlds, it is probably the second.

CRT filter

A CRT filter imitates the look of an old cathode-ray tube television or monitor on a modern flat screen. Retro collections, emulators and some pixel-art games include it as an option. The common parts of the effect are:

Scanlines: thin dark horizontal lines between rows of pixels.
Curvature: a slight bulge at the screen edges, as on a glass tube.
Phosphor glow and bleed: bright pixels blur slightly into their neighbours.
Shadow mask or aperture grille: a fine pattern of coloured dots or stripes, imitating how a tube displays colour.

Why people use it: many older games were drawn knowing that the television would soften and blend the pixels. On a sharp modern display the same art can look harsh and blocky, and the filter brings back the softness the artists expected.

Practical notes:

Scanlines and masks darken the picture, so raise the brightness or choose a lighter preset if the image looks dim.
Fine patterns on a low-resolution screen can produce moiré (a wavy interference pattern). If you see it, try another resolution or a lighter filter.
Some players find curvature and flicker-like patterns tiring. Always leave an option to switch it off.
A filter is cosmetic. It does not change how the game plays.

Grass culling

Culling means not drawing things that do not need to be drawn. Grass culling applies that to foliage: thousands of grass blades are expensive to render, so the game draws only the ones that matter. Three checks are common:

View culling (frustum culling): blades outside the camera's view are skipped.
Distance culling: beyond a set distance the grass is faded out or replaced with a simpler version.
Occlusion culling: blades hidden behind a rock or a building are skipped.

Game engines expose this as settings. Unity's terrain system, for example, has a detail distance and detail density for grass, and Unreal Engine lets artists set a start and end cull distance on foliage. In a game's menu the same controls appear as foliage quality, vegetation distance or grass density.

Why it matters to you:

Performance. Grass is one of the first things to turn down if the frame rate is poor in open-world games. Lowering draw distance usually gives more than lowering density.
Visibility. In shooters, the thickness of grass can hide a prone player. Studios deal with this differently: some tie the effect to a fixed quality level, and some limit what you can disable so that low settings do not become an advantage. If grass looks thin at your settings, so it does for everyone playing at those settings, but not for someone on higher ones.
Pop-in. If grass appears suddenly a few metres ahead of you while you run, that is the culling distance. Raising the distance hides it, at a cost.

Particle culling

Particles are the many small sprites or points that make up smoke, fire, sparks, rain, dust and magic effects. Particle culling stops the game from simulating or drawing particle systems that cannot be seen: effects outside the camera's view, far away, or hidden behind walls. Without it, a busy fight or storm could drag the frame rate down because the game would draw every spark on the map.

There are two things that can be skipped. The first is drawing: the particles are not rendered. The second is simulating: the game stops updating the effect. The second is trickier, because an effect that stops updating while off-screen has to resume sensibly when you look back at it. Unity's particle systems, for example, have a culling mode that decides whether an off-screen system keeps simulating, pauses, or catches up when it becomes visible again.

What it means for players:

Effects quality or particle density settings in menus usually control how many particles an effect may spawn and how far away they are shown. Lower numbers help in crowded fights.
Disappearing effects. If a smoke grenade or area effect looks smaller or vanishes from a distance, that is usually culling, not a bug. In games where such effects carry gameplay information, such as an area-of-effect zone, the developers normally draw a simplified marker instead so that everyone can still see it.
Cheap wins. Particles are a cheap place to save performance in games with big fights, because reducing them rarely makes the game harder to read.

Screen shake

Screen shake (or camera shake) is a short, deliberate jolt of the camera that adds weight to an explosion, a heavy landing, a hit or a boss attack. It is cheap to make and very effective: designers often add it, together with a brief pause and a sound, to make an action feel powerful. Jan Willem Nijman of the studio Vlambeer popularised the idea in his talk "The Art of Screenshake" in 2013, using small amounts of shake, camera kick and other feedback to show how a plain shooter can be made to feel better to play.

The downsides are real:

Motion sickness and eye strain. Constant shaking can cause nausea and headaches for some players. Accessibility guidelines for games, such as Microsoft's Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, recommend avoiding camera shake and bobbing or offering an option to turn them off.
Lost information. When the screen shakes during a fight, small targets are harder to follow.

Where to find the setting: look in the accessibility, camera or gameplay options for camera shake, screen shake, head bob or view bobbing. Some games, such as It Takes Two, offer a plain switch; others let you scale the strength. If a game has no option and the shake bothers you, tell the studio: a missing toggle is a common accessibility request.

Terrain mesh

The terrain mesh is the 3D surface that forms the ground in a game: a network of points (vertices) joined into triangles that make up hills, valleys and plains. Most engines build it from a heightmap, a greyscale image where each pixel stores the height of one spot, and turn that into a mesh. Textures (grass, sand, rock) are painted over the top, and the same surface is usually used for collision, so characters stand on it.

The central trade-off is detail against cost. A single mesh with a triangle for every square metre of a large map would be far too heavy, so engines use level of detail (LOD): triangles near the camera are small and numerous, and far-away ground uses large, simple triangles. That is the idea behind the geometry clipmaps mentioned under clip map.

What this looks like to you:

Pop-in and "popping" hills. When ground in the distance suddenly adds detail as you approach, you see the LOD change. Higher terrain quality or view distance settings push that point further out.
Blocky horizons. A low terrain setting can make distant hills look like faceted shapes.
Where the mesh cannot go. A heightmap stores one height per spot, so it cannot make caves, overhangs or arches by itself. Those are made as separate models placed over or under the terrain.

For pathfinding, many games also use a simplified navigation mesh built from the terrain, which is what computer-controlled characters follow. See game world, movement and navigation terms for how movement and traversal build on the ground you walk on.

Volumetric fog

Volumetric fog is fog that exists as a three-dimensional volume of air instead of a flat colour blended into the distance. Lights shine into it, so you see visible beams of light, glowing lamp halos and shadows cutting through haze. Older "distance fog" simply fades distant objects toward a colour; it is cheap and uniform. Volumetric fog interacts with every light and object it surrounds, which is why it looks richer and also why it costs much more.

Two facts from graphics history show both sides:

Fog has long been used to hide limits. On the PlayStation, games such as Silent Hill used thick fog to cover the short draw distance, and the nervous atmosphere that came with it became part of the series' identity.
Modern real-time volumetric fog was described by Bart Wronski for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag in 2014; the technique stores light scattering in a three-dimensional grid and costs around a millisecond per frame on the consoles of that generation. Another well-known case is Fallout 4's Godrays Quality option, which uses NVIDIA's volumetric lighting; NVIDIA's own figures, as reported by PC Gamer, put the cost at about 5% of performance on Low and about 40% on Ultra.

What to do:

Look for a "volumetric" or "fog quality" slider. Lowering it by one step usually returns a good share of frame rate with a small change in look.
In competitive play, thick fog can hide enemies. Check whether your game applies the same fog to everyone, which is normal, or lets you reduce it, which can matter for fairness.
For screenshots and slow exploration, this is one of the most noticeable effects to leave on high.

Shimmering

Shimmering is flicker or crawling on fine detail when the camera or an object moves: wire fences, thin cables, distant roof tiles, foliage edges and glossy textures seem to sparkle. It happens because a screen has a fixed grid of pixels and the game samples the scene once per pixel. Thin or high-contrast detail falls on one pixel in one frame and on the next one in the following frame, so it appears and disappears. This is called aliasing; the "jaggies" on edges are the still-picture version of the same problem.

What reduces it:

Fix	What it does	Downside
Temporal anti-aliasing (TAA, DLAA and similar)	Uses information from earlier frames to smooth edges and detail	Can leave a soft look or faint trails behind moving objects
MSAA or SMAA	Smooths geometry edges	MSAA is demanding and does not touch textures; SMAA is lighter
Anisotropic filtering	Keeps ground and wall textures sharp at shallow angles and cuts texture crawl	Very small cost on modern hardware
Render scale above 100%	Draws extra pixels and shrinks the image	Needs GPU headroom; see render scale
Lower sharpening	Strong sharpening filters make shimmer more visible	Slightly softer picture

Two myths are worth correcting. V-Sync does not cure shimmering; it makes the game wait for the monitor's refresh to avoid screen tearing, which is a different problem. And upscalers can add their own shimmer: if a game with DLSS or FSR shows flicker on fine detail, try another quality mode or a different anti-aliasing option.

These three terms are covered by their own articles:

Depth of field: the blur applied to things in front of or behind the focus point, which many players switch off in fast games because it blurs targets.
Render scale: the percentage of your screen resolution the 3D picture is drawn at; lowering it is one of the quickest ways to gain frame rate, and going above 100% cleans up shimmering at a high cost.
Vignette: darkened screen corners. Games use the effect to focus attention, to show low health, or as a cinematic look, and most let you turn it off.

A starting point for tuning

If you do not know where to begin, change settings in this order:

Set the render scale or resolution first, because it affects frame rate more than any other single option.
Lower volumetric fog, shadows and particle density next; they cost a lot and are rarely the details you notice in a fight.
Adjust foliage and terrain distance if the game is open-world.
Turn off bloom, depth of field, motion blur and screen shake if you play competitively or feel dizzy.
Choose anti-aliasing last, judging it by whether the flicker bothers you.

For performance questions beyond visual settings, such as frame caps and shader caches, see PC performance and frame rate terms.