Whether you're a veteran player striving to improve or a new one wanting to start off strong, optimizing your settings is a simple way to up your game. In this guide, we'll discuss how you can tweak your settings to achieve the best performance, quality of life, and competitive edge over your opponents. Some settings don't deserve their own explanation, so please reference the images in these cases.

Video

Display Mode "Fullscreen"

Playing in Borderless Windowed is nice if you don't have a second monitor, but it's less effective from a performance standpoint. When playing on borderless you have to render your desktop at the same time, and the game doesn’t have full control over the screen output. If you have a good system this doesn't matter as much, but it's a small performance boost if you don't.

VSync "Off"

The purpose of VSync is to limit your GPU until it only outputs as many frames as your monitor can refresh. This is made to fix screen tearing, but it gives you input lag in return. This input lag will completely destroy your aim, so only ever use this if screen tearing is making your game unplayable.

Display Performance Stats

When Display Performance Stats is enabled it shows you your FPS/Ping in the top left corner of your green. This is great if you want to check whether or not your game is running well, but can be a bit distracting sometimes. Most people have this turned on at all times, but there's no problem with hiding if you want.

Limit FPS "Custom"

There’s varying opinions on whether or not it’s useful to have a higher FPS then your monitors refresh rate, but in Overwatch I’d tend to believe it is. You might get slight screen tearing (which usually isn’t noticeable), but your game and mouse movements feel a lot smoother. There's a lot of discussion about this, so I suggest doing further research into the topic.

Render Scale "100%"

Rendering Scaling is when the game takes your chosen resolution and manipulates it until it fits your screen. Essentially, if you have 1920 x 1080 and 100% render scaling you’ll be seeing the true version of 1920 x 1080. On the other hand, if you have 1920 x 1080 with 50% render scaling you’ll be seeing 960 x 540 stretched to fit your screen. This hurts the clarity of your game, but can drastically improve performance. 100% should be fine for most systems, but if you want to drop it down to 75% that'll work as well. The game will look a bit worse, but you'll still be able to identify enemy models.

Shadow Details "Low"

When you're in a competitive game, having detailed shadows is probably the least of your worries and lowering them can give you a nice performance boost. Don't ever disable them completely though, because enemy shadows only appear at low and higher.

Sound

Team Voice Chat "Auto Join"

This is a great QoL option for anyone who frequently plays in a party. Open entering a game it'll remove you from group chat and automatically put you into team chat. This keeps you from having to manually swap every time, and makes sure you're communicating the rest of your team.

Music Volume "0"

While this isn't game changing by any means, it's simple enough that it's worth doing. Once action starts happening the music gets lowered, but disabling it completely will give you clearer audio. From a competitive standpoint the music doesn't add anything, so why not disable it to potential hear enemy footsteps?

Sound Plays While in Background

If you don't have a second monitor then you can get some nice use out of this option. Whether you're watching Twitch, browsing Reddit, or mastering Minesweeper, you'll hear the queue pop while tabbed out so you don't get kicked for being AFK.

Controls

Sensitivity

Sensitivity can be a bit of a sensitive topic (pun fully intended). Everyone has a level that they’re comfortable with, so it varies a lot from person to person. In this section, I'll provide you with all the facts you'll need when considering what sensitivity to use.

There's 2 factors that determine sensitivity, your mouse's DPI (Dots per inch) and the in-game slider bar. Most gaming mice have an adjustable DPI ranging somewhere between 400-16000, but if you are using a normal mouse you might be stuck using its stock settings. The other factor you need to consider is the in-game slider bar, which is quite frankly pretty garbage. It isn’t similar to any other FPS games, and putting it to anything above 4 can cause something known as "pixel skipping". Pixel skipping is when your crosshair doesn't move completely smoothly, instead skipping a few pixels. This is much easier to understand if you can actually see it, so I suggest watching this video by Taimou of Team EnVyUs. Due to this it’s better to have a higher DPI and lower in game sensitivity. Don't get me wrong, this is something you probably can't even notice unless someone tells you, but if you truly want to optimize your settings it’s something to consider.

Sensitivities such as 1000 DPI/2.5 In-Game and 1600 DPI/3.99 are popular options for a lot of people. Having a fairly low sensitivity help with precision, but there’s many successful players who use much higher sensitivity. Fortunately someone has collected these and put them together in a massive list, and I suggest you take a look at it when determining what you want to use. There's also the option in game to change your sensitivity for different heroes, and you might want to give this a try. Heroes like Zarya and Soldier benefit from slower sensitivities since they have to track enemies. On the other hand, Winston and Genji do well with faster sensitivities since they are so fast paced.

Finding your perfect sensitivity is one of the most important things when trying to get better at Overwatch, so play around with different options and see what works best.

Crosshair

Similar to sensitivity, crosshair preference varies from person to person, but there’s some general rules that you should follow when picking yours. Overwatch has a plethora of different maps, and each has a different color scheme. This means you'll need a crosshair color that can be seen whether the map is light or dark. One of the most commonly used colors is red, because it contrasts with almost every map. Green and pink are also popular choices. You want to avoid the other colors because they're simple too hard to spot on certain maps. When it comes to what type of cross hair you want to use that really depends on the hero, but here are some guidelines you should try to follow.

For precise heroes who are aiming for headshots, such as Widowmaker and McCree, the dot is usually the best option. For heroes with a wide spray, such as D.va, Zarya, and Roadhog, the default crosshair is a good choice. Anyone in between should use the circle or short crosshair. Having the right crosshair can making aiming feel much more comfortable, so try them all and use whatever you like the most.

Allied Health Bars "On"

This is an option that'll really only affect Soldier and Zarya. Just like if you were playing a support, you can see how injured your allies are. This lets you know exactly when you need to Biotic Field/Projected Barrier.

Hanzo/Genji/Junkrat (Riptire): Automatically Climb Walls

When this option is enabled you no longer need to hold down spacebar while climbing walls. All you have to do is jump onto the wall, and it'll automatically climb it for you. Whether you like this on or off is up to you, and both options have their merits.

Mercy: Guardian Angel Prefers Beam Target

For me at least, it's a toss-up on whether or not I like this option enabled. With this turned on, Guardian Angel will fly you to whatever target your beam is connecting too, meaning you don't even need to be facing this. Sometimes this is a problem though, because you have to stop your beam before flying to another ally. Cancelling it really doesn't have much of a delay, so this really comes down to how it feels to you.

Widowmaker: Zoom Sensitivity "38"

Thankfully someone has already done the math to figure out the optimal zoom sensitivity for Widowmaker. According to this reddit post (which looks quite accurate) the sweet spot is 38, and that'll make it equal to your regular sensitivity.

Gameplay

Always Skip Kill Cam "Off"

There's definitely a reason to be watching your team while dead, but it’s best to check out the kill cam first. For some reason, the kill cam shows how much ult charge your opponent had, so you can know whether they're about to have it during the fight. You can manually skip this after you've seen the ult charge, so there isn't any reason to have this enabled.

Kill Feed Display "On"

There's absolutely no disadvantage to having this disabled. It keeps you informed on the current situation by displaying allied kills/deaths in the upper right hand corner. This lets you know when you can teamfight, or maybe just flank safely.

Conclusion

No matter your rank or hero preference, you can benefit a lot from having the proper settings. These are the ones that I find extremely useful, but it truly comes down to what you're most comfortable with. Consider this a baseline and find what works best for you! Thanks for reading this guide, and I hope it's helped you on your journey into Overwatch.

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