Graphics settings

Graphics settings are a 10-level adjustable bar for the looks (and performance) of Roblox.
In order to run Experiences smoothly, computers with enough power can handle between 8 and 10, but they most likely require an external graphics processing unit, rather than internal graphics. For low-end computers, a graphics level between 1 and 3 is recommended. Mid-range computers can use a graphics level between 4 and 7, unless the Experience has many graphic intensive details.
Graphics	Equivalent to	Info
1 	Very Low 	
* No sun rays, depth of field, and low-quality neon/bloom and blur.
* Uses voxel-based lighting. 
* Render distance cut back to approximately 500 studs (render distance is variable, however).
* Gouraud shading on geometry. 
* Particle emitters emit at a reduced rate. 
* Bilinear texture filtering.
* Shadow softness is set at 1 automatically.
* Part textures is only rendered in 720p.
2 	Very Low 	
* Render distance is increased to approximately 700 studs.
* Increased voxel lighting render distance.
* More particle emission from particle emitters.
3 	Low 	
* Render distance is increased to approximately 900 studs.
* More accurate geometry shading (mostly using Phong shading).
* Full resolution texture rendering.
* Increased particle emitter rate.
* Studs appearance change depending on light.
4 	Low/Medium 	
* Render distance is increased to approximately 1,000 studs.
* Increased render distance of voxel lighting.
* Games will now use "ShadowMap" or "Future" technology, if selected by the developer of the Experience under Lighting.Technology in Roblox Studio (unless the graphics mode is OpenGL). Future will be at a short distance (10-ish studs).
* Phong shading distance increased.
* Particle emission rate increased.
5 	Medium 	
* Render distance is increased to approximately 1,500 studs.
*Farther shadowmap rendering.
* Increased Phong shading distance, voxel lighting distance, and particle emission rate.
* Texture filtering is also better now. 
* Increased future lighting render distance.
6 	Medium/High 	
* Render distance is increased to approximately 3,000 studs.
*The items mentioned above get increased except for texture filtering.
* High-resolution bloom and blur effects.
* Future lighting render distance significantly increased.
7 	High 	
* Render distance is increased to approximately 5,000 studs.
*More increases from graphics level 6.
* Boost in texture filtering. 
* Future lighting gets rendered far enough where it doesn't need to be mentioned any more.
8 	High 	
* Render distance is increased to approximately 10,000 studs.
* Terrain now receives normal mapping.
* Water reflects and refracts, and is now transparent. 
* Visible extra post-processing effects (sun rays and depth of field).
* Visible glass effects.
9 	Very High 	
* Items from level 8 are improved. 
* Render distance is increased to approximately 30,000 studs.
* Multisample anti-aliasing is added, getting rid of aliased/jagged lines on the edges of any geometry.
* The particle emission rate is now only slightly lower than on graphics level 10. 
* Texture filtering is maxed out.
10 	Very High 	
* The full visual feature set; An enhanced version of level 9 graphics.
* Render distance is now increased and fixed to 100000 studs.
* Shadow map distance is pushed to max (somewhere around 600 studs).
* Screen space ambient occlusion is added, adding shading to crevices visible on-screen.
== Graphics Mode ==
The GraphicsMode drop-down box shows a list of all graphics modes for Roblox to work. There are currently 5 graphic modes available. You can select one by going into Roblox Studio, going into settings (ALT+S), going into Render tab, scrolling down to general and picking a graphics mode from the drop-down. This setting only affects Roblox Studio, Changes can be only done to Roblox Studio and has been tested by 3rd party apps such as MSI Afterburner. Roblox currently defaults on Direct3D11 in Roblox Player to keep support for playing on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems, and for older hardware that don't support Direct3D12. Other platforms such as Android, iOS and MacOS default on either Metal or Vulkan, but can also use OpenGL when the hardware isn't compatible.
=== Automatic ===
The default graphics mode, this option chooses the best graphics mode for your computer depending on your GPU, CPU and RAM.
=== Direct3D11 ===
The 11th generation of the DirectX series is an API framework. It supports for Shader Model 5.0, Dynamic shader linking, addressable resources, additional resource types, subroutines, geometry instancing, coverage as pixel shader input, programmable interpolation of inputs, new texture compression formats (1 new LDR format and 1 new HDR format), texture clamps to limit WDDM preload, require 8-bits of subtexel and sub-MIP precision on texture filtering, 16K texture limits, Gather4 (support for multi-component textures, support for programmable offsets), DrawIndirect, conservative oDepth, Depth Bias, addressable stream output, per-resource mipmap clamping, floating-point viewports, shader conversion instructions, improved multithreading.
Roblox requires DirectX 11 feature level 10.0 of the API, which is supported by Geforce 8 series and later, ATI Radeon HD 2000 and Intel GMA X3500.
=== Metal ===
Apple's 3D graphics API framework, This graphics mode was added on November 5, 2016. Metal further improves the capabilities of GPGPU programming by introducing compute shaders.
=== NoGraphics ===
When selected, the Experience will not be rendered, and instead, will be using software renderer CPU-based instead of the GPU will not render the viewport on the windows. The Roblox Diagnostics Window will show on screen. It is used to diagnose issues with graphics, in-Experience physics, etc.
=== OpenGL ===
OpenGL is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.
=== Vulkan ===
Vulkan is a graphics API that came out in 2016 and later included in Roblox Studio in 2017 is a next-generation continuation of OpenGL. Like OpenGL, Vulkan targets high-performance real time 3D graphics applications such as video games and interactive media across all platforms and can offer higher performance and more balanced CPU/GPU usage. Other major differences to Direct3D (prior to version 12) and OpenGL are Vulkan being a considerably lower level API and offering parallel tasking. In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan is also able to better distribute work amongst multiple CPU cores.
== Trivia ==
* The debug console tracks if you have anti-aliasing.
* In manual mode, you can press F10 to increase the graphics level and Shift+F10 to decrease.
Category:Experience features