Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game.
I don’t think it would cost developers ANY amount of money or any significant development time to add a “Reboot game” button (or toggle) every time the player presses the quit button, or give the player a prompt every time they change a setting that requires a game restart (like in both PC versions of GTA V).
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
Problem is that the fancy graphics stuff isn’t just additive.
For example, raytracing is actually relatively simple to implement, since you just make light behave like it does in real-world physics, according to a couple relatively straightforward rules and material properties.
Lighting without raytracing involves tons of
smokes and mirrorshacks and workarounds. For example, mirrors were often faked by building the same room behind the wall, with everything inverted, including the player character’s animations.So, making a game with potato graphics typically requires building a second version of the game.
Of course, there can be a mode that does just turn off the additive stuff, so only that which does not require changing the game implementation. But that can just be one of the graphics presets…