Render Scale: The range is 50-200, in relatively coarse steps. 50 with a resolution of 1920x1080 represents a rendered resolution of 960x540, while 200 is equivalent to 3840x2160. At 50, performance improves by around 80 percent, while 200 drops performance to about 1/3 of normal (for four times as many pixels rendered). I recommend setting this to 100 rather than using 'Automatic.'

Texture Quality (restart required): with sufficient VRAM, this causes almost no change in performance—I measured a two percent gain going from high to low on the RX 480 8GB, and a similar change on a GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Only cards with less than 2GB VRAM will really need to drop this below the high setting.

Texture Filtering Quality: Allows anisotropic filtering settings of 1x to 16x, with almost no impact on performance. You can safely set this to 16x (Epic) on nearly any GPU.

Local Fog Detail (restart required): The second most demanding setting in the game, the name is a bit misleading—this is actually used for volumetric lighting. In practice, there's very little change in image quality, regardless of setting, and dropping this from ultra to low improves performance by about 15 percent.

Dynamic Reflections: The most demanding individual setting, depending on the area in the game this can impact performance by 20-50 percent. This is used for reflections of moving (dynamic) objects, like other players, bullets, etc. In the test scene, disabling this increases performance by 25 percent.

Shadow Detail (restart required): Effects the shadow mapping quality, with only a minor impact on performance. Turning this off only improves performance by around 5 percent.

Model Detail (restart required): Controls the number of polygons used for the character and level models. In testing, there was no discernable difference between the minimum low setting and the maximum ultra setting, but the low setting strips out a lot of extra objects so I'd set this to at least medium quality.

Effects Detail (restart required): This mostly appears to affect weapon effects and other dynamic elements, so potentially this will have a larger impact on performance during battles. During the test scene, however, this only caused a 4 percent change in performance.

Lighting Detail (restart required): Controls the quality and number of light sources, including god rays. The performance impact is minimal, with low improving framerates by only 3 percent compared to ultra.

Antialias Quality: Another setting that doesn't really impact performance much, mostly because all of the anti-aliasing methods used are post-processing algorithms. Low uses FXAA and the other enabled modes uses varying levels of SMAA. Going from ultra to off only improves framerates by about 3 percent, so I recommend leaving this on ultra for most GPUs.

Refraction Quality: Affects the way light bends as it passes through certain transparent/translucent objects. It's hard to notice this while playing, and the performance impact is a moderate 5 percent, so if you're looking for every last bit of performance setting this to low can help a bit.

Screenshot Quality: This is in the graphics settings so I'm listing it, but it only affects the resolution of screenshots. It's sort of like Nvidia's Ansel technology, except without all the extra UI functionality. You can capture 1X to 9X resolution, and the only time it will impact performance is when you grab a screenshot.

Local Reflections: Unlike the dynamic reflections, local reflections are pre-calculated and thus not nearly as demanding, and having these on can improve the overall appearance of the game quite a bit. Turning this off yields about a 3 percent gain in fps.

Ambient Occlusion: Unlike many other games, Overwatch only uses SSAO, the least costly form of ambient occlusion—a way of improving shadow quality in the corners and areas where polygons intersect. The performance cost is relatively small at 5 percent, so you can usually leave this on.


fps limit on display based or custom? (I have a 60 hertz monitor)
Custom. Even if your monitor can't display as many frames as you're rendering, more frames means that your computer is updating its simulation (the SIM value on the advanced performance stats graph) more often. Lower SIM = lower input lag.
Don't leave it uncapped, though - run some tests to figure out what the highest stable value is that your PC can handle, then set your custom FPS limit to that value.
Ctrl-Shift-N when you’re in-game will display the advanced netgraph.

Turn dynamic reflections off. It just creates shiny surfaces that rarely gets noticed and has a HUGE performance boost letting you change other settings higher. 
Also turning shadows to LOW or OFF improves performance greatly as well. 
AA filtering is surprisingly not taxing on the system.
Changing scaling to 100% lets you run at lower resolutions with lower visual sacrifice. 


mercy --
 toggle beam:  on
 ga prefers beam:  off
 toggle ga:    off
 GA sens:      90
 Beam sens:    85