the amount of tweeking aparently needed is scaring me, im too lazy :/
The simple answer to your dilemma is the following: leave it on the default settings, just like the console experience of putting the game in and playing it. I can tell you that, even on lowest settings on my Surface Pro 2 tablet which has Intel integrated graphics, the game looks great and only gets better from there.
That said, if you want a priority list of settings to keep high, I would subjectively rank them as such based on my experience with my 280X and Core i5-4690K, not just based on how much fps you gain/don't gain from turning down but also in terms of biggest impact on visual quality. To be clear, the things at the top of this list are relatively cheap to max out while the lower items tend to be the limiting factors:
1) The biggest increase in graphical fidelity is the Texture Quality which will mostly be limited by how much VRAM you have. Put that as high as you can without going over your VRAM limit and forget any other setting.
2) Shader Quality: I didn't notice much of a performance change from altering this one (although this might be location/time dependent) so I would keep this as high as possible. I've heard that Very High is required for foliage swaying in the wind which is a nice effect but I didn't test this one much since it wasn't really impacting my performance.
3) Water Quality: I didn't play with this one much since I wasn't having any problems with aqueous environments but, presumably, this determines whether you have large waves or not, thus I would attempt to keep this at Very High. Only tweak this if you have problems when viewing bodies of water.
4) Particles Quality: Again, didn't have any problems keeping this at Very High so didn't tweak it much. Only tweak this if viewing clouds of smoke or explosions tanks your framerate. I suspect that this might also determine whether small chunks of stuff fly off of cars in a collision so, if you find that major car crashes tank your framerate, you may want to play with this.
5) Distance Scaling: This determines how far away peds and cars will be drawn. If you don't like pop-in, keep this maxed.
6) Population Density and Variety: How many peds/cars and their variety respecitvely. If you're starved for VRAM or CPU-limited, this might be worth tweaking but, otherwise, this helps make the city feel much more alive and lived in.
7) Reflection Quality: I didn't find this to be a limiting factor in my tests so didn't really tweak this much but reflections are already hard to make out clearly anyway so making them a bit blurrier or less detailed probably won't hurt that much. That said, not a huge performance hog as far as I could tell.
8) FXAA: Post-process anti-aliasing that applies blur to remove aliasing. Personally, I don't like it due to the blurriness but some people hate aliasing a lot more. Very little performance cost.
9) Shadow Quality: Controls the resolution of shadows, thus how pixelated the edges are and how much the edges seem to "crawl" when they move. Since shadows are very prominent everywhere, I would keep this at least at High. You may want to try keeping it set to Very High for headlights and other dynamic sources to emit dynamic shadows, although High, I think, still has some dynamic shadows from stationary sources. Very High has a relatively huge cost, however, but somewhat based on what your other shadow settings are.
10) Shadow Softness: How blurry the edges of shadows are. I would try to keep this at minimum to Softer because it helps mask the pixelation of shadow edges, especially if using only High Shadow Quality. In fact, personally, I didn't think moving it any higher than Softer was worth the large costs.
11) Grass: Determines the density of polygonal grass. Huge performance cost to have this above Normal since Normal completely turns off polygonal grass. I found the density of polygonal grass in the High setting was sufficient to look great for a contemporary video game while having vast gains (~10-30% depending on shadow settings) over the Very High setting. Ultra is just ridiculous.
12) Post FX: Hard to say what exactly this controls but may have to do with depth of field effects, HDR, bloom, and possibly a haze effect over the city since it tended to tank my framerate when looking toward the city. Suffice to say that there's a huge performance impact with the Ultra and Very High settings but with very minimal effect on the visuals such that I recommend using High so that you can turn up shadows. If someone discovers otherwise (like Andy hard at work on the Nvidia guide
), please point out what changes with this setting since I can't really tell.
13) MSAA: Anti-aliasing that, roughly speaking, mostly improves edges of objects. Pretty expensive which is why most people just opt for FXAA (or inject other forms of post-process AA, such as SMAA) but generally produces sharper images. Most people should not turn this on unless they really hate aliasing because it costs so much and you'll get better image gains from increasing other graphic settings instead.
14) Advanced Options: Almost all of these are more expensive than they're worth. Only turn on if you can already max the regular graphic settings. The only exception is the High Detail Streaming While Flying which I think you really only need an SSD to effectively use this.
15) Reflection MSAA: Probably the most useless and unnoticeable setting unless you spend a lot of time zoomed in on reflective surfaces.
Again, turn down/off settings that are lower in this list and prioritize ones higher in this list to, in my opinion, have the best trade-off between visual fidelity and performance.
