Really loving this thread, shows that everyone has their own unique tastes and cares when it comes to image quality and graphical fidelity.
Personally I start with AA, never off but will drop to FXAA if higher quality from there drains enough to warrant it. MSAA is just not even a possibility any more for modern games, hell simply turning on 2x for R6 Siege incurs a massive performance hit and that's even with it being the only AA option on.
AF will always be at 16x, always. Those citing negligible performance hits are not entirely correct though, it honestly depends on the game. Take RoTR for example, with everything maxed in the large, open Soviet Relay base area dropping from 16x to 4x or 2x gained about 8fps or so. I have a 980ti and was at 1440p, max settings. Granted that and the Geothermal valley are really stressing areas but still, it proves the point.
Shadows I can drop to a notch below the max normally if needed, really prefer not to any further than that though as the jagged edges often become too noticeable. I suppose it depends on how fast paced the game is.
AO I try to keep max on every game, it just adds so much to the scenery.
DOF I like at max to often times get Bokeh quality but I can live with reducing it to a base "On" setting if necessary.
Tesselation I always leave on regardless, the more realistic looking scenery and character models really add a lot to the visuals. I think the only time I've cut it was back when I played Crysis 3 often, if I wanted to keep 60fps of any description.
I'll say this, there's a lot of settings to consider for any given game but I'll never go below console quality unless for some reason a setting is broken on PC. I don't have a PC VS Console complex, I own all of them and play them all at different rates, but knowing I payed 1.5 times an entire current gen console itself just for my GPU alone keeps me from accepting visuals below what the console version of a game has.
