I feel like instead of the “settings have been optimized for your hardware” pop up that almost always sets them to something that doesn’t account for the trade-off between looks and framerate that a player wants, there should be a “these settings are designed for future hardware and may not work well today” pop up when a player sets everything to max.

I’ve noticed some games also don’t actually max things out when you select the highest preset.

I also really like the settings menu of the RE engine games. It has indicators that aggregate how much “load” you’re putting on your system by turning each setting up or down, which lets you make more informed decisions on what settings to enable or disable. And it in fact will straight up tell you when you turn stuff too high, and warns you that things might not run well if you do.