Best Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 settings for PC and Steam Deck

Meeting the best Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 settings isn't a mammoth task, regardless of whether you're playing on PC or a handheld like the Steam Deck. There is, however, an interesting change you can make to how the game looks via the field of view setting.

The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 system requirements arrived very late, but were about as demanding as we expected, with the game virtually copying the demands of THPS 1+2. This means you won't need the best graphics card from our buying guide to run the game, and a buttery smooth frame rate shouldn't be too hard to come by if you follow our settings below.

• FPS Cap: Uncapped
• VSync: On
• Field of View: 65
• Scaling/Anti-Aliasing: TAA
• Texture Quality: Highest
• Shadow Quality: Highest
• Texture Anisotropy: 16x
• Effects Quality: Highest
• Ambient Occlusion: On

Using the above settings on our RTX 4070 test rig, we achieved an average frame rate of 151fps with 1% lows of 102fps at 2,560 x 1,440. With minimal settings to adjust and light system requirements, it was never going to be too difficult to run THPS 3+4 on a modern gaming PC, but it's still worth commending how well optimized the game is and how well it runs.

Curiously, THPS 3+4 is another game where choosing the highest graphical preset doesn't actually turn all the settings up to the max. We also found this to be the case in our best Persona 5 Phantom X settings testing. The Shadow Quality setting is left at 'high' if you opt for the maximum preset. This is the only setting we changed, bumping it up to the highest setting.

Another key visual setting, however, is the field of view. This can be set up to a value of 90, and really opens up levels if you choose to have it this high, as you have a better view of where objectives and collectibles are, but your chosen skater will be much smaller, becoming less of a focus when using this setting, as you can see in the below comparison image.

Having played around with the field of view for some time, 65 felt like the sweet spot, but this is absolutely a personal preference setting, and depending on what resolution you're playing on, your desired value may differ.

Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR are options in the menu, but we see no reason to deploy them given how the game runs natively. If you're struggling to get decent performance without them, then by all means give them a try. To unlock these settings, you'll need to switch the anti-aliasing option from TAA to either DLSS or FSR.

Best Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 settings for Steam Deck

• FPS Cap: 60
• VSync: On
• Field of View: 60
• Scaling/Anti-Aliasing: FSR
• AMD FSR: Quality
• Texture Quality: Low
• Shadow Quality: Low
• Texture Anisotropy: 2x
• Effects Quality: Low
• Ambient Occlusion: Off

Using the above settings on the Steam Deck, you can expect a solid 60fps across all levels on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4. The game runs remarkably well on the best gaming handheld, and while you can pursue better visuals at the cost of performance, it's not quite worth it.

As you'll see in the next section, the difference between the maximum and lowest graphics settings is quite small, and the above settings are effectively the low preset and still look decent when running at 60fps on a handheld.

You can get away with using the maximum graphics preset on the Steam Deck, but you'll be halving the expected frame rate down to 30fps with some instability on the larger, city-based maps.

In order to make sure you have the same experience as us, be sure to update to the latest stable version of SteamOS and use the Proton Experimental build.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 graphics presets

• Lowest
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Maximum

I was surprised to see five total presets in THPS 3+4, given the limited graphical settings, but it's great to see plenty of scope to adjust the visual quality of the game based on the PC or handheld you're using.

As you can see in the image below, however, there isn't a huge leap in quality between the maximum and lowest settings. Granted, the benefits of moving to the maximum preset are best felt during gameplay, and the level of detail changes with each location, so in levels like The Foundry, there's a smaller gap in visual quality than, say, San Francisco.

How we tested Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4

At PCGamesN, we use dedicated gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. The test rig used to play THPS 3+4 includes the following components: Intel Core i7-11700F, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 12GB, 32GB of DDR4 3,200MHz RAM in a dual-channel configuration, and an MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Windows 11 64-bit.

We always run our testing first at 1,920 x 1,080 to identify the best settings for this entry-level resolution, then again at 2,560 x 1,440 using the same setup to gauge the difference in performance. We use CapFrameX to capture frame data and compare testing sessions.

Does Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 need an SSD?

THPS 3+4 does not require an SSD, but without one, you will likely experience longer load times between levels. Therefore, it's highly recommended that you upgrade if you still use a mechanical drive.

If you grab yourself the best SSD from our buying guide for your gaming PC, it will really help keep game loading times in check and get you into the action much quicker.

How to monitor performance in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4

If you want to keep an eye on performance in THPS 3+4, we have an easy method that works whether you're using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.

For Nvidia cards, ensure you have the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled, and then hit ALT + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + O.

Alternatively, you can download free software such as CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView, to get a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking tool that works with any graphics card.

With handheld gaming PCs, most will have a dedicated button to access a quick menu from which performance monitoring, sometimes called real-time monitoring, can be accessed.

If you're jumping into Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, you will want to check out our guide on how to unlock the Spongebob level in THPS 3+4 and our guide on how to wallplant in THPS 3+4.

You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We've also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.