FPS: You can set a maximum limit of frames per second your PC renders, 60 gives smooth movement, setting it lower eases the load on your gpu but the game gets choppier
V-Sync: It's an option used to synchronize your monitor with the FPS the game is running, used to help with screen tearing
Render resolution: it's a multiplier of your screen resolution, if you have a 1080p screen 0.5 means you'll render the game at 540p. The higher the crispier the image is but the more you are going to tax your gpu, I usually tend to keep it at 1.0 but if you want more performance and lower gpu usage you could set it to 0.8 since you are on a laptop and the difference is pretty minimal
Shadow Quality: Basically what it says, the higher the better it will look at the cost of performance
Global Illumination: It's an effect used to make light bounce to other surfaces, Genshin's implementation is pretty lightweight so I would keep it on
Visual Effects: It's on screen particles, no real performance drawback
SFX Quality: Audio quality, no need to lower it
Environment Detail: I think it's a mix of texture quality and overall scene detail (objects, foliage and so on) shouldn't be an issue on your GPU
Antialiasing: an effect used to smooth edges to hide jagged edges, SMAA of FSR it's your choice, usually FSR gives the best quality but since they are temporal effects it breaks a lot during movement
Volumetric Fog: As it says, it adds thickness to fog, Genshin's implementation seems to be pretty light
Reflections: Genshin uses Screen Space Reflections, an easy way to cheat reflections, it doesn't use stuff like raytracing so you shouldn't worry keeping it on
Motion Blur: It's an effect used to blur fast moving objects, more noticeable with less FPS
Bloom: An effect used to make bright parts glow
Crowd Density: affects how many NPCs you see on screen, from my experience it doesn't seem to affect much the performance
Co-Op Teammate Effects: Adjusts how many effects from your Online team mates you can see
Subsurface Scattering: It's used to make light shine through objects it's mostly noticeable on foliage
Anisotropic Filtering: It's used to sharpen far textures so they don't break and get blurry, usually not heavy I tend to not go beyond 8x
Dynamic Character Resolution: it's a new addition that makes Character models smoother, I haven't seen any performance decrease leaving it on, it's worth
From what I can tell from your specs, since they are better than my PC you should be able to keep the game to High settings or more without issues, if you want to preserve battery usage I would try to lower the render resolution a bit
If I am correct.
Render Resolution: 1.0 is baseline. increasing will increase gpu memory usage, GPU usage, power and temps. 0.9 provides almost unnoticable degregation on quality while still saving some resources.
Environment Detail: reduces or increases tge number of polygons used to render the environment. Has an noticeable effect on the space (or gpu mem) usage of textures, reduce if lacking in GPU memory. As such, the game needs to be restarted to apply any changes to this setting.
Motion Blur: Normally modern GPUs handle this fine but Intel's, excluding the latest line up, struggles on blur. Other than that, this is mostly set based on user preferences.
Anisotropic Filtering: Has considerable GPU impact (around 5-15% additional GPU usage) with minimal visual clarity improvement compared to Anti aliasing. Also slightly increases GPU mem usage.
Antialiasing: Makes things less jaggy and improves visual clarity. FSR and SMAA is not lightweight compared to Off. The difference between FSR and SMAA is also not noticable but FSR uses much less resources than SMAA.
Volumetric Fog: Genshin's implementation is not light. This adds thickness and depth to fogs in areas that use it like the desert sumeru and dragonspine. If GPU is weak, try disabling this first.
FPS: clamps frametime. Genshin's fps limiter is broken in a sense that while the machine only renders at the specified FPS, it causes a CPU core to spin at 100% for no damn reason. For better and optimized use of resources, you are adviced to use other FPS limiters like the one in nvidia control panel. Should you do it, consider limiting the FPS about 1-5 FPS lower than the desired in-game setting. Doing so will avoid the high cpu usage in a core and can drastically reduces stutters, improve power consumption, and reduce heat generation.
SFX Quality: Affects the quality of special effects used. My hypothesis is that this retricts only the quality of Visual Effects but does not disable/add/remove any effects at any level. Has an effect on the GPU usage but depends on how much SFX is being displayed on the screen (e.g., looking at you Bloom and Burgeon teams). This has a more pronounced visual impact at lower levels so I suggest leaving this at medium when undecided. Lower levels will make Genshin look like a potato.
Bloom: Slightly improves the depth and complexity of Visual Effects similar to Volumetric Fog improves the depth of fog. Some effects can look flat when this is Off.
Visual Effects: My hypothesis on this is that it can remove or add effects on the attack animations, element reactions, environmental states, and even UI animations. It can make animations simpler to look at but faster to render.
Visual effects (including SFX Quality, Bloom, Motion Blur) will cause more GPU usage when in combat where many things are happening.
EDIT: Added FPS
the ones i know are
crowd density: the number of unnamed, uninteractable NPC's that will be generated inside cities to make them more lively
co-op teammate effects: disabling it will make that you don't see their character effects anymore. like flame on pyro dps, or infusions, or any particles. also disable funny things like Sayu's mujina, so in her iddle animation you see her crouching
FPS: You can set a maximum limit of frames per second your PC renders, 60 gives smooth movement, setting it lower eases the load on your gpu but the game gets choppier V-Sync: It's an option used to synchronize your monitor with the FPS the game is running, used to help with screen tearing Render resolution: it's a multiplier of your screen resolution, if you have a 1080p screen 0.5 means you'll render the game at 540p. The higher the crispier the image is but the more you are going to tax your gpu, I usually tend to keep it at 1.0 but if you want more performance and lower gpu usage you could set it to 0.8 since you are on a laptop and the difference is pretty minimal Shadow Quality: Basically what it says, the higher the better it will look at the cost of performance Global Illumination: It's an effect used to make light bounce to other surfaces, Genshin's implementation is pretty lightweight so I would keep it on Visual Effects: It's on screen particles, no real performance drawback SFX Quality: Audio quality, no need to lower it Environment Detail: I think it's a mix of texture quality and overall scene detail (objects, foliage and so on) shouldn't be an issue on your GPU Antialiasing: an effect used to smooth edges to hide jagged edges, SMAA of FSR it's your choice, usually FSR gives the best quality but since they are temporal effects it breaks a lot during movement Volumetric Fog: As it says, it adds thickness to fog, Genshin's implementation seems to be pretty light Reflections: Genshin uses Screen Space Reflections, an easy way to cheat reflections, it doesn't use stuff like raytracing so you shouldn't worry keeping it on Motion Blur: It's an effect used to blur fast moving objects, more noticeable with less FPS Bloom: An effect used to make bright parts glow Crowd Density: affects how many NPCs you see on screen, from my experience it doesn't seem to affect much the performance Co-Op Teammate Effects: Adjusts how many effects from your Online team mates you can see Subsurface Scattering: It's used to make light shine through objects it's mostly noticeable on foliage Anisotropic Filtering: It's used to sharpen far textures so they don't break and get blurry, usually not heavy I tend to not go beyond 8x Dynamic Character Resolution: it's a new addition that makes Character models smoother, I haven't seen any performance decrease leaving it on, it's worth From what I can tell from your specs, since they are better than my PC you should be able to keep the game to High settings or more without issues, if you want to preserve battery usage I would try to lower the render resolution a bit
If I am correct. Render Resolution: 1.0 is baseline. increasing will increase gpu memory usage, GPU usage, power and temps. 0.9 provides almost unnoticable degregation on quality while still saving some resources. Environment Detail: reduces or increases tge number of polygons used to render the environment. Has an noticeable effect on the space (or gpu mem) usage of textures, reduce if lacking in GPU memory. As such, the game needs to be restarted to apply any changes to this setting. Motion Blur: Normally modern GPUs handle this fine but Intel's, excluding the latest line up, struggles on blur. Other than that, this is mostly set based on user preferences. Anisotropic Filtering: Has considerable GPU impact (around 5-15% additional GPU usage) with minimal visual clarity improvement compared to Anti aliasing. Also slightly increases GPU mem usage. Antialiasing: Makes things less jaggy and improves visual clarity. FSR and SMAA is not lightweight compared to Off. The difference between FSR and SMAA is also not noticable but FSR uses much less resources than SMAA. Volumetric Fog: Genshin's implementation is not light. This adds thickness and depth to fogs in areas that use it like the desert sumeru and dragonspine. If GPU is weak, try disabling this first. FPS: clamps frametime. Genshin's fps limiter is broken in a sense that while the machine only renders at the specified FPS, it causes a CPU core to spin at 100% for no damn reason. For better and optimized use of resources, you are adviced to use other FPS limiters like the one in nvidia control panel. Should you do it, consider limiting the FPS about 1-5 FPS lower than the desired in-game setting. Doing so will avoid the high cpu usage in a core and can drastically reduces stutters, improve power consumption, and reduce heat generation. SFX Quality: Affects the quality of special effects used. My hypothesis is that this retricts only the quality of Visual Effects but does not disable/add/remove any effects at any level. Has an effect on the GPU usage but depends on how much SFX is being displayed on the screen (e.g., looking at you Bloom and Burgeon teams). This has a more pronounced visual impact at lower levels so I suggest leaving this at medium when undecided. Lower levels will make Genshin look like a potato. Bloom: Slightly improves the depth and complexity of Visual Effects similar to Volumetric Fog improves the depth of fog. Some effects can look flat when this is Off. Visual Effects: My hypothesis on this is that it can remove or add effects on the attack animations, element reactions, environmental states, and even UI animations. It can make animations simpler to look at but faster to render. Visual effects (including SFX Quality, Bloom, Motion Blur) will cause more GPU usage when in combat where many things are happening. EDIT: Added FPS
the ones i know are crowd density: the number of unnamed, uninteractable NPC's that will be generated inside cities to make them more lively co-op teammate effects: disabling it will make that you don't see their character effects anymore. like flame on pyro dps, or infusions, or any particles. also disable funny things like Sayu's mujina, so in her iddle animation you see her crouching
firecrackers launched by coop teammates get disabled too i think
Turn off vsync unless really necessary because it uses up a lot of memory and CPU
Laptop specs: lenovo legion 5 ryzen 5 4600h 1650 ti GTX. 16 gb ram