007 First Light — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 8% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Texture Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In 007 First Light: Texture Quality is the single biggest VRAM drain in First Light. Ultra at 4K pushes past 10GB. Mid-range cards should use High — the difference from Ultra is subtle but the VRAM headroom matters for stable frametimes.

Typical impact 3-10% · 6% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Terrain Quality at High (6% fps cost).

Controls terrain mesh tessellation density, heightmap resolution, and texture splatting layer count. Higher settings increase the number of terrain patches submitted to the tessellation pipeline (hull/domain shaders) and enable more material blend layers per patch — each layer requiring its own albedo, normal, and roughness texture fetches. Terrain rendering is particularly bandwidth-heavy because the large screen coverage means nearly every pixel on the ground plane runs the full multi-layer blend shader.

In 007 First Light: Glacier tessellates outdoor terrain patches and blends up to four splatting layers per patch, sampling separate albedo, normal, and roughness maps for each. In First Light's alpine chase and Mediterranean coastal levels, the ground plane covers most screen pixels, making this setting bandwidth-heavy. Ultra uses the full four-layer blend with high-resolution heightmap displacement; dropping to Medium halves the active blend layers and reduces domain shader output, recovering roughly 7–10% GPU time in outdoor scenes with minimal perceptible change beyond a few meters.

Typical impact 3-12% · 6% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at High (6% fps cost).

Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between LOD tiers. The engine uses screen-space projected size or distance-based heuristics to swap between high-poly and simplified meshes. Higher settings push these transition distances further, keeping detailed geometry on screen longer. This increases total triangle count, draw calls, and vertex buffer memory. In UE5 titles using Nanite, this controls the aggressiveness of the virtual geometry streaming system.

In 007 First Light: Glacier uses distance-weighted LOD budgets that are pushed hard at Ultra — Bond-side characters and background NPCs in busy environments like the casino floor and harbour market maintain high-polygon meshes at distances where the detail is imperceptible. Lowering from Ultra to High tightens transition thresholds, cutting vertex buffer size and draw call count in crowd-heavy set pieces. Medium introduces visible geometry pop on foreground objects in cutscenes. High offers the best trade-off: 6–10% GPU frame-time reduction in dense scenes with pop-in limited to the far background.

Typical impact 8-25% · 14% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (14% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In 007 First Light: Glacier's ray-traced shadows are expensive: dropping Ultra to Medium recovers ~22% performance with minimal visual degradation outside of close-up cutscenes.

Typical impact 3-20% · 10% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Reflection Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls the method and fidelity of surface reflections. Low settings use pre-baked cubemap probes — a single texture lookup per pixel. Medium enables screen-space reflections (SSR) that ray-march through the depth buffer to find reflected geometry. High uses higher-resolution SSR with more march steps. Ultra may enable planar reflections (re-rendering the scene from a mirrored viewpoint) or RT reflections (hardware-accelerated rays). The cost escalation from cubemaps to SSR to RT is dramatic — cubemaps are nearly free, SSR costs 3-8%, and RT reflections cost 15-25%.

In 007 First Light: At Ultra, Glacier combines screen-space reflections with hardware RT reflection rays for surfaces the SSR pass misses — most visible on the game's marble floors, glass facades, and wet tarmac chase sequences. The RT reflection layer adds meaningful cost: expect 10–15% GPU overhead versus High, which uses SSR-only with a higher step count and fallback reflection captures. Low falls back to static cubemap probes, which look noticeably flat on the game's numerous interior glossy surfaces. High is the recommended setting — SSR handles the majority of reflection content in Glacier's mostly interior-heavy level geometry with acceptable off-screen fallback.

Typical impact 5-20% · 10% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Global Illumination Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls the quality of indirect diffuse lighting — light that bounces from surfaces to illuminate surrounding geometry. Higher quality tiers increase the resolution and sample count of the GI computation, whether screen-space (SSGI), voxel-based (VXGI), or ray-traced. Better GI dramatically improves realism in indoor scenes and shadowed areas by accurately simulating light bounced from walls and floors. The cost scales steeply with scene complexity since every surface becomes a secondary light source.

In 007 First Light: Glacier's GI controls how indirect light bounces within a scene — the warm fill that spills from a window into a shaded room, or the coloured reflected light from a gold-walled vault interior. Ultra uses a higher probe density and update frequency; Low falls back to a sparser probe grid with slower updates, which can cause visible light leaking in small enclosed spaces. High is recommended — the visual delta from Ultra is minimal in motion, with roughly 8–12% GPU frame time savings in First Light's many richly lit interior sequences.

Typical impact 3-10% · 8% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Volumetric Fog Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Sets the resolution and sample count of the volumetric fog computation. Fog is rendered into a 3D frustum-aligned voxel grid: each voxel stores scattering coefficients and light contributions. Higher quality doubles the voxel resolution in each dimension, quadrupling the fill cost but producing finer fog detail and sharper shadow shafts (god rays). Light shafts from directional lights require shadow-map sampling per voxel — the most expensive part of the computation.

In 007 First Light: Glacier's volumetric fog is a fullscreen ray-march compute pass that adds atmospheric depth to First Light's coastal outdoor sequences, underground areas, and smoky casino interiors. Ultra uses a high sample count per march ray and a wide integration depth; Low halves sample count and cuts integration range, producing visibly thinner atmosphere in the game's sun-drenched Mediterranean levels. Medium offers a good balance — the fog reads correctly in motion, with cost savings of around 5–8% GPU frame time in outdoor scenes.

Typical impact 3-8% · 6% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Volumetric Effects Quality at High (6% fps cost).

Controls the quality of volumetric rendering for atmospheric effects including mist, smoke, and particle volumes. Higher settings increase the ray-march step count through volume densities and enable multi-scattering approximations that simulate light bouncing within volumes. This setting differs from volumetric fog in that it applies to localised volume effects (explosion smoke, ground mist) rather than global atmospheric fog.

In 007 First Light: Controls the simulation resolution and particle count for smoke, steam, explosive dust clouds, and environmental haze throughout First Light's action set pieces. At Ultra, particle systems are simulated at full resolution with per-particle lighting interactions; at Low, count is reduced and lighting falls back to ambient-only. The cost varies by scene — gunfight-heavy indoor areas with lots of muzzle smoke and debris see the largest savings from dropping to Medium, roughly 4–6% GPU frame time.

Typical impact 0-2% · 2% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Texture Filtering at Anisotropic 16x (2% fps cost).

Controls anisotropic texture filtering quality — the technique that keeps textures sharp when viewed at oblique angles. Higher settings take more anisotropic samples per pixel (up to 16x), eliminating the blurriness that bilinear filtering introduces on surfaces like roads and floors seen from a low angle. Dedicated anisotropic hardware in modern GPU texture units makes even 16x nearly free.

In 007 First Light: Anisotropic filtering sharpens textures on surfaces viewed at oblique angles — floors, roads, and walls that recede into the distance. Trilinear filtering leaves these surfaces blurry; Anisotropic 16x maintains clarity at virtually no GPU cost on modern hardware (it is primarily a texture cache bandwidth concern, not a shader cost). Leave this at Anisotropic 16x unless you are on very constrained VRAM.

Typical impact -30-80% · +15% fps

In 007 First Light, NVIDIA DLSS has no Off toggle — Automatic is the menu default. On GPUs where it isn't supported the control is greyed out in-game; use the vendor-matched upscaler instead.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In 007 First Light: NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is available for NVIDIA RTX GPUs. AMD FSR 3 is natively supported for AMD and Intel users — confirmed in-game (v1.0.5, Quality/Balanced/Performance/Ultra Performance modes). FSR 4 is not native; it can be enabled via the third-party OptiScaler tool for AMD RDNA4 GPUs. Both DLSS and FSR are listed as separate settings in the in-game menu.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In 007 First Light, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

Typical impact 1-5% · 1% fps cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Motion Blur at On (1% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In 007 First Light: Applies per-object and camera-based motion blur as a post-process pass. GPU cost is negligible. Disable if you find it visually uncomfortable or if you want the sharpest possible image during fast camera movement — personal preference only.

Typical impact 0-1% · no measurable cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Film Grain at On (no measurable cost).

Overlays a procedural noise pattern on the final image to simulate analog film grain. The shader generates noise either from a tiling noise texture or procedurally using a hash function seeded with screen position and frame number. The noise is modulated by luminance and blended into the final color. The entire computation is a single texture fetch or ALU operation per pixel in the final composite pass — effectively zero cost.

In 007 First Light: Overlays a subtle luminance noise pattern to soften the rendered image. GPU cost is negligible. Disable for a cleaner, sharper output — particularly noticeable when upscaling is active, as grain can interact with the temporal accumulation pass.

Typical impact 0-1% · no measurable cost

In 007 First Light, we recommend Chromatic Aberration at On (no measurable cost).

Simulates the lens imperfection where different wavelengths of light focus at slightly different points, producing color fringing at screen edges. The shader samples the color buffer three times per pixel — once each for red, green, and blue channels — with slightly offset UV coordinates that increase toward the screen periphery. The cost is trivial: one fullscreen pass with 3 texture fetches per pixel. Purely an aesthetic choice with virtually zero performance impact.

In 007 First Light: Simulates lens colour fringing at screen edges as a post-process pass. GPU cost is negligible. Most players disable it for a cleaner image; it is a stylistic effect that adds cinematic feel but reduces perceived sharpness near screen borders.