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%

In 007 First Light, we recommend View Distance at Epic.

Sets the maximum distance at which world geometry, props, and objects are rendered. The engine performs frustum culling and occlusion culling on all objects — increasing view distance dramatically increases the number of objects passing visibility tests, leading to more draw calls submitted to the GPU command processor. In UE5 titles, this also affects Nanite virtual geometry streaming range. The CPU cost of scene traversal and draw call submission often bottlenecks before the GPU at extreme view distances.

Typical impact 3-12%

In 007 First Light, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Ultra.

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

Typical impact -30-80% · +15% fps

In 007 First Light, enabling NVIDIA DLSS at Automatic is the recommendation — it +15% fps rather than costing them.

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 the native upscaling option for this game — available on NVIDIA RTX GPUs only. AMD and Intel GPU users receive TAA as the native anti-aliasing option. Non-NVIDIA users can enable FSR 4 or XeSS upscaling via the third-party OptiScaler tool (see the Third-party tools section below).

Typical impact -25-70%

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 -30-80%

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

Synthesizes entirely new intermediate frames between real rendered frames using optical flow analysis. DLSS Frame Generation (NVIDIA Ada+) uses the Optical Flow Accelerator hardware to compute per-pixel motion between consecutive frames, then a neural network generates a synthetic frame by warping and blending the two surrounding real frames. AMD FSR Frame Generation uses a software-based optical flow compute shader implementation. The generated frame is inserted between real frames, effectively doubling perceived framerate. The trade-off is approximately 1 frame of additional display latency and potential artifacts on fast-moving objects where optical flow estimation fails.

In 007 First Light: DLSS 4.5 Multi-Frame Gen X2 and X3 are both available — one of the best MFG implementations in a 2026 release. On RTX 4000+, MFG X2 roughly doubles output from the native render base.