Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 6% fps cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we recommend Texture Quality at High (6% 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 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Expedition 33's hand-authored surface textures — ornate wallpaper, aged stonework, otherworldly organic geometry — are authored at high resolution and stream through UE5's texture pool. Epic loads full 4K mips and demands 8 GB minimum at 1080p; exceeding VRAM capacity produces visible hitching during scene transitions rather than a steady FPS drop. High is the practical ceiling for 8 GB cards. The GPU shading cost difference between tiers is negligible — VRAM headroom is the only constraint that matters here.

Typical impact 15-40% · 24% fps cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we recommend Global Illumination at High (24% fps cost).

The most comprehensive indirect lighting system, simulating full multi-bounce light transport. Modern implementations include UE5 Lumen (software screen-space radiance cache with optional hardware RT acceleration), path tracing (stochastic ray tracing with multiple bounces per pixel), and hybrid systems combining screen-space probes with signed distance field tracing. Lumen software mode uses a screen-space radiance cache updated via compute shaders plus SDF traces, while hardware RT mode dispatches actual ray tracing calls through RT cores. This is typically the single heaviest setting in any game.

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Lumen is the primary performance drain and the key to Expedition 33's extraordinary lighting. Switching from Lumen to High GI recovers 30–40% FPS — essential on anything below RTX 4090. The visual difference is subtle in fast-moving battle sequences.

Typical impact 8-25% · 12% fps cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (12% 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 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: UE5 virtual shadow maps at Epic are the second biggest GPU cost. High provides excellent fidelity for the hand-crafted environments. Epic adds minimal visual gain at a steep FPS premium — only warranted on RTX 5000-class hardware.

Typical impact 3-12% · 8% fps cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at High (8% 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 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Expedition 33 uses Nanite virtual geometry for its detailed world assets, meaning LOD here primarily governs Nanite's cluster streaming aggressiveness and the fallback LOD thresholds for non-Nanite objects like foliage and particles. At Epic, Nanite retains finer mesh clusters at greater distances in the game's open vistas — the Continent's sweeping exterior environments benefit most. Low and Medium are noticeable in panoramic shots where background architecture simplifies. For GPU-limited systems, the cost reduction from Epic to High is modest (5–8%); dropping to Medium has more impact due to non-Nanite asset LOD bias changes.

Typical impact 3-15% · 7% fps cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we recommend Effect Quality at High (7% fps cost).

Controls the visual fidelity of gameplay effects including explosions, weapon impacts, ability VFX, and environmental interactions. Higher settings increase particle emitter counts per effect, use higher-resolution flipbook or mesh particles instead of simple sprites, enable GPU particle simulation via compute shaders, and add dynamic lighting from effects (each explosion spawning a temporary point light). The cost is highly variable — intense combat with multiple overlapping effects can produce 4-8x overdraw from layered transparent particles.

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Combat in Expedition 33 is visually spectacular — Lumiere attacks, Stains of Ruin, and Paintress sequences generate dense layered particle systems with dynamic point lights spawned per explosion. Effect Quality controls emitter counts, GPU particle simulation complexity, and whether effects spawn temporary lighting contributions. At Epic, a multi-target ability can spawn dozens of lit particles per frame, stressing both the compute path and the forward lighting pass. High retains the visual character of attacks while cutting peak particle overdraw. Low visibly simplifies hit effects, reducing immersion in the game's most cinematically directed combat moments.

Typical impact 5-20% · 6% fps cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we recommend View Distance at High (6% fps cost).

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.

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: This setting governs the draw range for world geometry, props, and background scene elements in Expedition 33's hand-crafted levels — the floating ruins above Lumiere, the coastal city districts, and the Painting's interior spaces. Higher settings extend Nanite streaming range and push non-culled prop draw calls further out. Epic is most impactful in the game's large exterior traversal areas; in the tighter indoor environments that dominate much of the game, High and Epic are visually indistinguishable. CPU scene traversal overhead increases at Epic in areas with dense background geometry — a consideration on weaker CPUs paired with fast GPUs.

Typical impact 2-15% · 4% fps cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at Medium (4% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Expedition 33 implements UE5's TAA pipeline at High, which uses jittered sub-pixel sampling and temporal accumulation to resolve geometry edges and surface detail. Medium and Low reduce the TAA sample history weight and jitter quality, increasing shimmer on fine detail like hair and foliage edges. Off disables temporal anti-aliasing entirely — aliasing is severe on the game's high-contrast painterly surfaces. In practice, if DLSS or XeSS is enabled, native AA becomes redundant — both upscalers include their own temporal reconstruction that supersedes this setting. Reserve High AA only for native resolution rendering without an upscaler active.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

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 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: DLSS is implemented via the standard UE5 DLSS plugin and runs the neural reconstruction pass on Tensor Cores, making it the recommended path for all RTX GPU owners. Quality mode renders at approximately 67% native resolution — visually clean enough for Expedition 33's painterly art style, which tolerates temporal upscaling exceptionally well due to its non-photorealistic aesthetic. Performance mode at 50% render scale delivers substantial FPS gains with acceptable softness on fine text and particle edges. DLSS 3 Frame Generation is supported on Ada and Blackwell hardware and can double perceived framerate at the cost of roughly one frame of added latency — well-suited to the turn-based pacing.

Typical impact -25-65% · no measurable cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the recommended preset leaves Intel XeSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Intel Xe Super Sampling — a temporal upscaling technology that uses machine learning inference to reconstruct high-resolution frames from lower-resolution input. On Intel Arc GPUs, XeSS runs on dedicated XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) AI accelerator hardware. On non-Intel GPUs, XeSS falls back to a DP4a (dot product of 4 8-bit integers) shader implementation that runs on standard compute units. The neural network takes the current low-resolution color buffer, motion vectors, depth, and responsive masks as input. Quality mode renders at ~77% of native, Performance at ~50%.

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: XeSS provides DLSS-equivalent temporal reconstruction for non-NVIDIA hardware using the UE5 XeSS plugin. On Intel Arc GPUs, inference runs on XMX matrix hardware; on AMD and other GPUs it falls back to DP4a compute shaders, which is somewhat slower but still substantially faster than native rendering. Quality mode at 77% render scale is the recommended starting point for Expedition 33 — the game's stylized surfaces mask the modest reconstruction artifacts typical of DP4a mode. Balanced and Performance modes push render scale to 58% and 50% respectively, useful for RX 7700 XT and equivalent cards targeting 60 fps at 1440p.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we recommend Motion Blur at High (2% 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 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Motion blur uses UE5's velocity buffer pass to apply per-pixel directional smearing during camera pans and character dashes in Expedition 33's action-timing dodge sequences. At High, the blur is multi-sample and covers both camera and per-object motion; Low reduces sample count and limits the effect to camera motion only. The implementation is a single post-process pass — GPU cost is minor (1–3%) and the setting has no impact on turn-based menu navigation. Players who find the artistic camera sweeps between turns disorienting typically disable this without any meaningful visual loss during gameplay.

Typical impact 0-1% · no measurable cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, 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 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Film grain is part of Sandfall's deliberate cinematic aesthetic — the game's visual direction draws from French New Wave cinema, and the noise overlay reinforces that analogue texture. The shader generates procedural grain seeded per-frame using screen-position hashing, modulated by luminance. Disabling it produces a cleaner, more digital image that some players prefer for readability. Performance cost is measured in fractions of a percent — this is purely a taste preference. Leaving it on is the intended experience; it is most pronounced in the darker cave and interior sequences.

Typical impact 0-1% · no measurable cost

In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, 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 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Chromatic aberration in Expedition 33 adds subtle RGB channel fringing toward screen edges, consistent with the game's lens-simulation post-processing stack. The three-sample fullscreen pass costs less than 0.1% of frame time — it is not a performance consideration under any circumstance. Disabling it sharpens peripheral image clarity, which some players find preferable during the game's real-time parry and dodge inputs where edge-screen visual precision matters. Artistically, it contributes to the painterly, slightly imperfect lens aesthetic Sandfall intended.