Dead by Daylight — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Dead by Daylight, we recommend Texture Quality at High (4% 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 Dead by Daylight: Dead by Daylight's UE4 texture streaming pool scales directly with this setting. The game's maps use high-resolution surface detail on assets like the Coldwind Farm haystacks and Léry's tiled floors, so Ultra pushes VRAM consumption noticeably. At 1080p, Medium keeps streaming well within the 3 GB budget with minimal visual degradation. Hitching from texture eviction — not steady-state FPS loss — is the main symptom when VRAM is exceeded.

Typical impact 8-25% · 10% fps cost

In Dead by Daylight, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (10% 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 Dead by Daylight: DBD uses shadows as a core horror mechanic. Lower settings make the Killer more visible — considered an advantage by survivors.

Typical impact 2-15% · 4% fps cost

In Dead by Daylight, 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 Dead by Daylight: DBD uses UE4's built-in TAA at Medium and High, which accumulates sub-pixel jitter over multiple frames to smooth geometry edges on foliage, fencing, and map structures. Off produces sharp but heavily aliased edges on the game's prop-heavy environments. Low applies FXAA — a single-pass edge blur that costs almost nothing but softens fine detail. High TAA is the recommended balance; it adds under 2 ms on most hardware and substantially cleans up the dense fencing and chain-link geometry common across maps.

Typical impact 3-10% · 6% fps cost

In Dead by Daylight, we recommend Post-Process Quality at High (6% fps cost).

Controls the overall quality of the fullscreen post-processing effect stack including tone mapping, color grading (LUT application), bloom (bright-pass filter with multi-stage Gaussian blur), lens flare, auto-exposure (luminance histogram compute shader), and screen-space lens distortion. Higher settings run these effects at full resolution, use larger blur kernels for bloom, and enable additional effects. The total cost is the sum of multiple fullscreen passes — each reading and writing the entire framebuffer.

In Dead by Daylight: This controls DBD's fullscreen post-processing stack including the atmospheric bloom around pallet fire and generator sparks, the tone mapping curve used across all maps, auto-exposure adjustments as the Killer enters and exits dark buildings, and the lens distortion applied during the Terror Radius pulse effect. Ultra runs all passes at full resolution with wider bloom kernels. Dropping to Low removes the multi-stage bloom blur passes and simplifies exposure, recovering 5-10% frame time — particularly useful in Léry's with its many bright fluorescent light sources.

Typical impact 3-15% · 3% fps cost

In Dead by Daylight, we recommend Effect Quality at Medium (3% 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 Dead by Daylight: Controls the particle systems tied to generator repair sparks, pallet break debris, hook struggle effects, and the Entity claw animations. At High, each generator emits dense GPU-simulated spark particles and blood pool decals accumulate on the ground. Low switches to simpler sprite-based particles and reduces emitter counts, cutting overdraw in chase sequences where multiple effects overlap. The saving is most noticeable during end-game collapse when multiple generators, exit gates, and the Entity's border effects fire simultaneously.

Typical impact 5-20% · 4% fps cost

In Dead by Daylight, we recommend View Distance at High (4% 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 Dead by Daylight: In UE4, this setting adjusts the LOD bias and cull distance for all static mesh actors across DBD's maps. At Ultra, distant props on open maps like Coldwind Farm and Autohaven Wreckers remain at their highest LOD tier across the entire playable area, multiplying draw call count substantially through UE4's render thread. Dropping to Low aggressively culls distant objects and forces early LOD transitions — this is one of the most CPU-frame-time-intensive settings in the game and Low to Medium can recover 10-20 FPS on draw-call-limited systems.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In Dead by Daylight, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at On (5% fps cost).

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.

In Dead by Daylight: DBD's UE4 implementation uses SSAO, running a fullscreen depth-buffer hemisphere sampling pass each frame. When enabled, it adds soft contact shadowing where survivors crouch near walls, where pallets meet the ground, and inside building interiors like the Lery's exam rooms. The visual contribution is meaningful in DBD's dark maps, but the fullscreen compute cost at higher resolutions is noticeable. Turning it Off is recommended on GPUs below a GTX 1060 equivalent, recovering roughly 3-7% frame time with limited visual impact during active gameplay.

Typical impact 1-5% · 1% fps cost

In Dead by Daylight, 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 Dead by Daylight: DBD applies per-object motion blur using UE4's velocity buffer pass, most visible during the Killer's lunge animations and fast camera rotation. The effect uses motion vector data accumulated in the G-buffer pass with 8-16 samples per pixel in a post-process resolve. Most players disable this entirely — it reduces visual clarity when tracking fast Killer movement and the 1-3% frame time cost is not justified. Off is the near-universal competitive preference, particularly for survivors who need to read animation cues.

Typical impact 0% · no measurable cost

In Dead by Daylight, we recommend V-Sync at On (no measurable cost).

Synchronizes the GPU's framebuffer swap with the monitor's vertical blanking interval to prevent screen tearing. When enabled, the GPU holds the completed frame until the monitor signals it is ready. If the GPU cannot maintain the refresh rate, VSync forces the frame to wait for the next blanking interval, causing framerate to drop to a fraction (e.g., 60fps to 30fps on a 60Hz display). This introduces up to one full frame of input latency. Triple buffering mitigates the fractional drop but adds more latency.

In Dead by Daylight: Enabling V-Sync in DBD locks the swap chain to the monitor's refresh interval through UE4's standard backbuffer flip mechanism. Given the game's inconsistent frame pacing under CPU load — especially in end-game with multiple players acting simultaneously — VSync can cause the frame rate to stair-step down to half refresh (e.g., 60 to 30 fps on a 60 Hz display) during the render-thread spikes common in this title. Disabling VSync and using NVIDIA Reflex or a frame rate cap set slightly below refresh is the better approach for input latency and frame consistency.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Dead by Daylight, 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%.