Death Stranding 2: On the Beach — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, 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 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels load sharper, more detailed textures but require significantly more VRAM.

Typical impact 8-25% · 12% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, 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 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic light sources. Higher settings produce sharper, more accurate shadows but are GPU-intensive.

Typical impact 3-8% · 8% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, we recommend Model Detail at High (8% fps cost).

Controls the geometric complexity of character and object meshes by selecting between pre-authored LOD tiers. Lower settings swap in reduced-polygon meshes earlier, cutting vertex shader invocations and rasterizer triangle throughput. This also reduces the number of material draw calls since simplified meshes often merge material slots. The CPU cost of skinning and animation blending also scales with vertex count on games that use CPU-side skeletal animation.

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Controls the geometric complexity of character and object meshes. Higher settings load higher-poly models with more surface detail, increasing VRAM usage and GPU load.

Typical impact 3-15% · 8% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, we recommend Effect Quality at High (8% 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 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Controls the visual fidelity of particle and gameplay effects including explosions, weapon impacts, and environmental elements. Has a moderate GPU cost in action-heavy scenes.

Typical impact 5-18% · 8% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (8% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Timefall rain and BT encounters use dense volumetric effects. Core to the atmosphere — reducing below Medium significantly diminishes the horror elements.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (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 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet, adding depth and grounding to the scene. SSAO is cheaper; HBAO/RTAO are more accurate but more expensive.

Typical impact 3-12% · 7% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at High (7% 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 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between lower-detail LOD tiers. Higher settings keep complex meshes visible at greater distances, increasing GPU and CPU load.

Typical impact 2-15% · 1% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at FXAA (1% 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 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Smooths jagged edges on geometric boundaries. FXAA is cheapest with a slight blur; TAA/TAAU are sharper with less shimmer; TSR/DLSS AA offer the best quality on supported hardware.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, 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 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: NVIDIA DLSS — an AI-based upscaling technology for NVIDIA RTX GPUs that renders at a lower resolution and uses machine learning to reconstruct a higher-quality image. Can significantly boost frame rates.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, 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.

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution — a temporal upscaling technology available on all GPU brands. Renders at a lower resolution and reconstructs detail, trading some fine detail for improved frame rates.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, 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 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Applies directional blur to fast-moving objects or during camera rotation. Adds cinematic motion feel; disabling it produces a crisper, sharper image which many competitive players prefer.

Typical impact 2-8% · 1% fps cost

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, we recommend Depth of Field at On (1% fps cost).

Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from a focal plane. The depth buffer is sampled to determine each pixel's circle of confusion (CoC). A Gaussian or bokeh blur is applied with kernel size proportional to CoC. Higher quality modes use physically-based hexagonal or circular bokeh shapes via a gather pass. Cinematic mode may use separate near-field and far-field blur with smooth transitions. The cost scales with maximum CoC radius — large blur kernels require 32+ texture taps per pixel.

In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from the focal plane. Primarily a cinematic effect; many players disable it for clearer gameplay visibility.