Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 5% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, we recommend Texture Quality at High (5% 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Decima streams texture assets through its own asset management layer. At Ultra, the engine loads full 4K surface textures into VRAM — expect 10GB consumed at 4K Ultra, and potential streaming stalls on 8GB cards during fast traversal through densely detailed areas like Izuhara's villages. High uses 2K maps and sits comfortably within 8GB at 1440p. FPS impact is negligible unless VRAM is saturated, at which point hitching becomes noticeable during camera pans across detailed environments.

Typical impact 8-25% · 10% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Decima uses cascaded shadow maps for the primary directional (sun/moon) light plus shadow-mapped local lights in interiors and campsites. Moving from Medium to Ultra increases cascade resolution and extends the cascade range, which is very visible under Tsushima's dramatic golden-hour lighting as distinct shadow penumbrae appear on grass blades and distant tree trunks. The shadow render pass is one of the costlier in this title — dropping from Ultra to High typically recovers 5–10% frametime without visibly softening near-field shadows.

Typical impact 5-20% · 10% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, we recommend Foliage Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls density, LOD transitions, and rendering quality for non-grass vegetation — trees, bushes, ferns, and vines. Higher settings increase the number of foliage instances, delay the transition from full 3D meshes to billboard imposters, and use higher-poly foliage meshes. In UE5 games using Nanite foliage, this controls the mesh cluster granularity and streaming distance. The primary cost drivers are massive overdraw from layered alpha-tested foliage cards and the high draw call count from thousands of individually-placed foliage instances.

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Tsushima's iconic dense bamboo forests and grass fields make foliage quality one of the highest-impact settings. Ultra is visually stunning but costs ~16% FPS. High is the recommended balance — the difference is most visible in the wind-driven grass animations.

Typical impact 3-20% · 7% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, we recommend Reflection Quality at Medium (7% 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Decima implements screen-space reflections on wet surfaces, standing water, and polished stone floors throughout Tsushima's shrines and beaches. At Off, the engine falls back to static cubemap probes. Low and Medium progressively increase the SSR ray march step count and resolve resolution. High runs SSR at full resolution with maximum steps, which is most visible on rain-soaked ground and the game's coastal water surfaces. Because SSR is view-dependent, reflections fail at glancing angles regardless — the visual uplift from Medium to High is subtle outside dedicated water areas.

Typical impact 3-12% · 6% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (6% 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Decima's AO pass produces soft contact shadows under Jin's armour, in rock crevices, and beneath foliage canopies — areas that look flat without it. High uses a high-sample-count GTAO-style horizon-based method producing physically plausible occlusion, especially visible in cave interiors and dense bamboo. Low is a fast SSAO approximation. Turning AO Off is the most visually regressive choice and is noticeable immediately in outdoor scenes. Medium delivers the bulk of the visual benefit at noticeably lower cost than High.

Typical impact 5-20% · 8% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, we recommend View Distance at High (8% 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Decima engine handles long draw distances efficiently. Ultra adds persistent distant LOD transitions that improve the open-world vistas significantly — worth keeping on 1440p+ setups.

Typical impact 3-12% · 6% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Controls the distance thresholds at which Decima swaps character models, environmental props, and building geometry between polygon tiers. High and Ultra keep detailed meshes visible further into the scene, reducing the silhouette discontinuities on NPCs and structures visible during horseback traversal. The cost is additional vertex throughput and draw calls at distance. In Tsushima's densely populated settlement areas and shrine interiors, the difference between Medium and Ultra is visible on secondary NPC models. Low introduces noticeable in-camera LOD transitions that break immersion.

Typical impact 2-15% · 3% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at Medium (3% 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Ghost of Tsushima uses a temporal anti-aliasing solution as its primary AA. Low is a basic TAA pass with moderate temporal accumulation. High increases the jitter sample count and the temporal history weight, producing cleaner edges on Jin's hair, armour trim, and foliage silhouettes but adding some ghosting on fast camera sweeps. Off leaves raw alias edges on geometry. If DLSS, FSR, or XeSS is active, their temporal reconstruction supersedes this setting — enabling any upscaler with AA on High is redundant overhead. Use AA only when running at native resolution.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Nixxes integrated DLSS 2/3 via the standard NGX SDK. The engine passes Decima's motion vectors and depth buffer to the DLSS reconstruction network. Quality mode renders at approximately 67% of native pixels and is difficult to distinguish from native at normal play distances, even during the sweeping landscape shots Tsushima is known for. Balanced is appropriate for 4K targets on RTX 30-series. Performance at 1440p targeting 4K output remains acceptable. On RTX 40-series, pairing any DLSS quality mode with Frame Generation significantly raises the effective framerate ceiling.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: FSR 2 temporal upscaling is available for all GPU vendors via Decima's compute shader pipeline. It consumes Tsushima's motion vector and depth outputs identically to DLSS but runs on standard shader cores without Tensor hardware. FSR 2 Quality mode at 1440p produces clean results on Tsushima's high-contrast foliage edges, though ghosting on fast katana swings is marginally more visible than with DLSS in the same quality tier. FSR 3 Frame Generation extends this to non-NVIDIA hardware — see Frame Generation. Ultra Quality is the recommended starting point for RX 6000 and 7000 series owners.

Typical impact -25-65% · no measurable cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Intel XeSS uses the Decima engine's motion vectors and depth data to temporally reconstruct the output frame. On Arc GPUs, the XMX matrix hardware accelerates the neural inference pass. On AMD and NVIDIA hardware, XeSS falls back to a DP4a compute shader path that performs comparably to FSR 2 in quality tier for tier. At Quality mode, XeSS handles Tsushima's fine grass geometry and armour detail reasonably well. It is the third-tier upscaling choice in this title — DLSS for NVIDIA, FSR 3 for AMD, and XeSS primarily for Intel Arc owners.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Uniquely, Ghost of Tsushima supports both DLSS 3 Frame Gen (RTX 40+) and FSR 3 Frame Gen (any GPU) — one of very few games with both implementations. AMD GPU owners get the full frame generation benefit too.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, 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 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut: Decima applies a per-object and per-pixel velocity-buffer motion blur pass. High produces pronounced directional streaking during Jin's dodge rolls and during mounted gallops — particularly visible against Tsushima's high-contrast sky. Low reduces the streak length and sample count, retaining subtle blur on fast limb motion. Off disables the pass entirely, which many players prefer for the improved clarity during combat. The frametime cost is a single fullscreen post-process pass and is low in absolute terms, but disabling it marginally sharpens input response perception and is recommended for higher-framerate targets.