God of War Ragnarok — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, 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 God of War Ragnarok: Santa Monica's streaming system loads surface textures for dense environments like Yggdrasil's branches, Atreus's cloth, and Kratos's scarring. Low and Medium run comfortably within 6–8 GB at 1080p–1440p. Jumping to Ultra at 1440p saturates 8 GB VRAM, causing frame-time spikes in asset-heavy areas like Vanaheim's rainforest. Keep at High unless you have 10+ GB VRAM at 4K — the visual delta from High to Ultra is subtle outside of close-up cutscenes.

Typical impact 8-25% · 13% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (13% 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 God of War Ragnarok: The engine renders cascaded shadow maps for the directional sun/moon light plus multiple dynamic point lights throughout each realm. Helheim's overcast sky and Niflheim's procedural layout are particularly shadow-intensive. Dropping from Ultra to High recovers 8–12% GPU frame time by reducing cascade resolution and soft shadow sample count. Low is visually harsh — contact shadow quality degrades noticeably on Kratos's body and environment props. Medium is the practical sweet spot for mid-range hardware.

Typical impact 3-20% · 6% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, we recommend Reflection Quality at Medium (6% 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 God of War Ragnarok: At Off and Low, the engine falls back to pre-baked cubemap probes — acceptable in enclosed Dwarf forges but obviously flat on Alfheim's crystalline surfaces and the Lake of Nine. Medium enables screen-space reflection traces. High increases SSR ray march depth and adds planar reflection support for select water surfaces, producing a significant visual improvement in the open-world Vanaheim and Lake of Nine areas at a 10–18% GPU cost increase over Off. No hardware ray tracing path exists in this title.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, 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 God of War Ragnarok: The engine applies a screen-space AO pass that grounds characters and props in each environment. At High, the implementation uses a multi-sample horizon-based method visible in Kratos's armour grooves and rock crevices throughout Midgard. Dropping to Low noticeably flattens geometry contact shadowing in dense cave sections in Svartalfheim. Off removes the pass entirely, recovering 4–6% GPU time but making environments look artificially bright at surface junctions. Medium balances quality and cost well on mid-range GPUs.

Typical impact 3-8% · 8% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, 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 God of War Ragnarok: Governs the polygon LOD tier loaded for character meshes — Kratos, Atreus, enemies, and NPCs like the Dwarven craftsmen. Ultra loads the maximum-density meshes with highest bone count for skeletal skinning, visible in close combat. The GPU cost scales with on-screen enemy count — arenas in Asgard with multiple Einherjar pack members make this setting consequential. Dropping from Ultra to High recovers 4–8% GPU frame time in dense combat encounters with minimal visible quality difference unless the camera zooms in during executions. Low noticeably degrades enemy silhouettes.

Typical impact 3-15% · 8% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, 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 God of War Ragnarok: Controls VFX fidelity for Kratos's Leviathan Axe frost explosions, Draupnir Spear lightning chains, the Blades of Chaos fire trails, and environmental destruction debris. Ultra increases particle emitter counts, switches sprites to mesh particles with dynamic point lighting from each effect, and uses higher-resolution flipbook animations. The cost is highly variable — in single-enemy encounters Ultra is manageable, but multi-enemy arena fights in Asgard with overlapping ability effects can produce 10–20% GPU overhead spikes versus Low. Reducing to Medium is one of the most effective per-setting optimizations during combat-heavy sequences.

Typical impact 2-15% · 1% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at SMAA (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 God of War Ragnarok: TAA is the baseline temporal solution — it accumulates sub-pixel jitter to smooth geometry edges on Kratos's axe and environmental rock detail, at the cost of slight motion ghosting during fast attacks. SMAA uses pattern-matched edge detection without temporal accumulation, producing sharper but slightly aliased output in motion. Off leaves raw pixel edges visible on fine details like Leviathan Axe blade geometry. If DLSS or FSR is active, their internal TAA pass supersedes this setting — set Anti-Aliasing to Off when using either upscaler to avoid double temporal processing.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In God of War Ragnarok, 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 God of War Ragnarok: DLSS 2 runs on RTX hardware via Tensor Cores, rendering at reduced internal resolution and reconstructing full-resolution output using NVIDIA's neural network. In Ragnarök's dense geometry environments — Svartalfheim forge interiors, Asgard's golden architecture — DLSS Quality mode renders at ~67% linear resolution and recovers 30–45% GPU frame time with minimal perceptible sharpness loss. Balanced and Performance modes push gains further at the cost of fine detail on distant foliage in Vanaheim. Pair with Anti-Aliasing Off to prevent redundant temporal processing. DLSS is NVIDIA RTX only; AMD users should use FSR.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In God of War Ragnarok, 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 God of War Ragnarok: FSR 2 runs on all GPU vendors via compute shaders, using temporal accumulation with motion vectors and depth to reconstruct full-resolution output from a reduced render target. In Ragnarök, FSR Quality mode at 1440p renders the Nine Realms at roughly 960p, recovering 25–35% GPU frame time. FSR is particularly useful on AMD RDNA 2/3 cards where DLSS is unavailable. Quality mode is recommended — Balanced and Performance introduce visible softness on fine geometry like rope bridges and Dwarf engravings. Set Anti-Aliasing to Off when FSR is active; its internal temporal pass is sufficient.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, 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 God of War Ragnarok: The engine applies per-object motion vector blur using the G-buffer velocity pass, producing directional streaking on Kratos during dodge-rolls and Draupnir Spear throws. High mode uses a wider tap radius and more samples, adding cinematic weight to combat. The cost is a single fullscreen post-process pass — Low to High represents a 1–3% GPU cost delta, making this a low-priority target for optimization. Many players disable it entirely for competitive clarity; the visual coherence loss during heavy combat is the main subjective trade-off rather than a meaningful FPS gain.

Typical impact 2-8% · 1% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, 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 God of War Ragnarok: A simple toggle enabling or disabling the engine's CoC-based lens blur during cutscenes and scripted story sequences. When On, the engine computes circle-of-confusion from the depth buffer and applies a physically-based bokeh blur — most visible during close-up dialogue scenes with Freya and Tyr. The runtime cost is 2–5% GPU time during affected sequences and negligible during gameplay where DoF is rarely active. Disabling it for gameplay FPS gains yields little practical benefit; it is primarily a cinematic preference choice.

Typical impact 5-15% · 6% fps cost

In God of War Ragnarok, we recommend Screen Space Reflections at Medium (6% fps cost).

Computes reflections by ray-marching through the depth buffer in screen space. For each reflective pixel, a reflection ray is traced using hierarchical Z-buffer tracing (Hi-Z) — stepping through mip levels of the depth buffer to quickly find intersections. Higher settings increase the maximum ray march steps (16 to 128), enable multi-bounce SSR (tracing a second reflection from the hit point), and use higher-resolution tracing. The fundamental limitation is that SSR can only reflect what is visible on screen — off-screen geometry produces fallback cubemap reflections.

In God of War Ragnarok: GoW Ragnarok uses high-quality SSR for the Lake of Nine water reflections and Alfheim crystal surfaces. Ultra SSR is expensive but visually transformative.