NARAKA: Bladepoint — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: NARAKA streams surface textures for large open environments including stone ruins, bamboo structures, and terrain across Morus Isle. Ultra loads full 4K texture pages into the streaming pool — fine if you have 6 GB+ VRAM at 1440p, but dropping to High on a 4 GB card eliminates mid-match stutter caused by texture eviction. Visual difference between High and Ultra is subtle at play distances; the VRAM headroom is more valuable.

Typical impact 8-25% · 10% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: This is NARAKA's most GPU-intensive individual setting. The Unity deferred renderer re-renders shadow-casting geometry into cascaded shadow maps for each quality tier — Ultra uses high-resolution cascades with wide coverage that hit hard in forested areas where every tree trunk, bamboo stalk, and player model casts its own shadow. Dropping from Ultra to Medium typically yields 15–20% frame time reduction, with only softness of distant shadows visibly changing.

Typical impact 3-15% · 8% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: Combat in NARAKA is effects-heavy — Tarka Ji's fire pillars, Zai's lightning chains, and Tianhai's transformation all spawn particle-dense VFX simultaneously. Ultra emits high-particle-count GPU-simulated effects with dynamic point lighting, which in 10-player skirmishes can stack multiple expensive transparent overdraw layers. Low substantially reduces emitter counts and strips dynamic lighting from effects, a meaningful gain in late-game circles where ability spam peaks.

Typical impact 5-20% · 10% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: NARAKA maps feature dense bamboo forests that affect gameplay visibility. Low removes most decorative foliage for competitive advantage.

Typical impact 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (4% 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: NARAKA uses a screen-space AO pass in its Unity deferred pipeline. At High, the full-resolution compute pass adds contact darkening around rock formations, architectural details, and character feet — most noticeable in the shadowed interiors of the Mausoleum zone. The cost is a per-pixel hemisphere sample pass that scales with resolution; at 1440p the High tier adds a few milliseconds per frame. Off is worth considering in outdoor daylight areas where the effect contributes little.

Typical impact 5-18% · 6% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (6% 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: NARAKA's atmospheric fog — most visible in the low-lying mist of Holoroth's valleys and early-morning Morus Isle — is computed via a froxel ray-march pass through a 3D volume texture. High resolution froxels interact with shadow maps for shadowed fog shafts. Beyond aesthetics, the fog can slightly reduce gameplay visibility at range. Off or Low eliminates the volumetric integration entirely and can recover 5–10% frame time, with minimal competitive downside in bright midday conditions.

Typical impact 2-15% · 4% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at TAA High (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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: NARAKA uses Unity's temporal anti-aliasing implementation. TAA High applies a more aggressive temporal accumulation with a wider sample history and stronger edge smoothing — it handles fast grapple-hook traversal and melee animation reasonably well but can introduce ghosting trails on rapidly moving characters. TAA Standard is the better balance for competitive play. Off produces sharp but heavily aliased geometry edges, particularly visible on distant bamboo and roof tiles, and is generally not recommended unless using DLSS or FSR.

Typical impact 5-20% · 8% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: Controls how far world geometry, LOD transitions, and distant structures remain fully detailed across NARAKA's large maps. Ultra holds high-LOD meshes at engagement ranges beyond 150m — useful for spotting rooftop opponents on the Holoroth skyline. However, in Unity's rendering path each distant object still contributes draw call overhead to the CPU render thread. Low introduces noticeable LOD pop-in on terrain features and buildings at mid-range, while High offers a reasonable balance without the CPU submission cost of Ultra.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: NARAKA ships native DLSS 2 integration with the full preset ladder. The engine renders the scene at a reduced internal resolution and feeds the result through NVIDIA's Tensor Core network alongside motion vectors. Quality mode (~67% native pixels) is recommended as a starting point at 1440p — it recovers 20–35% FPS with minimal softening. Balanced and Performance are viable on RTX 20/30 series targeting 144+ fps. Combine with Reflex enabled for reduced input latency when GPU-bound.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: FSR 2 in NARAKA uses temporal accumulation via a compute shader pipeline, making it a genuine DLSS alternative on AMD, Intel, and older NVIDIA hardware. At Quality mode (~77% native pixels), the reconstruction holds well on NARAKA's hard architectural edges and bamboo geometry. Performance mode shows more shimmer on thin foliage. Because FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, the upscaling pass itself has a small but non-zero compute cost compared to DLSS on Tensor Cores.

Typical impact 1-5% · 1% fps cost

In NARAKA: Bladepoint, 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 NARAKA: Bladepoint: NARAKA's motion blur is a per-object and camera velocity post-process pass using Unity's motion vector buffer. Given the game's grapple-hook traversal and rapid melee animations, enabling blur produces heavy streaking on fast swings and aerial movement — many players disable it immediately for cleaner target tracking. The performance cost is modest (one fullscreen pass, 8–16 taps), but the competitive clarity gain from disabling it is significant. Off is the near-universal competitive preference.