Path of Exile 2 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Path of Exile 2, 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 Path of Exile 2: GGG's engine streams textures into a configurable VRAM pool. At Ultra, the engine loads 4K surface maps for terrain, architecture, and characters across acts like the Jungle Ruins and Ogham. At High or below it falls back to 2K and 1K mips. If your VRAM ceiling is exceeded — common at 1080p with 6 GB cards on Ultra — the streaming system stalls and produces hitches as assets are evicted. Switching from Ultra to High recovers headroom without obvious visual degradation during fast combat.

Typical impact 8-25% · 6% fps cost

In Path of Exile 2, we recommend Shadow Quality at Medium (6% 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 Path of Exile 2: PoE 2's deferred renderer renders the directional sun shadow via cascaded shadow maps and per-light shadow maps for area lights. At High, four CSM cascades are used with a 2048 or 4096 texel atlas and PCF filtering. At Medium the cascade count and atlas resolution both drop, visibly softening contact shadows near the player. Off removes all dynamic shadow casting, which is serviceable indoors but looks flat in outdoor acts. The cost difference between Medium and High is roughly 8–12% GPU frame time.

Typical impact 15-40% · 9% fps cost

In Path of Exile 2, we recommend Global Illumination at Low (9% fps cost).

The most comprehensive indirect lighting system, simulating full multi-bounce light transport. Modern implementations include UE5 Lumen (software screen-space radiance cache with optional hardware RT acceleration), path tracing (stochastic ray tracing with multiple bounces per pixel), and hybrid systems combining screen-space probes with signed distance field tracing. Lumen software mode uses a screen-space radiance cache updated via compute shaders plus SDF traces, while hardware RT mode dispatches actual ray tracing calls through RT cores. This is typically the single heaviest setting in any game.

In Path of Exile 2: PoE 2 recalculates GI per spell-cast, making this unusually CPU-heavy. Switching to Shadows Only (disabling full GI) delivers a ~17% FPS uplift at 1080p with minimal visual change during fast combat.

Typical impact 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In Path of Exile 2, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Low (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 Path of Exile 2: The engine runs a GTAO-style horizon-search AO pass at High, sampling dozens of depth taps per pixel across the full render target. In PoE 2's top-down perspective, AO primarily adds depth to floor crevices, archways, and monster undersides in zones like the Vastiri Desert. At Low, a cheaper SSAO variant with a reduced sample count is used. Disabling AO entirely is largely unnoticeable during active play, and the gain of roughly 5–8% GPU time is worth considering on mid-range hardware.

Typical impact 3-12% · 18% fps cost

In Path of Exile 2, we recommend Particle Quality at High (18% fps cost).

Controls particle system density, simulation complexity, and render quality. Higher settings increase maximum particle count per emitter, enable GPU-driven particle simulation in compute shaders (position, velocity, lifetime, collision), and use soft particle blending (sampling the depth buffer to fade particles near surface intersections). The overdraw cost from thousands of alpha-blended billboard quads is the primary performance concern — each particle that overlaps another requires a separate blending operation.

In Path of Exile 2: Endgame PoE 2 builds fire dozens of skills per second. Ultra particle quality during high-density encounters costs up to 30% FPS. Dropping to Medium or Low is the primary endgame performance fix.

Typical impact 3-15% · 12% fps cost

In Path of Exile 2, we recommend Effect Quality at High (12% 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 Path of Exile 2: Distinct from particle quality, this governs the fidelity of skill effect meshes, distortion passes, and dynamic lighting spawned by abilities. At Ultra, skills like Comet or Volcanic Fissure spawn per-hit point lights that contribute to the deferred lighting pass and high-resolution flip-book materials for impact frames. Lower settings reduce the complexity of these material shaders and cap the number of simultaneous dynamic effect lights. In boss arenas with sustained heavy VFX, dropping from Ultra to High saves 5–10% GPU frame time.

Typical impact 5-20% · 3% fps cost

In Path of Exile 2, we recommend View Distance at Medium (3% 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 Path of Exile 2: GGG's engine uses distance-based culling to manage draw calls across PoE 2's large procedurally assembled zones. At Far, the CPU traverses more scene graph nodes and submits draw calls for distant props, breakables, and environmental geometry — notably expensive in open outdoor acts. At Short, culling aggressively removes anything beyond a close radius, meaningfully reducing both CPU draw call submission overhead and GPU geometry load. The transition from Far to Medium typically saves 8–15% on CPU-bound frame times in large acts.

Typical impact 2-15% · 3% fps cost

In Path of Exile 2, 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 Path of Exile 2: PoE 2 uses a TAA-based implementation at its higher tiers. High runs full TAA with sub-pixel jitter and temporal accumulation via motion vectors, which stabilizes the image across the detailed tileset geometry but introduces ghosting on fast projectiles. Medium and Low use progressively fewer accumulation samples and less aggressive jitter. Off disables all AA — aliasing becomes obvious on environment edges but frame time drops by 3–6%. If DLSS or FSR is active, their internal temporal reconstruction supersedes this setting and it can be left at Low or Off without visual penalty.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Path of Exile 2, 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 Path of Exile 2: DLSS 2 (transformer model in driver versions post-2024) is supported in PoE 2, rendering at 67% of native pixels in Quality mode and 50% in Performance. Given the engine's heavy reliance on temporal stability for GI and AO, DLSS Quality mode is the recommended entry point — it preserves edge clarity on intricate tileset geometry and rune text while recovering 30–50% GPU frame time. Performance mode is viable at 4K. DLSS interacts well with PoE 2's motion vectors from the deferred pass, producing stable output even during particle-heavy endgame encounters.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Path of Exile 2, 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 Path of Exile 2: FSR 2 is the upscaler for AMD and Intel GPU owners in PoE 2. It uses temporal accumulation via GGG-supplied motion vectors and runs entirely on standard compute units. Quality mode (67% render scale) is recommended as the visual quality floor — at Balanced or Performance, the game's intricate ground decals and UI-adjacent world elements show noticeable softening. Because FSR runs on compute hardware rather than dedicated AI silicon, it has a small but nonzero GPU cost versus DLSS. It is still a strong FPS multiplier, typically recovering 25–45% frame time in Quality mode.

Typical impact -20-50% · +30% fps

In Path of Exile 2, enabling Multithreaded Rendering at On is the recommendation — it +30% fps rather than costing them.

Enables parallel draw call submission across multiple CPU threads to the graphics API command queue. Without multithreading, a single render thread must sequentially prepare and submit all draw calls. With multithreading, the engine uses DX11 deferred contexts or DX12/Vulkan command buffers to record draw calls on multiple threads simultaneously. The CPU savings are proportional to the number of draw calls and available cores. In Valorant, Riot's optimized UE4 achieves 2-3x draw call throughput. Disabling on modern multi-core CPUs can cut FPS by 50%+.

In Path of Exile 2: The single highest-impact toggle in PoE 2. Enabling multithreading routes AI and physics to all CPU cores — a 30%+ FPS gain on any modern CPU. Always keep this On.