Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 6% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, we recommend Texture Quality at High (6% 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: The Swarm Engine streams textures through a managed VRAM pool. At Ultra, surface albedo, normal, and roughness maps for both Space Marine armour and Tyranid carapace load at full resolution — this is where the 6/8/10 GB VRAM thresholds come from. Staying at High rather than Ultra saves roughly 1–1.5 GB of VRAM with almost no visible difference during combat, where camera shake and particle density mask fine texture detail anyway. Drop to Medium only if you are streaming textures and seeing hitch spikes.

Typical impact 8-25% · 10% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: The Swarm Engine uses cascaded shadow maps for the directional sun/sky light across Space Marine 2's large outdoor environments — Kadaku jungles, ruined Graia facilities, and the Hive city segments all have wide cascade ranges. Moving from Ultra to High reduces shadow map resolution and cascade count, cutting the shadow render pass cost by 15–20% in open areas. Low removes soft filtering, producing noticeably aliased shadow edges on large structures. High is the practical sweet spot for most systems.

Typical impact 3-15% · 10% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, we recommend Effect Quality at High (10% 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: Space Marine 2 renders hundreds of Tyranid enemies simultaneously via the Swarm Engine. Effect quality governs particle and destruction detail during horde combat — the most visually impactful setting and a heavy GPU cost in swarm encounters.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Default (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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: Keep AO at Default — the High preset adds very little visual benefit for the cost. The game's biggest bottleneck is CPU, so GPU savings are less impactful unless you're at 4K.

Typical impact 3-20% · 5% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, we recommend Reflection Quality at Default (5% 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: With no hardware ray tracing in Space Marine 2, reflections are entirely screen-space (SSR) at Default and High. The polished ceramite of a Space Marine's armour and wet stone floors in the Graia underhive both rely on this pass. Off falls back to static cubemap probes, which are noticeably flat on glossy surfaces. Default runs SSR at a reduced resolution with a limited step budget. High increases march step count and trace resolution, improving reflection accuracy on curved armour surfaces — but costs 5–8% GPU time. Off is a meaningful FPS recovery if you are GPU-bound.

Typical impact 5-18% · 5% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (5% 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: Lowering Volumetrics to Low gives ~5% FPS with minimal visual change. Worth doing when CPU-bottlenecked since it slightly reduces GPU submission overhead too.

Typical impact 5-20% · 6% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, we recommend View Distance at High (6% 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: View distance in Space Marine 2 controls how far out the Swarm Engine retains full-detail world geometry and spawned entities — particularly relevant on Kadaku's open engagement zones where long sightlines exist. Higher settings push the frustum culling threshold outward, increasing draw calls for distant terrain segments, buildings, and potential enemy spawns. Because the game is frequently CPU-bottlenecked, increasing view distance beyond High can amplify that bottleneck by adding more scene traversal work alongside the swarm simulation. Ultra offers minimal visual payoff in most missions and should be the first setting reduced on CPU-limited rigs.

Typical impact 3-12% · 6% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: The Swarm Engine must LOD-manage not just static world geometry but the massive number of Tyranid entities simultaneously on screen. Higher LOD settings keep full-polygon Hormagaunt and Carnifex meshes visible further out and delay the transition to simplified stand-in geometry, increasing both vertex buffer requirements and draw call count. At Ultra, even distant enemies render at near-full detail, compounding CPU submission overhead. Reducing from Ultra to High is largely invisible during the chaos of large engagements and reduces the per-frame scene complexity enough to ease both CPU and GPU load in swarm-heavy missions.

Typical impact 2-15% · 3% fps cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: Space Marine 2's TAA implementation (the High preset) uses motion vectors and sub-pixel jitter to stabilise the image across frames, which is particularly effective at smoothing the silhouettes of swarming Tyranids. Medium reduces temporal sample accumulation, introducing light shimmer on fine armour geometry. Low applies a lighter spatial filter only. Off leaves jagged edges on all geometry edges and is only viable when DLSS or FSR are active, since both upscalers incorporate their own temporal anti-aliasing pass that supersedes the in-engine AA setting. If running DLSS or FSR, set AA to Off or Low to avoid double-applying temporal filtering.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: DLSS in Space Marine 2 uses Transformer-based DLSS 3.5 model reconstruction, which handles the game's dense enemy geometry and motion-heavy swarm combat better than older CNN models. Quality mode at 1440p renders internally at roughly 960p, cutting pixel count to ~44% of native while producing output that holds up well on armour surface detail. If your GPU supports Ada or Blackwell architectures, DLSS Frame Generation is also available, doubling perceived framerate by inserting synthesised frames between rendered ones — particularly effective here since the game's swarm bottleneck can leave GPU utilisation headroom that frame gen exploits.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 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 Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2: FSR 2 in Space Marine 2 operates via temporal accumulation using the engine-supplied motion vectors and depth buffer, making it viable on any GPU. Quality mode renders at approximately 77% of native linear resolution. The reconstruction holds up well on flat armour surfaces but can show instability on fine Tyranid leg geometry and foliage edges during fast panning — a characteristic of FSR's optical flow estimation under high-frequency motion. Balanced or Performance mode is worth considering if you are CPU-bottlenecked, since further reducing GPU load will not translate to more frames once the swarm simulation is the limiting factor.