007 First Light is a very interesting PC release to analyze. On the one hand, IO Interactive’s latest game can look quite good in the right scenes, especially thanks to its strong lighting, high-quality character rendering, solid animation work, and cinematic presentation. On the other hand, it is also a rather frustrating PC port in several important ways, as most of its graphics settings barely scale, some of its temporal reconstruction options behave strangely, and the game can suffer from truly massive performance drops during large explosions. This guide should hopefully help you strike the best balance between visuals and performance in 007 First Light. In it, we will first provide a gameplay and technical overview of the game, then take a look at its CPU performance in a demanding NPC-heavy test scene, and finally break down each relevant graphics setting to determine which settings are worth keeping at Ultra and which ones should be lowered for a better experience. 007 First Light translates IO Interactive’s stealth-sandbox DNA into a more cinematic James Bond experience, with crouched infiltration, guard observation, and gadget-friendly level design framed by the upgraded Glacier Engine’s richer lighting, reflective materials, and software ray-traced global illumination. Gameplay And Technical Overview Of 007 First Light Released on May 27, 2026, on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, 007 First Light is a third-person narrative action-adventure game developed and published by IO Interactive. Unlike the studio’s HITMAN World of Assassination trilogy, this is not a pure sandbox assassination game. Instead, it is a more cinematic and directed James Bond origin story that follows a young, resourceful, and reckless Bond as he is recruited into MI6 and begins earning his place in the 00 program. Gameplay-wise, 007 First Light mixes stealth, third-person shooting, hand-to-hand combat, gadgets, cinematic set pieces, driving sequences, and more open-ended IO Interactive-style level design. It is not as systemically deep as Hitman, but it still clearly carries some of IOI’s DNA, especially when the game allows players to observe patrols, use disguises, manipulate guards, and choose between stealthy or aggressive approaches. From a technical standpoint, 007 First Light runs on IO Interactive’s proprietary Glacier engine, which has been upgraded quite extensively for this project. The most notable changes include a new real-time software ray-traced global illumination system, updated asset streaming, improved volumetric rendering, and much more ambitious cinematic rendering than what we have seen in previous Hitman games. 007 First Light boasts some rather impressive character rendering technology. Visually, 007 First Light is at its best when it focuses on character rendering, indoor lighting, cinematic framing, skin shading, and glossy material work. Character faces and clothing can look excellent, and the game’s lighting can sell some scenes very effectively. However, the environments are a lot more inconsistent. Some indoor areas look very nice, but many outdoor environments do not look particularly impressive by modern standards, especially compared to the best-looking current PC titles. Texture quality can also be very inconsistent, with some assets looking surprisingly ugly. This appears to be related, at least in part, to buggy texture streaming behavior rather than purely to the texture quality setting itself. Unfortunately, the game also suffers from some severe performance anomalies. The most obvious issue we encountered was the performance drop during large explosions, where framerates could drop to less than half of their previous level. That is simply unacceptable. We attempted to profile the game with NVIDIA Nsight Graphics to better understand the bottleneck behind these explosion-related drops, but Nsight Graphics failed to properly attach to the game executable. We cannot definitively prove the cause, but the game’s intrusive Denuvo Anti-Tamper DRM may be one possible reason why profiling did not work correctly. Explosions in 007 First Light are extremely GPU-intensive, which is likely due to the heavy, volumetric smoke alpha transparencies. Let’s begin by taking a look at the game’s PC system requirements, courtesy of the developers: The 007 Fist Light PC specs. As we can see from the above infographic, 007 First Light is not outrageously demanding at the lower end, though the higher-end specs are worth paying attention to. The 1440p and 4K tiers call for 12 GB and 16 GB of VRAM, respectively, which is not particularly surprising given the game’s texture/asset quality, large environments and levels, and high-resolution rendering targets. However, the Ultra tier should be interpreted carefully. A 4K 200+ FPS target with an RTX 5080 is clearly based on DLSS 4.5 with both temporal upscaling (via Super Resolution) and frame generation (via Multi Frame Generation) rather than native 4K rendering. Frame generation can be an excellent smoothness multiplier when the base framerate is already high enough, but it should not be confused with native performance. The PC version supports DLSS Super Resolution, DLSS Frame Generation, DLSS Multi Frame Generation, DLAA, NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency, and AMD FSR 3.1 upscaling. Unfortunately, XeSS Super Resolution is missing entirely, FSR Frame Generation is not supported, AMD Anti-Lag 2 is not supported, and Intel Xe Low Latency is also missing. This is disappointing, especially because all modern temporal upscalers and frame generation technologies require broadly similar engine inputs. It is also worth mentioning that 007 First Light is set to receive a path tracing update later in the summer of 2026. That update is expected to bring path tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, and it will be very interesting to see how much it improves the game’s visuals, how heavy it is, and whether AMD’s future FSR Ray Regeneration technology can eventually provide a useful machine learning-based denoising path for Radeon GPUs. Finally, we have to mention the game’s official known issues page, which is a good thing to see. One of the listed issues also matched our own experience: HDR turns itself off every time the game is restarted, meaning players have to re-enable it manually after each launch. Hopefully, this gets patched soon. Test Systems And Methodology For our graphics settings comparisons, we used our desktop PC test system with the following relevant specs: CPU: Intel Core i7-14700K RAM: 32 GB DDR5-7200 CL34 Storage: 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB Operating System: Windows 11 25H2 All system firmware, BIOS, OS updates, and graphics drivers were fully updated before testing. All individual graphics settings comparisons were performed at a resolution of 2560x1440 (1440p), with every setting set to Ultra, resolution scaling disabled, and the game’s native TAA active. The game does not allow TAA to be disabled through the in-game graphics menu. The post effects settings, including motion blur, full screen blur, film grain, and similar options, were disabled for our testing. These options had little to no impact on both GPU-limited and CPU-limited performance in our testing, and they can also make it harder to distinguish between the different quality levels of graphics settings. The accessibility options, such as reduced light effects and flashbang dark effects, were left at their default disabled values. While the individual graphics comparisons were performed on our desktop test system, the Ultra graphics settings versus optimized graphics settings comparison and CPU performance testing were both performed on our laptop test system, with the following relevant specs: CPU: Intel Core i7-12700H RAM: 16 GB DDR4-3200 CL22 Storage: 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU Operating System: Windows 11 25H2 All system firmware, BIOS, OS updates, and graphics drivers were fully updated before testing. The Ultra versus optimized graphics settings comparison was performed at a resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p) with no temporal upscaling active, meaning native resolution with the game’s TAA solution. The CPU benchmark was performed at 1080p using Ultra graphics settings with FSR 3.1 Upscaling set to Performance mode in order to reduce the GPU bottleneck as much as possible. CPU Benchmark Before moving on to the graphics settings deep dive, we first performed a CPU benchmark using the popular benchmarking tool CapFrameX in 007 First Light. For this test, we chose the “All the Time in the World” mission in Slovakia, specifically inside the Grand Carpathian Hotel, where Bond is looking for the suspicious blond bellhop, as this is an area that’s rich with NPCs, dense geometry, detailed interiors, props, and asset streaming activity. It is therefore a much better CPU test scene than an empty corridor or a simple outdoor traversal segment. The game also appears to use our laptop test system’s CPU cores quite well, with excellent scaling shown across all of its individual hardware threads. As such, you’re likely to be limited by your CPU’s clock speeds and memory subsystem (caches and system memory), rather than its raw core/thread count or performance per clock cycle, as long as you’re not sporting an ancient CPU! The 007 First Light CPU Benchmark scene. Without further ado, let’s look at the CPU benchmark results: 007 First Light CPU Benchmark numbers. 007 First Light CPU Benchmark numbers, with even more detailed performance metrics. As we can see from the above results, 007 First Light hammered our laptop test system’s CPU. While the average framerate only barely cleared the 60 FPS mark, the 1% low and 0.1% low figures were far less impressive, and the high adaptive standard deviation metric points to noticeably uneven frame pacing. In practice, this translated into spiky frametimes and display times, meaning the game did not feel as smooth as the average FPS figure alone might suggest. As such, 007 First Light appears to require some serious CPU horsepower if you want consistently smooth, high-refresh-rate performance, no matter how powerful your GPU may be. A Deep Dive Into 007 First Light’s Graphics Settings In this section, we will explore 007 First Light’s graphics settings via comparison screenshots and videos that should showcase both the visual and performance profiles of each relevant graphics setting. This should allow us to determine which graphics settings strike the best visuals-to-performance balance, which is the basis for establishing optimized graphics settings in PC games. Unfortunately, 007 First Light’s graphics menu is not great. In our view, it feels too awkward to tweak each option through drop-down menus, and there is no live preview window to show what each setting actually changes. The menu does include a VRAM meter, which is nice, but it would have been much better had it also displayed additional information such as the CPU/GPU models, graphics driver version, current CPU/GPU framerate/frametime, etc. Even more disappointing, the game does not include graphics presets. This means players have to tweak each setting individually, which becomes especially annoying in a game where many settings barely move performance or visuals at all. The Game's "Graphics" menu — Part 1 The Game's "Graphics" menu — Part 2 The Game's "Graphics" menu — Part 3 The Game's "Graphics" menu — Part 4 2 of 9 Anti-Aliasing And Upscaling 007 First Light supports its own temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) solution, DLSS Super Resolution, DLAA, and FSR 3.1 Upscaling. Curiously, the game doesn’t allow players to use FSR 3.1 Native AA or Ultra Performance modes, even though there’s nothing that should be stopping the developers from implementing them. On the other hand, the game’s built-in TAA does an acceptable job overall, though it is not especially sharp or stable compared to the best modern temporal reconstruction methods, and it cannot be used at sub-native resolutions as a temporal upscaler. NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU users with enough GPU headroom should strongly consider DLAA, as it provides better anti-aliasing quality while rendering at native resolution. DLSS Super Resolution is also supported, but in our testing, its performance scaling was surprisingly small compared to what we usually see in modern games. This remained true even when using the correct DLSS SR presets recommended by NVIDIA. FSR 3.1 Upscaling, meanwhile, delivered larger performance gains, but it also came with the usual FSR 3.1 Upscaling image quality trade-offs, especially in motion. The following game captures should greatly illustrate our point: 1440p Ultra TAA — 135 FPS baseline framerate in this scene. 1440p Ultra DLSS SR Quality mode — the framerate barely went up by about 6%! 1440p Ultra FSR 3.1 Upscaling Quality mode — the framerate went by a respectable 35%, which is more akin to what we’d expect from a modern temporal upscaling solution at this mode. Unfortunately, the game’s FSR 3.1 Upscaling implementation is also lopsided — FSR 3.1 Upscaling is available, but there is no FSR Native AA mode, no FSR Ultra Performance mode, no FSR Frame Generation, and no apparent way for AMD RDNA 4 users to force FSR 4 or FSR 4.1 through the AMD Adrenalin Software interface. Intel Arc users are also left without XeSS Super Resolution, which is a real shame. Recommendation: DLAA for RTX GPU users with enough GPU headroom; DLSS SR Quality/Balanced if you need extra performance on RTX GPUs; FSR 3.1 only if you need the extra performance on non-RTX GPUs. Texture Quality Texture Quality adjusts the size and quality of the game’s textures. This is mostly a VRAM capacity-related setting, though lowering it can also, in theory, reduce texture streaming pressure on systems with limited memory bandwidth or slower storage. At 1440p, Ultra texture quality requires more than 10 GB of VRAM in our experience, while High, Medium, and Low all appear to require at least 8 GB. At 4K, VRAM requirements will naturally be higher, while 1080p users can get away with less. Temporal upscaling also lowers VRAM consumption because the game renders internally at a lower resolution. Unfortunately, 007 First Light also suffers from some ugly texture presentation in certain scenes, and that does not appear to be solved entirely by simply raising Texture Quality to Ultra. This points to a possible texture streaming issue in the engine rather than a simple quality setting problem. Recommendation: Depends on VRAM capacity. Use Ultra if you have 10+ GB of VRAM; use High or Medium on 8 GB GPUs, especially at 1440p. Texture Filter Texture Filter controls texture filtering quality. As usual, this setting affects the clarity of textures viewed at oblique angles, such as floors, roads, terrain, walls, and other slanted surfaces. In our testing, the performance impact of 16x anisotropic filtering

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