The best PC settings for The Blood of Dawnwalker
An Unreal Engine 5 game with a short graphics menu and some notable gaps. Start with what the menu can and cannot do, then set the few options that actually move your frame rate.
What the graphics menu gives you
- DLSS, FSR and XeSS upscaling, or none
- Frame generation, labelled experimental, 2x
- Four presets: Low, Medium, High, Ultra
- Frame rate limit and VSync
- Motion blur, bloom, chromatic aberration and depth of field toggles
What it does not
- Native HDR output
- A field of view slider
- A sharpening slider
- Uncapped cutscenes: in-game cutscenes run at 30fps
- Ultrawide cutscenes: gameplay fills the screen, cutscenes get black bars
The Blood Of Dawnwalker | OPTIMIZATION GUIDE | Every Setting Tested | Best Settings
BenchmarKing · 12:30
Every graphics setting tested one at a time, with the sharpening problem the menu cannot fix.
Setting by setting
Recommendations for a mid-range PC and for a handheld. They date from before launch and the hotfixes, and a single test on your own machine beats any table, but they are a sensible starting point.
| Setting | Mid-range PC | Handheld | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shadow Quality | High | Low | — |
| Light Quality | High | Low | — |
| Reflections Quality | Medium | Low | Ray tracing: none, or software ray tracing (Lumen), with Ultra possibly switching to ray-traced reflections. |
| Post-Processing Quality | High | Low | — |
| Effects Quality | Ultra | Low | Mostly particles, and probably heavier on the CPU than anything else. |
| Shading Quality | High | Low | — |
| Foliage Quality | Medium or High | Low | — |
| Detail Quality | Medium | Low | Turn it down if you are CPU-limited; it hits the CPU hard. |
| Volumetric Quality | Medium | Low | — |
| Texture Quality | Ultra with 16GB of VRAM or more, High with 8–12GB, Medium or Low below 8GB | It mostly decides how much VRAM the game uses, and Low may look almost identical to Ultra in normal play. | |
Upscaling and frame generation
Use the upscaler made for your graphics card: DLSS on Nvidia, FSR on AMD and XeSS on Intel. The game supports DLSS 4, FSR 4 and XeSS 2, and its DLSS Super Resolution can be upgraded to DLSS 4.5 through the NVIDIA app. For the mode, try Performance if you are struggling to reach 60fps, though it looks rough at lower resolutions.
Frame generation is an experimental 2x option for both AMD and Nvidia cards. Either just turn it on, since this is not a competitive or especially fast game, or leave it off: it adds input latency and visual distortion, especially from a low starting frame rate, and may only pay off when you are already comfortably above 60fps.
The four gaps, and what people do about them
No native HDR
HDR is not natively supported, though engine-level workarounds can force it. There is no HDR switch in the menu to look for.
No field of view slider
Field of view can be changed only by modding; the menu has no option for it.
Ultrawide cutscenes and the 30fps cap
Gameplay fills a 21:9 screen, but cutscenes are letterboxed and capped at 30fps. The Nexus mod “Ultrawide Settings - Centered HUD - No Black Bars - Uncapped Cutscenes” removes the bars, lets cutscenes run at your frame rate and pulls the HUD in from the screen edges. Another, “Ultrawide Cinematic Fix”, notes that the few pre-rendered videos stay 16:9 whatever you do.
Heavy sharpening with no slider
The game reportedly applies an overly aggressive sharpening filter with visible artifacts, and there is no in-game control for it; one fix is an edit to the Engine.ini file. Back that file up before changing it.
Mods are made by players, not Rebel Wolves, and can break after a patch. Keep a copy of your saves before installing any; where each kind goes, and the mods for the game’s timer and combat, are on the mods page.
Lock-on and target switching
There seems to be no option to turn off automatic target switching, though players have asked for one. What exists: a hard lock you control yourself, probably on R3 on a controller, and the Nexus mod “Target Lock Control - No Automatic Target Switching”, which stops combat switching enemies on its own while keeping manual switching and hard lock. If fights feel unfair for a different reason, the assists on the difficulty settings page, auto block in particular, are real options in the menu.
Steam Deck and handhelds
Valve rates the game Unsupported on Steam Deck, citing graphics performance. A Lenovo Legion Go 2 at the lowest settings at 900p managed around 24fps indoors in one test. If you are deciding whether a PC or handheld is enough in the first place, the system requirements has Steam's minimum and recommended specs.
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