007 First Light Targets 60 FPS Everywhere Except Series S, As IO Blames RAM And GPU Headroom For The Cutback

IO Interactive has sponsored a new Digital Foundry video interview to outline the evolution of its proprietary Glacier engine in 007 First Light, which launches next week.

The interview was conducted with the following members of the engine and tech team:

• Ulas Karademir — Chief Technical Officer.
• Casper Fabi — Glacier engine architect and core engineer for entities, bricks, crops, and streaming.
• David Kanyas — Technical Director.
• Alex Müller — Senior render engineer.
• Alex Chaffronov — Lead and principal animation programmer.

IO says Glacier was modernized across the board for 007 First Light, with fully real-time global illumination replacing HITMAN's simpler bounce-lighting setup, new volumetric systems like the in-house Smolder tech, clustered lighting, more advanced shadow management, and a much stronger crowd/AI presentation. The studio also says it upgraded the animation stack with motion-matching, improved facial animation, more full-body interactions, and motion warping for combat and cinematic transitions. On top of that, Glacier now supports fully dynamic brick streaming, letting IO load and unload larger mission spaces seamlessly in real time rather than relying on fixed level loads.

Console Platform Specs: 60 FPS for Everyone Except the Series S

The developers revealed that 007 First Light was designed from the get-go around a 60 FPS target on PS5, PS5 Pro, and Xbox Series X. On base PS5 and Series X, players can choose between Performance mode at 60 FPS and Quality mode at 30 FPS, while the PS5 Pro effectively runs the Quality mode visual profile at 60 FPS (and also leverages the new PSSR 2.0, as announced yesterday, while other consoles are limited to FSR 3.1.5). Series S is the outlier: at launch, it only gets a 30 FPS Quality mode, which IO framed as a consequence of the machine's limited RAM (10 GB instead of 16 GB) and GPU headroom for this particular feature set. Of course, it's far from the first time we've heard this tune from a developer when commenting on the limitations of the smaller Xbox console.

IO's explanation for the Series S's 30 frames per second limit is straightforward: the Glacier engine is full of systems that are both expensive and always on, especially real-time GI, volumetrics, dense crowds, and sophisticated streaming. The studio says it designed the game assuming the minimum spec would be below a GTX 1660-class GPU and RDNA1, but that doesn't necessarily mean every console variant can maintain 60 FPS with the full feature set. Series S is simply the device where the combination of memory, GPU throughput, and the rest of the stack makes 30 FPS the only practical target. The good news is that they stressed this will be the case at launch, so things might change with a patch later on. Anyway, it seems likely the upcoming Switch 2 version will also run at 30 FPS, though that wasn't discussed in this deep dive.

The interview also provides us with a clear picture of how IO is budgeting pixel cost across hardware tiers. On PS5 Pro, the target is 1440p internal resolution upscaled to 4K at 60 FPS. On base PS5, the quality mode runs at 1440p upscaled to 4K at 30 FPS, while performance mode drops to 1080p internal rendering and upscales from there. Series X is described as matching the base PS5's console-side profile, meaning the game aims for equivalent visual and performance across Sony and Microsoft's current-gen consoles, as is often the case despite the Series X's theoretical spec advantage.

Frame-Graph Architecture and Aggressive Async Compute

A major reason the game can hit these targets is the renderer’s frame graph architecture. IO says the frame graph tracks dependencies across resources and allows it to schedule passes very efficiently, which is important when the scene contains lots of lighting, volumetric, transparency, and shadow work. This matters on consoles because the engine is trying to keep the GPU busy without introducing stalls, while also preserving enough headroom for the dynamic systems that make the game feel alive. In other words, the platform strategy is not “turn things off until it runs”; rather, it's “design the graph so the expensive stuff can coexist more cleanly”.

IO specifically calls out aggressive async compute as part of the console strategy. On PlayStation, the team says it can run up to four async compute pipelines in parallel, which helps fill GPU bubbles and keep utilization high. That is especially relevant for systems like clustered lighting, volumetrics, and other passes that can be overlapped rather than serialized. The practical effect is that the console version is being structured to avoid wasting GPU time on tasks that can be parallelized.

Scalability Is King

The studio's philosophy is that if a system cannot scale down to the intended minimum spec, it probably should not be in 007 First Light in that form. That is why IO emphasizes that features like clustered lighting, OIT, Smolder, and the updated global illumination solution were built with scalability in mind from the start, not as luxury features bolted on later. The engine also avoids an explosion of shader permutations by deliberately limiting static branching, helping reduce the cost and chaos of platform-specific compilation. This is important because the game is not just shipping to one console family; it also has to support PC and later Switch 2.

On the CPU side, IO says the game is designed to distribute work across eight worker threads on consoles. The studio also claims that a big chunk of the simulation-heavy systems, like physics, AI, animation-related work, and other expensive operations, have been moved off the critical path where possible. That matters because the platform challenge is not just about rendering; it's about avoiding spikes when a level is full of AI, entities, scripting logic, and streaming events. IO claims the main thread is in good shape and that much of the game is running well above 60 FPS from a CPU perspective, leaving the GPU as the more likely limit on high-end setups.

PC Shaders and Path Tracing

When interviewer Alexander Battaglia asked how they are handling shader compilation for the PC version, IO replied that it still has to compile PSOs (pipeline state objects), but it tries to minimize that cost by reducing shader permutations and avoiding unnecessary static branching. Shader compilation upon first booting 007 First Light is automated, and the studio reassured that the process is generally measured in minutes, possibly even less than a minute for powerful systems, rather than something longer and more disruptive.

Path tracing (which has been unfortunately postponed to a post-launch update due in the Summer) is described in the interview as a separate high-end layer, not a direct continuation of the old HITMAN ray tracing code. IO says only a little legacy low-level DirectX work remains from HITMAN, while the rest is effectively rebuilt for a more GPU-driven pipeline with bindless resources, GPU-managed materials, and GPU-side mesh/instance handling.

For more about 007 First Light, head to our roundup hub page. The game is out on May 27 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S and X, though pre-order customers will be able to play one day early thanks to the free Deluxe upgrade.

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