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.
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.
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.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the game’s PC system requirements, courtesy of the developers:
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!
Without further ado, let’s look at the CPU benchmark results:
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.
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:
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 was negligible, and the visual benefit is worth keeping. This is one of those settings that should almost always be maxed out on modern GPUs unless something is very wrong.
Recommendation: Anisotropic 16x
Level Of Detail
Level Of Detail adjusts the quality and draw distance of models, assets, and environmental objects. In theory, this can be an important scalability setting, especially in open areas with a lot of geometry. In 007 First Light, however, lowering the setting did not provide a compelling enough performance uplift to justify the reduction in distant object quality.
The game’s environments already do not always look cutting-edge, especially outdoors, so lowering LoD can make them feel even less impressive. Keeping this setting at Ultra helps preserve object density and reduces visible pop-in.
Recommendation: Ultra
Terrain Quality
Terrain Quality controls the resolution of the game’s terrain virtual texturing. This setting mostly affects terrain detail and VRAM usage rather than providing a major performance improvement.
In our testing, lowering Terrain Quality was not worth it on GPUs with enough VRAM. The visual difference can be scene-dependent, but because the performance gain is limited, Ultra is the best choice for most mid-range and high-end GPUs.
Recommendation: Ultra
Shadow Quality
Shadow Quality controls the resolution and quality of the game’s rasterized static and dynamic shadow maps. This is one of the very few settings in 007 First Light that is actually worth lowering.
At Ultra, shadows can look cleaner and more detailed, but the visual difference between Ultra and Medium is not large enough to justify the performance cost on weaker GPUs. Medium provides a better balance, preserving most of the game’s shadow presentation while freeing up some performance.
This is one of our main optimized settings changes.
Recommendation: Medium
Volumetric Fog Quality
Volumetric Fog Quality controls the quality of volumetric fog and atmospheric rendering. This can affect the density, stability, and resolution of foggy lighting volumes, especially in scenes with strong shafts of light or heavy atmospheric effects.
In 007 First Light, lowering this setting to Medium provides a better visuals-to-performance balance than Ultra. The game retains most of its atmospheric identity, but the GPU cost is reduced enough to make this one of the more sensible optimized settings changes.
Recommendation: Medium
Volumetric Effects Quality
Volumetric Effects Quality controls the fidelity of volumetric effects such as smoke and other particle-heavy effects. Given how severe the game’s performance drops can be during large explosions, one would hope that this setting would provide a clear fix. Unfortunately, the explosion-related performance drops appear to be much deeper than a simple quality scaling issue.
Because lowering Volumetric Effects Quality did not provide a strong enough general visuals-to-performance trade-off in our testing, we recommend keeping it at Ultra for normal gameplay. The game’s smoke and effects work is part of its cinematic identity, and lowering it does not solve the biggest performance problems anyway.
Recommendation: Ultra
Global Illumination Quality
Global Illumination Quality controls the quality of the game’s indirect lighting, including its screen-space and probe-based GI components. 007 First Light appears to use a software ray-traced global illumination solution, with a screen-space component that works on visible pixels and a radiance probe-based fallback that helps provide lighting information when screen-space data is unavailable.
The result can look quite good in certain indoor scenes, especially when indirect lighting helps ground characters and objects in the environment. However, the system is not perfect, and screen-space limitations can still show up depending on camera angle and scene composition.
Lowering Global Illumination Quality can reduce the richness and stability of indirect lighting, and in our testing, doing so didn’t seem to improve performance much, if at all. As such, we recommend keeping GI Quality at Ultra.
Recommendation: Ultra
Reflection Quality
Reflection Quality controls the quality of the game’s screen-space ray-casted reflections. As with most screen-space reflection implementations, the results are scene-dependent. Reflections can look convincing when the necessary information is visible on screen, but they can break down or disappear when reflected objects leave the camera's view.
Still, lowering Reflection Quality did not provide much of a performance gain in our testing, and the visual loss can be noticeable in glossy indoor areas. Since 007 First Light often relies on polished floors, shiny materials, glass, and cinematic lighting, we recommend keeping reflections at Ultra.
Recommendation: Ultra
Optimized Graphics Settings
Wrapping it all up, here are our final recommended optimized graphics settings for 007 First Light, which we feel strike the best balance between visuals and performance:
| Graphics Setting | Optimized Value |
| Texture Quality | Depends on VRAM capacity |
| Texture Filter | Anisotropic 16x |
| Level Of Detail | Ultra |
| Terrain Quality | Ultra |
| Shadow Quality | Medium |
| Volumetric Fog Quality | Medium |
| Volumetric Effects Quality | Ultra |
| Global Illumination Quality | Ultra |
| Reflection Quality | Ultra |
| Post Effects | Personal preference, though disabled for the cleanest image during testing |
| Anti-Aliasing / Upscaling | DLAA/DLSS SR for GeForce RTX GPU users; FSR 3.1 only if needed on non-RTX GPUs |
For Texture Quality, we recommend Ultra if you have enough VRAM. At 1440p, Ultra requires more than 10 GB of VRAM in our testing, while High, Medium, and Low are more appropriate for 8 GB GPUs. At 4K, VRAM requirements will be higher, while 1080p users can be a bit more flexible. Upscaling can also reduce VRAM pressure.
With our optimized graphics settings established, let us look at how they improve performance versus Ultra graphics settings on our laptop test system at 1080p native resolution, via the following comparison video:
At the end of both benchmark runs, we obtained the following performance numbers:
| Settings | Average FPS | 1% Lows | 0.1% Lows |
| Ultra Graphics Settings | 47 | 31 | 26 |
| Optimized Graphics Settings | 51 | 33 | 24 |
| Improvement | +9% | +6% | -8% |
As we can see from the above results, our optimized graphics settings improve average FPS by 9% and 1% lows by 6%, though 0.1% lows were somehow 8% worse in this particular run, and this was frustratingly repeatable across many test runs. This is not a transformative improvement, and it reinforces one of our biggest criticisms of 007 First Light: the game’s graphics settings simply do not scale well enough.
In fact, this is one of the least scalable PC games we have tested in quite some time. Going from Ultra graphics settings to optimized graphics settings produces only a modest improvement, and many individual graphics settings barely change performance or visuals. This is highly disappointing because graphics settings scalability is one of the main hallmarks of a well-optimized PC game. A good PC game should allow lower-end machines to gain meaningful performance by turning settings down, while also giving high-end systems enough headroom to push visuals further. 007 First Light does not do either side especially well.
Extra Tips To Improve Your 007 First Light Experience
First, keep an eye on the game’s HDR option. The game currently turns HDR off after every restart, so players need to re-enable it manually after launching the game. This is an annoying issue, and hopefully, IO Interactive fixes it soon, as it is a known issue on their part.
Second, HDR users may want to experiment with RenoDX. The RenoDX mod can improve HDR fidelity and may help with some DLSS Frame Generation disocclusion artifacts when HDR is enabled. However, we also noticed DLSS Frame Generation HUD ghosting issues, and users should remember that mods are unofficial, may break after updates, and may behave unpredictably in games with aggressive DRM solutions. Use them only if you understand the risks.
Third, test DLSS SR and FSR Upscaling manually instead of assuming the usual behavior applies. In 007 First Light, DLSS Super Resolution delivered unusually small performance gains in our testing, especially compared to FSR 3.1 Upscaling. DLSS SR still provides massively higher image quality here, but if you are strictly chasing performance — especially on a non-RTX GPU — then FSR 3.1 Upscaling may scale better.
Fourth and last, AMD RDNA4 GPU owners may want to download and install OptiScaler in order to force FSR 4.1 Upscaling, as it can greatly improve temporal upscaling fidelity vs the much-maligned FSR 3.1 Upscaling solution.
Final Words
Overall, 007 First Light is a highly mixed PC release. It is not a disastrous PC release, and it can run reasonably well in many scenes, but it is also held back by poor graphics settings scalability, incomplete vendor temporal upscaling/frame generation/latency mitigation technology support, an awkward graphics menu, HDR issues, and severe performance drops during large explosions.
Visually, the game is also inconsistent. Character rendering, lighting, animation, and cinematic presentation can look very good, especially indoors. However, many environments, particularly outdoor ones, do not look especially impressive by today’s standards, and the occasional ugly texture presentation can be distracting.
In the end, 007 First Light is a game that deserved a better PC release. Our optimized graphics settings can provide a very modest performance uplift while preserving most of the game’s visuals, but the fact that the gain is only 9% in average FPS shows just how limited the game’s tuning range currently is. Hopefully, IO Interactive improves the game’s optimization and addresses its other issues in future updates.
About the author: Sebastian Castellanos is a data scientist by education and training. He's also deeply passionate about PC gaming hardware and software. He has recently started writing technical articles and guides Wccftech about PC hardware, games and mods.
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