With PC games growing increasingly complex nowadays — especially those built on Epic Games' infamous Unreal Engine 5 — default/maxed-out graphics settings rarely, if ever, strike the optimal balance between visual fidelity and performance that most PC gamers seek, and Directive 8020 is sadly no exception to this rule.
As a demanding UE5-powered cinematic horror game, it should come as no surprise that the game's maxed-out High graphics preset, even without ray tracing or path tracing enabled, can be quite GPU-heavy. However, what is a bit more disappointing is that Directive 8020 ends up being heavier on the GPU than it probably should be for the kind of game it is and how it looks, especially when compared to other Unreal Engine 5 games of a similar style and scope.
This guide should hopefully help you strike a better balance between visuals and performance in Directive 8020. In it, we will first provide you with a brief technical overview of the game, then break down how each relevant graphics setting affects visuals and performance through video comparisons. Finally, we will present you with our ready-to-use optimized graphics settings, which should improve performance without completely sacrificing visual fidelity.
Gameplay And Technical Overview Of Directive 8020
Released on May 12, 2026, on PC via Steam, as well as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, Directive 8020 is a cinematic sci-fi survival horror adventure developed and published by Supermassive Games. It is also part of the long-running Dark Pictures Anthology franchise, which has built its identity around narrative-driven horror, meaningful player choices, branching paths, and the ever-present possibility of permanent character death.
This time around, the series leaves behind more grounded horror scenarios and heads into deep space. Earth is dying, humanity is running out of time, and the colony ship Cassiopeia is sent toward Tau Ceti f, a planet located around 12 light-years away that may represent humanity's last chance at survival. Unfortunately for the crew, the mission quickly goes horribly wrong after the ship crash-lands, forcing them to deal not only with the dangers of deep space but also with an alien organism capable of perfectly mimicking its prey.
Gameplay-wise, Directive 8020 still retains the cinematic storytelling and decision-making DNA that Supermassive Games is known for, but it also pushes further into survival horror territory thanks to real-time alien threats, stealth, improvised weapons, and more direct player control than some of the studio's previous narrative horror titles.
From a graphical rendering standpoint, Directive 8020 is built on Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, and it makes use of many of the engine's now-familiar rendering features, such as Nanite, software/hardware Lumen ray-traced global illumination and reflections, and Virtual Shadow Maps. As such, it is very much a modern, graphically intensive game.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the game’s PC system requirements, courtesy of the developers:
| Tier | CPU | GPU | RAM | Storage | Performance Targets / Notes |
| Minimum | Intel Core i5-8500 / AMD Ryzen 5 3500 | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 / AMD Radeon RX 5700 | 16 GB | 40 GB available space | SSD recommended |
| Recommended | Intel Core i5-12400F / AMD Ryzen 5 5600X | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 6800 | 16 GB | 40 GB available space | — |
As we can see from the above table, Directive 8020 is not asking for an absurd amount of CPU power, which makes sense considering the game’s linear, cinematic, and narrative-driven design. However, the GPU requirements are definitely worth paying attention to, as even the minimum specification starts with an RTX 2060/RX 5700-class graphics card, while the recommended tier moves up to an RTX 3070 Ti/RX 6800-class GPU (which are broadly equivalent to current-gen GeForce RTX 5060 Ti/Radeon RX 9060 XT GPUs). This already suggests that Directive 8020 is very much a GPU-heavy UE5 title, and that impression is further reinforced by our own testing, where the game proved to be quite a bit heavier than its overall visual presentation would suggest, even with ray tracing and path tracing disabled.
Thankfully, the game does have a pre-gameplay PSO (pipeline state object)/shader compilation process, which was quite effective in our testing, as we failed to spot any major instances of just-in-time shader compilation stutter. The PSO compilation process is also relatively fast, though oddly enough, the game appears to compile shaders every time it launches, with the very first shader compilation pass being the longest.
The good news continues when it comes to traversal stutter. Unlike many Unreal Engine 5 games, Directive 8020 exhibited very few traversal hitches in our experience, which is genuinely nice to see. This does not mean that the game is a perfect technical package, of course, but the lack of egregious shader compilation and traversal stutters is still very much worth praising.
CPU performance is also excellent, which frankly makes sense given the scope and design of the game. Directive 8020 is a linear cinematic horror game without the sort of complex open-world AI, large-scale NPC simulation, physics-heavy destruction, or systemic gameplay layers that would meaningfully stress a modern CPU. Unreal Engine 5 is also a modern GPU-driven engine in this context, so the rendering workload will almost always be GPU-limited. As such, any decent 4+ GHz, 6+ core CPU released over the last several years should have no trouble delivering good performance in this game. For that reason, we will forego a dedicated CPU performance analysis section in this guide and focus entirely on GPU performance and individual graphics settings.
Visually, Directive 8020 is a bit of a mixed bag. The game can certainly look good, and its character models in particular are often quite impressive, which is important for a cinematic narrative game that spends so much time focusing on faces, performances, and close-up character interactions. However, the environments themselves are less impressive. They are not bad by any means, but they also do not always feel visually rich enough to justify the GPU cost, especially with the game being this heavy even without ray tracing or path tracing enabled.
Directive 8020 also supports HDR (high dynamic range), though its implementation reportedly appears to be closer to a basic/default Unreal Engine HDR implementation rather than an especially polished one. It is functional, but probably not something we would describe as a standout HDR presentation.
On the upscaling and frame generation front, the game is mostly excellent. Directive 8020 supports Unreal Engine 5’s TSR (Temporal Super Resolution), NVIDIA’s DLSS Super Resolution, AMD’s FSR upscaling, and Intel’s XeSS Super Resolution as upscaling/anti-aliasing options. Traditional TAA does not appear to be available as a separate option. The game also supports multiple frame generation technologies, including NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation/Multi Frame Generation and Intel Xe Frame Generation/Multi Frame Generation (via Intel graphics driver override on Arc GPUs), though FSR Frame Generation appears to be absent.
One very important caveat from our testing is that XeSS Super Resolution appears to be broken, at least on our GeForce RTX 4090 test system, where it resulted in a black screen with only UI elements visible. Intel Arc users may still want to test XeSS SR on their own hardware, but on our test system, it was not usable.
Ray tracing and path tracing are also supported, though they require a game restart to enable. Ray tracing appears to add hardware Lumen ray tracing for diffuse indirect lighting (global illumination) and specular indirect lighting (ray-traced reflections). Path tracing, meanwhile, adds NVIDIA ReSTIR GI-based path-traced indirect diffuse and specular lighting, and likely ReSTIR DI as well for direct lighting (shadows), given that the game's settings menu mentions updating shadow quality settings once path tracing is enabled.
Unfortunately, path tracing is not something we can recommend. Even with NVIDIA’s ML-based denoiser (DLSS Ray Reconstruction) set to Quality mode — which path tracing appears to force on — the output can look noisy, artifact-ridden, and blurry. Performance is also egregiously low, with framerates dropping into the low 40s in our testing. In our opinion, path tracing is simply not worth using in Directive 8020 right now, no matter how powerful your system is.
A Deep Dive Into Directive 8020's Graphics Settings
In this section, we will explore the various graphics settings in Directive 8020 via comparison screenshots/videos that should showcase both the visual and performance profiles of each setting. This should allow us to determine which combination of settings strikes the best visuals-to-performance ratio, which is the basis for establishing optimized graphics settings in all PC games.
Please be aware that the graphics settings comparisons in this section were all made on a system with the following specs:
- CPU: Intel Core i7-14700K;
- RAM: 32 GB DDR5-7000 CL34;
- Storage: 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD;
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090;
- Operating System: Windows 11 25H2;
- All system firmware, drivers, BIOS, and OS updates were fully applied before testing.
All comparisons were performed under GPU-limited conditions at a resolution of 2560x1440, with TSR Native used as the temporal upscaling/anti-aliasing solution. Motion blur, chromatic aberration, and film grain were also disabled so as not to interfere with the visual profile of the other settings.
Also, unless otherwise stated, the High preset, with both ray tracing and path tracing disabled, was used as the baseline for testing each individual graphics setting.
As we can see from the above screenshots, Directive 8020 offers a fairly standard Unreal Engine 5 graphics menu, but with a few very welcome additions, such as the render/output resolution, CPU/GPU render/simulation timing metrics, hardware/driver information, the achieved framerate/frametime, and a very neat settings preview functionality. The game also has detailed explanations for each graphics setting, which is not a given in any game.
As an Unreal Engine 5 game, Directive 8020 is naturally quite VRAM-efficient, at least without ray tracing or path tracing enabled. In our testing, 8-10 GB of VRAM was enough to max out the game at native 1440p with TSR at the High preset, which is good to see given how many recent PC games have struggled with VRAM usage. Of course, ray tracing and especially path tracing are a different story, as those techniques naturally require more VRAM capacity.
Another thing that’s greatly worth praising is the fact that the developers allow players to individually disable chromatic aberration and film grain. This may sound basic, but a surprising number of modern games still bundle these effects together or hide them behind vague post-processing presets, so it is always nice when developers get this right.
With all that said, let us finally delve into the visual and performance profiles of each relevant graphics setting that Directive 8020 offers.
Note: Our comparison videos use a CapFrameX/RivaTuner Statistics Server-based overlay that displays game performance data regarding three metrics that we feel are relevant to gauge the performance profile of each graphics setting, which are GPU usage, real-time framerate, and dedicated GPU memory usage.
Upscaling / Anti-Aliasing Method
Directive 8020 does not appear to support traditional TAA as a separate anti-aliasing option. Instead, players can choose between UE5’s TSR, DLSS Super Resolution, FSR upscaling, and XeSS Super Resolution.
Our recommendation here depends on your GPU vendor. NVIDIA GeForce RTX users should use DLSS Super Resolution, as it always delivers the best image quality and temporal stability. AMD RDNA 4 users should use FSR 4/4.1 upscaling through the AMD Adrenalin Software driver override if available, while other AMD and non-NVIDIA RTX/Intel Arc users should use the game's built-in FSR 3.1 upscaling implementation. Intel Arc users should try XeSS Super Resolution, though we should stress again that XeSS SR was broken on our RTX 4090 test system, producing a black screen where only the UI remained visible. Should XeSS SR also be broken on Intel Arc systems, then they’re unfortunately going to be stuck with FSR 3.1 upscaling.
For our temporal upscaling comparisons, the tested upscalers — except the broken XeSS Super Resolution — were tested at the Quality preset, which upscales the game from 67% of each per-output resolution axis. Sharpness was also set to 0 across all temporal upscalers to avoid sharpening artifacts.
Antialiasing Quality
The Antialiasing Quality setting controls the quality of TSR. This means that it is only relevant if you are using TSR as your temporal upscaling/anti-aliasing solution.
In our testing, lowering this setting to Low provided a decent performance improvement without a major enough hit to image quality to make higher levels worth the extra cost. Since Directive 8020 is already quite GPU-heavy, this is an easy setting to lower, especially for players using TSR Native or TSR at more aggressive modes.
Recommendation: Low
Shadow Quality
Shadow Quality controls the quality of dynamic shadows and volumetric fog shadows in Directive 8020. As is often the case with Unreal Engine 5 games, the higher levels can be quite expensive, but shadows are also important to the game's presentation, especially given its dark sci-fi horror atmosphere.
In our testing, High provides the best balance here. Lower levels can improve performance, but the visual compromise becomes more noticeable than we would like, especially in scenes where shadow definition and fog interaction contribute heavily to the atmosphere.
Recommendation: High
Global Illumination Quality
Global Illumination Quality controls the quality of the game's Lumen diffuse indirect lighting solution, which relies on software ray tracing/signed distance fields (SDF)-powered proxies of geometry when hardware ray tracing is disabled.
This is one of the more important settings in the game, as it affects how light bounces around the environment and how scenes are indirectly illuminated. However, the highest levels (High and Epic) usually come with a noticeable performance cost in UE5 games, and the visual returns are not always large enough to justify that cost.
In our experience, Medium provides the best visuals-to-performance ratio here. It retains the general lighting character of the higher levels while freeing up a meaningful amount of GPU performance.
Recommendation: Medium
Reflection Quality
Reflection Quality controls the quality of the game's Lumen software/SDF ray-traced specular indirect lighting, which is commonly known as reflections.
Interestingly, this is one of the few settings where we actually prefer the Low setting visually in many cases. Low appears to disable Lumen reflections and replace them with screen-space reflections (SSR), and in Directive 8020, these screen-space reflections can look better defined than the noisy software Lumen ray-traced reflections used at higher settings.
Of course, SSR have their own limitations, as they can only reflect information that is already visible on screen. However, given the game's visual profile and the noisy nature of its software Lumen RT reflections, Low ends up being the most sensible recommendation in our view.
Recommendation: Low
Post-Processing Quality
Post-Processing Quality controls effects such as bloom, depth of field, lens flares, motion blur, and other similar screen-space/post-process effects.
As usual, this setting is partly subjective, as some players enjoy a heavier cinematic post-processing look while others prefer a cleaner image. However, in terms of pure performance/visuals balance, Low is the setting that makes the most sense. It provides a decent performance boost while avoiding a major loss in overall image quality, especially since players can separately disable effects like motion blur, chromatic aberration, and film grain.
Recommendation: Low
Effects Quality
Effects Quality controls the fidelity of effects such as subsurface scattering, sky atmosphere, and particles, or at least according to the game’s own graphics settings menu description.
This setting can affect some important visual elements, but lowering it too much is not something we would recommend, as Low can eliminate the visible water droplets on the hypersleep pod housing the player-character in the above video comparison. High strikes a good balance here and preserves the intended look of the game's effects without being as wasteful as pushing everything blindly to maximum.
Recommendation: High
Texture Quality
Texture Quality is a somewhat misleading setting in Directive 8020, as it appears to affect the texture streaming pool size and texture filtering quality rather than directly changing the resolution of the textures themselves in a dramatic way.
In our testing, there did not seem to be a major difference in VRAM usage between the different levels, and lowering the setting can reduce texture filtering quality. Since the game is also fairly VRAM-efficient without ray tracing or path tracing enabled, there is very little reason to lower this setting on any GPU with enough memory.
Recommendation: High
Ray Tracing, Path Tracing, and DLSS Ray Reconstruction
Ray Tracing
Ray tracing in Directive 8020 appears to enable hardware Lumen ray tracing for both diffuse ray-traced global illumination and specular ray-traced reflections. In theory, this should improve lighting and reflection accuracy, but in practice, the performance hit is substantial enough that we do not think it is worth enabling on most systems.
This is especially true because the game is already very GPU-heavy without ray tracing enabled. If you have a high-end GPU and want to experiment with it, ray tracing can be worth trying, but for most players, it is better left disabled.
We would only recommend ray tracing for users with very powerful GPUs, such as an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, an AMD Radeon RX 9070 or higher, and even then, only if they are comfortable with relying on upscaling and/or frame generation technologies to recover lost performance from enabling RT.
Recommendation: Off
Path Tracing
Path tracing is the most demanding rendering option in Directive 8020, and unfortunately, it is also the easiest one to dismiss.
In our testing, path tracing forces NVIDIA’s proprietary machine learning-based denoiser (DLSS Ray Reconstruction) on, and even with DLSS RR set to Quality mode, the output can look extremely noisy, artifact-heavy, and blurry. Performance is also poor enough that the setting becomes impractical, with framerates dropping into the low 40s in our test scene and on our RTX 4090-powered test system.
This is particularly disappointing because path tracing is supposed to represent the highest-quality rendering mode. However, in Directive 8020, the combination of image instability, blur, noise, artifacts, and massive performance cost makes it feel unfinished or at least not worth using in its current state.
Recommendation: Off
DLSS Ray Reconstruction
Surprisingly, DLSS Ray Reconstruction can be used not only with path tracing, but also with both software and hardware Lumen ray tracing, though sometimes the graphics menu bugs out and locks out DLSS RR out of the software Lumen RT path.
When it works well, Ray Reconstruction can greatly enhance the fidelity of Lumen-based global illumination and reflections, reducing noise and improving the stability of ray-traced lighting in the process. However, it also carries a considerable performance hit, and given how heavy Directive 8020 already is, this makes it a difficult setting to recommend broadly.
If you have a high-end GeForce RTX 40/50 Series GPU and are using ray tracing, it may be worth testing DLSS Ray Reconstruction to see whether the image quality improvement is worth the performance cost. However, for optimized settings, we would leave it disabled unless you are specifically chasing higher ray-traced image quality rather than higher performance.
Optimized Graphics Settings For Directive 8020 On PC
Wrapping it all up, here are the final optimized graphics settings we recommend for Directive 8020, which we feel strike the best balance between visual fidelity and performance:
| Graphics Setting | Optimized Value |
| Upscaling / Anti-Aliasing Method | Depends on GPU vendor |
| Antialiasing Quality | Low |
| Shadow Quality | High |
| Global Illumination Quality | Medium |
| Reflection Quality | Low |
| Post-Processing Quality | Low |
| Effects Quality | High |
| Texture Quality | High |
| Ray Tracing | Off |
| DLSS Ray Reconstruction | Off, unless specifically using hardware Lumen RT and chasing higher ray-traced image quality |
| Path Tracing | Off |
For temporal upscaling/antialiasing, we recommend that NVIDIA GeForce RTX users use DLSS Super Resolution, AMD RDNA 4 users enable FSR 4/4.1 upscaling through AMD Adrenalin Software if available, Intel Arc users try XeSS Super Resolution if it is not broken on their systems, and all other modern GPU users use FSR 3.1 upscaling.
With our optimized graphics settings established, let us look at how they improve performance on our test system compared to the game's High preset, with ray tracing and path tracing disabled in both cases, via the below comparison video:
In the table below, we put the CapFrameX/RTSS-powered overlay performance numbers shown in our High preset vs. optimized graphics settings comparison video, focusing on average FPS, 1% low average FPS, and 0.1% low average FPS to better illustrate both raw performance and overall smoothness.
| Graphics Preset | Average FPS | 1% Low Average FPS | 0.1% Low Average FPS |
| High Preset | 143 | 124 | 119 |
| Optimized Graphics Settings | 176 | 143 | 138 |
As we can see from the above benchmarks, our optimized graphics settings increased average FPS by 23%, while 1% lows improved by 15%, and 0.1% lows improved by 16%. This is a solid performance uplift, especially considering that the game was already GPU-bound on a GeForce RTX 4090 at native 1440p with TSR.
That being said, this uplift also highlights the fact that Directive 8020 is quite a bit heavier than it should be. Even after optimized settings are applied, the game remains fairly demanding relative to its visual output, especially considering that ray tracing and path tracing were both disabled for this comparison.
Final Words
Overall, Directive 8020 is a technically mixed Unreal Engine 5 release. On one hand, the game deserves praise for its effective PSO/shader compilation step, extremely rare traversal stutters, excellent CPU performance, broad upscaling/frame generation support, useful graphics menu information, and separate toggles for effects like chromatic aberration and film grain.
On the other hand, the game is simply heavier than it should be, even without ray tracing or path tracing enabled. The character models can look quite good, and the cinematic presentation is often strong, but the visual fidelity and scope of the game’s environments are not impressive enough to justify the GPU cost. As a result, Directive 8020 ends up with a somewhat underwhelming visuals-to-performance profile.
Ray tracing can improve the presentation in some areas, but it is too expensive for most players. Path tracing, meanwhile, is not worth using at all in our opinion, as it delivers noisy, blurry, artifact-heavy output while absolutely hammering performance.
Thankfully, the lack of major shader compilation and traversal stutters makes Directive 8020 smoother than many other Unreal Engine 5 releases, and our optimized graphics settings can deliver a meaningful performance uplift without completely sacrificing visual fidelity.
In the end, Directive 8020 is a relatively polished, but undeniably heavy, technical package. It avoids some of Unreal Engine 5's most frustrating stuttering/hitching-related pitfalls, but its demanding GPU profile and disappointing path tracing implementation prevent it from being a truly impressive PC release.
For more on Directive 8020, please check out our review of the game from this link!
This performance analysis was based on a Steam copy of Directive 8020 provided by publisher Supermassive Games.
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 on Wccftech about PC hardware, games and mods.
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