With PC games becoming increasingly complex nowadays — especially open-world games built on Epic Games’ 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 LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is no exception to this rule.
TT Games’ latest LEGO Batman adventure is certainly a much more visually ambitious game than the studio’s older LEGO titles, with its open-world Gotham City, dense streets, detailed LEGO characters and assets, physically convincing plastic materials, attractive effects, and state-of-the-art UE5-powered visuals. However, this added visual ambition also comes with a heavier GPU and CPU cost than some players may expect from a LEGO game, especially when using the maxed-out Epic preset.
This guide should hopefully help you strike a much better balance between visuals and performance than that of the game’s graphical presets, in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. In it, we will first provide a gameplay and technical overview of the game, then analyze CPU performance in a demanding open-world Gotham City test scene, and finally break down how each relevant graphics setting affects visuals and performance through video comparisons. At the end, we will present our ready-to-use optimized graphics settings, which provided a very substantial GPU performance uplift in our testing without sacrificing the game’s intended visual presentation.
Gameplay And Technical Overview Of LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
Released on May 22, 2026, on PC via Steam, as well as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is an action-adventure game developed by TT Games and published by Warner Bros. Games. As its name suggests, the game once again places players in the role of Batman, but this time with a much larger and more modern open-world Gotham City that serves as the central playground for exploration, combat, traversal, side content, collectibles, and story progression.
Gameplay-wise, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight blends the familiar LEGO formula — accessible combat, environmental puzzles, collectibles, (local) co-op-friendly design, and plenty of humor — with a broader Batman fantasy inspired by decades of comics, movies, TV shows, and games. The result is a much more ambitious LEGO Batman game than the older entries, and one that clearly tries to deliver a more complete Gotham City sandbox rather than a simple hub-and-level structure.
From a technical standpoint, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is built on Unreal Engine 5, and that is immediately obvious in both good and bad ways. The game can look quite nice, especially in dense nighttime Gotham scenes with rain, fog, emissive signage, ambient lighting, and detailed LEGO materials. However, like many Unreal Engine 5 games, it also suffers from noticeable pipeline state object (PSO)/shader compilation and traversal stutters and hitches. We also noticed very distracting hitches when transitioning between gameplay and cutscenes, which can hurt the otherwise polished presentation.
The game does support a wide selection of modern image reconstruction and frame generation technologies. On the upscaling side, players can use UE5’s TSR (Temporal Super Resolution), UE4-era TAAU (Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling), FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) Super Resolution, and XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) Super Resolution. The game also supports DLSS Frame Generation/Multi Frame Generation, FSR Frame Generation, and XeSS Frame Generation/Multi Frame Generation through Intel’s graphics driver override on supported Intel Arc GPUs. However, some graphics settings (LEGO Mesh Quality and frame generation) require a game restart to apply correctly, so players should keep that in mind when changing graphics settings.
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 i5-10600K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 GB / AMD Radeon RX 6400 4 GB / Intel Arc A580 8 GB | 16 GB | 50 GB SSD | Low 1080p @ 30 FPS with FSR upscaling or XeSS SR Balanced & Frame Generation enabled. SSD required. |
| Recommended | Intel Core i7-12700 / AMD Ryzen 7 5800X | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8 GB / AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT 8 GB / Intel Arc B580 12 GB | 16 GB | 50 GB SSD | Medium 1440p @ 60 FPS with DLSS SR, FSR upscaling, or XeSS SR Quality & Frame Generation enabled. SSD required. |
As we can see from the above table, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is not asking for absurd hardware on paper, but the additional notes deserve serious criticism. Targeting 30/60 FPS with frame generation enabled is not acceptable, as that can imply native framerates of roughly 15/30 FPS before interpolation. Frame generation should improve smoothness on top of an already playable base framerate, and not be used as a crutch to mask poor native performance, especially given the input latency and visual artifacting issues that become far more noticeable at low base framerates. Frankly, these requirements initially deterred us from covering the game, though further reports from the tech community and our own testing eventually convinced us otherwise, as actual performance was nowhere near as bad as we first feared.
CPU Benchmarks
Before moving on to the graphics settings deep dive, we also performed a CPU benchmark in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. This is important because the game’s open-world Gotham City can become quite busy, especially in areas with lots of pedestrians, vehicles, dense geometry, lighting, and asset streaming activity.
For this test, we used a busy part of Gotham City with plenty of NPCs and captured performance with CapFrameX at a 1080p resolution with the Epic Preset and with DLSS Super Resolution set to Ultra Performance mode. This was done to lower the GPU burden as much as possible and push the test much closer to a CPU-limited scenario.
The CPU benchmark in this section, and the graphics settings video comparisons in the next section, were performed on a system with the following relevant 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 24 GB;
- Operating System: Windows 11 25H2;
- All system firmware, drivers, BIOS, and OS updates were fully applied before testing.
With that said, let us consider the CPU benchmark performance numbers below, courtesy of CapFrameX:
As we can see from the above CPU benchmark performance numbers, CPU-limited performance was somewhat dicey. Average framerate was high, but the 1% and 0.1% lows were much lower than we would like, and we noticed multiple frametime/display time excursions into the 15 to 20+ milliseconds range in our 20-second-long benchmark trek through the busy Gotham City streets. These spikes can be somewhat noticeable even on VRR (variable-refresh-rate) displays, especially in a game where traversal, combat, and camera movement can all happen quite quickly.
The game also appears to use many CPU cores, but like many modern open-world titles, the CPU performance bottleneck will likely be the CPU memory subsystem — memory latency and bandwidth of the CPU caches and system memory — rather than just raw core count, PPC (performance per clock cycle), or clock speed past a certain point. This is why AMD Ryzen X3D CPUs and well-tuned Intel Core 12th-gen and up systems may end up performing particularly well in CPU-limited scenarios.
This is also the kind of game where we really hope future Unreal Engine improvements can help. Dense open-world games can heavily stress the CPU render thread, asset streaming, traversal, and scene management systems, and LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is no exception. Per-CPU core/thread usage seems good enough, but the limiting factor still appears to be the broader CPU memory subsystem rather than simple core count or clock speed alone.
One more thing worth mentioning is frametime consistency across GPU vendors. Based on various reports in the tech community regarding many Unreal Engine 5 games with complex environments, AMD GPUs often deliver higher frametime consistency than their NVIDIA counterparts, especially open-world games that stress both the CPU and GPU. This does not mean that every AMD GPU will automatically deliver a smoother experience than every NVIDIA GPU, and the issue is more complex than simply blaming NVIDIA’s higher Direct3D12 graphics API driver overhead. However, it is a trend we have seen often enough that we think is worth keeping in mind when analyzing complex UE5 games’ performance.
A Deep Dive Into LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight’s Graphics Settings
In this section, we will explore the various graphics settings in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight via comparison videos that should showcase both the visual and performance profiles of each relevant graphics setting. This should allow us to determine which combination of settings strikes the best visuals-to-performance balance, which is the basis for establishing optimized graphics settings in all PC games.
For our testing, all comparisons were performed at the default gameplay/camera field of view values, with the Epic preset at 2560x1440, TSR set to 100% render resolution through the game’s “Anti-Aliasing Base Resolution” slider, and all “Fullscreen Effects” enabled as the baseline. The game also supports TAAU with upscaling, in addition to FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing), though TAAU looks noticeably worse than TSR, with the trade-off being lower GPU processing time, so we only recommend using it as a last resort if DLSS SR, FSR upscaling, XeSS SR, or TSR are not viable options.
Furthermore, all of our graphics settings comparisons were performed in the open-world environment of Gotham City, as that is where the majority of the game takes place and where the game is most demanding on the entire system. This is important because Gotham does not just stress the GPU. Its NPCs, traffic, city geometry, asset streaming, and lighting with many light sources can also put noticeable pressure on the CPU, system memory, and the storage device that’s housing the game files.
Also, while the game’s “Fullscreen Effects” (Motion Blur, Vignettes, Weather effects, Repeating Visual Effects, Bloom, and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) had a combined performance impact of just under 5% in our testing, whether or not you should enable them will mostly depend on personal preference. The main exceptions are weather effects, which meaningfully enhance immersion (especially when it’s raining), and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), which we strongly recommend leaving enabled because it noticeably improves ambient/indirect lighting quality.
The graphics menu itself is good, but not as complete as we would like. The game includes many individual graphics settings, an internal resolution slider for TAAU/TSR called “Anti-Aliasing Base Resolution”, and support for several upscalers and frame generation technologies. However, there is no live preview system for individual settings, and the menu also lacks useful hardware, driver, GPU VRAM/CPU system RAM, CPU/GPU frametimes, and framerates. That is a shame, as those features are very helpful when tuning a modern PC game.
Let's take a look at the game's graphics settings menu, which is called the Video menu:
Note: Our comparison videos use a CapFrameX/RivaTuner Statistics Server-based overlay that displays game performance data regarding several metrics that we feel are relevant to gauge the performance profile of each graphics setting, including GPU usage, real-time framerate, and dedicated GPU memory usage.
Anti-Aliasing And Temporal Upscaling
LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight supports several anti-aliasing and temporal upscaling options, including TSR, TAAU, FXAA, DLSS Super Resolution/DLAA, FSR upscaling/FSR AA, and XeSS Super Resolution/XeSS AA.
Generally speaking, our recommendation is simple: use the best temporal reconstruction/anti-aliasing solution available for your GPU. NVIDIA GeForce RTX users should use DLSS Super Resolution or DLAA, AMD Radeon RX users should use FSR upscaling (FSR 4.1 upscaling for RDNA4 GPUs and FSR 3.1 upscaling for pre-RDNA4 GPUs) or FSR AA, Intel Arc users should use XeSS Super Resolution or XeSS AA, and users who do not want to rely on vendor-specific solutions should use TSR, alongside reasonable tweaks to the “Anti-Aliasing Base Resolution” slider.
Anti-Aliasing Quality
Anti-Aliasing Quality affects the quality of both TAAU and TSR — though our above video comparison only showcases its impact on TSR’s visual fidelity and performance impact — and only appears when either of those solutions is selected as the temporal anti-aliasing/upscaling method.
In our testing, Medium provides the best balance here. Lowering the setting too much can hurt temporal stability and image reconstruction quality, while pushing it higher than Medium is not necessarily worth the cost, especially given how expensive LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight can already be at the Epic preset.
Recommendation: Medium
Lighting Quality
Lighting Quality affects the number of lights as well as the distances at which they appear. Interestingly, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight does not have a separate setting that explicitly controls the quality of global illumination/indirect diffuse lighting, which is usually where we would expect to see a UE5 Lumen GI control.
This makes Lighting Quality a somewhat unusual setting. Its description appears to relate more to visible light count and light draw distances than to the actual quality of Lumen global illumination. Still, given how important Gotham’s lighting is to the overall presentation, we would avoid lowering this too aggressively.
High provides a good balance between preserving the game’s nighttime city atmosphere and avoiding the unnecessary cost of the Epic setting.
Recommendation: High
Shadows
The Shadows setting affects the resolution and draw distance of dynamic shadows, as well as the number of lights that cast shadows.
As usual, shadows are important to the overall visual presentation, especially in a Batman game set primarily in a dark, moody, urban environment. Lowering this setting too much can noticeably flatten the image and reduce the sense of depth in Gotham City.
High is the sweet spot here. It preserves most of the intended shadow quality while avoiding the slightly heavier GPU cost of the Epic setting.
Recommendation: High
View Distance
View Distance determines how far away objects are culled for performance. This is a particularly relevant setting in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight because Gotham City contains a lot of geometry, props, buildings, traffic, pedestrians, and LEGO-specific detail.
In our testing, Medium provides a sensible balance. Going lower can become more noticeable in the open world, while higher settings can add cost without dramatically improving the image during normal gameplay.
Recommendation: Medium
Streaming Distance
Streaming Distance determines how far away objects are loaded for performance. Interestingly, this setting appears to impact CPU performance more than GPU performance, which makes sense given that streaming is often tied to asset management, memory behavior, and world traversal.
We recommend High here. Lower settings may help weaker CPUs or slower storage devices, but Gotham’s open-world structure benefits from keeping streaming distance reasonably high, especially when moving through the city quickly.
Recommendation: High
Textures
The Textures setting affects the resolution of textures. In LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, this setting is mostly a VRAM management lever rather than a conventional performance setting.
At 1440p, the Epic Textures setting requires at least 12 GB of VRAM in our testing. High, Medium, and Low all require more than 10 GB of VRAM. Aggressive temporal upscaling and lower output resolutions can lower these requirements, while higher resolutions can increase them.
Because of that, our recommendation depends on your GPU’s VRAM capacity. If you have 12 GB of VRAM or more and play at 1440p, then Epic is viable. If you have an 8 GB GPU, you may need to lower textures and rely on upscaling to avoid VRAM-related stutters, hitching, or texture streaming issues.
Recommendation: Epic for 12+ GB GPUs at 1440p; High/Medium for lower-VRAM capacity GPUs, depending on resolution and upscaling
Anisotropic Filtering
Anisotropic Filtering affects the quality of texture filtering at oblique angles, which is especially visible on roads, floors, rooftops, and other surfaces viewed from a shallow angle.
Normally, this is one of the easiest settings to max out, as the performance cost is usually negligible on modern GPUs. In LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, however, we observed something strange: performance inexplicably went down when lowering Anisotropic Filtering, and this was reproducible in many areas of the game. The issue seemed to happen when setting Anisotropic Filtering to 4X or below. Because of that, the recommendation is very simple: leave this setting at 16X.
Recommendation: 16X
Material Quality
Material Quality affects the visual fidelity of some surfaces and effects. This is an important setting in a LEGO game because the material response of LEGO bricks, minifigures, capes, roads, vehicles, and environmental surfaces contributes a lot to the overall look.
High provides the best balance here. Lower settings can reduce the visual richness of some surfaces, while Epic does not provide a large enough improvement to justify the added cost in our optimized profile.
Recommendation: High
Distance Field Ambient Occlusion
Distance Field Ambient Occlusion affects the quality of Unreal Engine 5’s Distance Field Ambient Occlusion, or DFAO. In simple terms, this helps improve ambient shadowing and contact depth by using mesh distance fields rather than relying purely on screen-space information.
In our testing, High is the best option. Lowering this setting can reduce ambient depth and make scenes look flatter.
Recommendation: High
LEGO Mesh Quality
LEGO Mesh Quality determines the detail level of the meshes that are loaded. This is obviously an important setting in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, as the game’s entire visual identity is built around LEGO bricks, minifigures, vehicles, props, and environmental detail.
In our testing, there was not enough of a performance difference to justify lowering this setting and potentially introducing blockier meshes/assets. For that reason, we recommend leaving LEGO Mesh Quality at Epic.
Recommendation: Epic
Effects
The Effects setting determines the quality of particle lighting, as well as volumetric effects such as sky clouds and fog.
This is a Batman game set in Gotham City, so fog, atmosphere, weather, and particle effects matter a lot to the overall mood. High preserves most of the intended presentation while avoiding the higher cost of Epic.
Recommendation: High
Reflections
The Reflections setting affects the quality of reflections. Like most Unreal Engine 5 games that support Lumen, Low and Medium use Screen-Space Reflections and/or low-resolution cube map fallbacks, while High and Epic use Software Lumen Ray-Traced Reflections via Signed Distance Fields (SDFs).
This means that this setting is not just a simple quality slider, as it also changes the underlying specular reflection technique. SSR can sometimes look sharper in specific camera angles, but it is limited to reflecting information already visible on screen. Software Lumen reflections are more complete and better suited to complex scenes, though they can also be noisier and more expensive on your GPU.
High is the best compromise in LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. It keeps the more complete software Lumen ray-traced reflections path without pushing their cost as high as Epic.
Recommendation: High
Post Processing
Post Processing controls the quality of effects such as motion blur, depth of field, bloom, and other post-process effects.
As usual, this setting is partly subjective. Some players prefer a cleaner image, while others enjoy a more cinematic presentation. In terms of visuals-to-performance balance, Medium is the best option in our testing.
One small note: the comparison video for this setting contains a typo. The lowest compared setting should be labeled “Off” rather than “Low”. Apologies for the confusion!
Recommendation: Medium
Population Quality
Population Quality adjusts the number of pedestrians walking the streets of Gotham.
This is one of those settings where the visual and gameplay feel matter just as much as the raw performance number. Lowering it too much can make Gotham City feel strangely empty, which is not ideal for a dense urban Batman game.
High is the best compromise. It keeps Gotham from turning into a ghost town.
Recommendation: High
Optimized Graphics Settings For LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
Based on all of the above testing, these are our optimized graphics settings for LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight:
| Graphics Setting | Optimized Value |
| Anti-Aliasing / Upscaling | DLSS SR for NVIDIA RTX GPUs / FSR for AMD GPUs / XeSS for Intel Arc GPUs / TSR as fallback |
| Anti-Aliasing Quality | Medium |
| Lighting Quality | High |
| Shadows | High |
| View Distance | Medium |
| Streaming Distance | High |
| Textures | Epic for 12+ GB GPUs at 1440p; High/Medium for lower-VRAM GPUs |
| Anisotropic Filtering | 16X |
| Material Quality | High |
| Distance Field Ambient Occlusion | High |
| LEGO Mesh Quality | Epic |
| Effects | High |
| Reflections | High |
| Post Processing | Medium |
| Population Quality | High |
| Screen Space Ambient Occlusion | On |
| Weather Effects | On |
| Other Fullscreen Effects | Personal preference |
These settings are designed to preserve most of the game’s intended visual presentation while removing some of the frankly wasteful Epic-level graphics settings. As always, users with lower-end GPUs should start by lowering output resolution/internal resolution through temporal upsampling before gutting the game’s visual settings too heavily.
Epic Preset vs Optimized Graphics Settings
To quantify the benefit of our optimized graphics settings, we compared the Epic preset against our optimized graphics settings in a GPU-limited 1440p test scene in the above comparison video, using an altered CapFrameX/RTSS-powered overlay that showcases relevant performance metrics, such as GPU usage, average FPS, 1% lows, 0.1% lows, real-time framerate, and finally real-time frametime. At the end of the video, we obtained the following averaged-out performance metrics for each run:
| Graphics Settings | Average FPS | 1% Low FPS | 0.1% Low FPS |
| Epic Preset | 106 | 79 | 69 |
| Optimized Graphics Settings | 153 | 109 | 95 |
| Improvement | +44% | +38% | +38% |
As we can see from the above results, our optimized graphics settings improve the average framerate by 44%, while also improving 1% lows and 0.1% lows by 38% each. That is a very strong uplift, especially considering that the visual downgrade is not severe during normal gameplay.
And given that LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is an Unreal Engine 5 game, we would also strongly recommend combining our optimized graphics settings with a suitable temporal upscaling technology and mode for your GPU/monitor, and some frame/multi frame generation as well, in case you have strong baseline performance and a (really) high-refresh rate panel.
Final Words
In the end, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is a fairly demanding Unreal Engine 5 title, especially for a LEGO game, but it can still be optimized quite well with the right graphics settings. The game’s biggest technical issues are not necessarily its raw GPU requirements, but rather its shader compilation/traversal stutters, cutscene-transition hitches, CPU-limited frametime spikes in busy Gotham City areas, and some strange graphics settings behavior, such as Anisotropic Filtering performing worse at lower values.
Still, with our optimized settings, a good upscaling/frame generation solution, and realistic expectations around CPU-limited open-world performance, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight can deliver a much smoother and more balanced PC experience than the seriously unoptimized maxed-out/Epic preset would suggest.
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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