The Best PC Graphics Settings for The First Descendant

With The First Descendant’s arrival on PC, lots of folks out there will be looking to dive into the game and get their grind going. Here are the best PC settings for The First Descendant.

The Best Settings for Good Framerates on PC

The PC settings below are designed to give the best possible framerates while you play The First Descendant. While the game is certainly very nice-looking, a lot of those shinier settings will eat up performance, and they will sometimes only give a marginal visual improvement while costing double-digit frames to get.

The main area of interest will be the Additional Options under Performance in the Graphics Settings. This is where you will find specific technologies like DLSS for Nvidia, AMD FSR, Intell XeSS, etc. This is where you will see the greatest performance improvement if you have a card that supports such technology. For those who don’t, read on.

First up, turn off motion blur and V-Sync. This is not a performance issue; it’s just ugly as sin, and I am firmly in the camp that feels it should be set to off by default in every game, ever. It’s also particularly ugly in The First Descendant, for some reason.

Up next, you’ll want to experiment with the Shadows settings. Set this to Medium or lower for a solid improvement in your frames without a dramatic change to the visuals. Reflections can also go to Medium or below. I found my frame timing improved a lot when it did this, and while the framerate improvement wasn’t dramatic, the feel of the game sure did get better.

Shaders are something you should experiment with. This can be a little draining on performance, so play with it at different quality levels to see how it impacts your own set up. Finally, Object is worth playing with, too. At first, I thought this was an odd way of covering load distance, but it seems to actually cover overall object quality, and it just isn’t all that visually impactful.

Minimum and Recommended PC Requirments

The minimum PC requirements for The First Descendant are listed below. As you might expect from an MMO in the modern age, it can run on almost anything, so you should hopefully be fine, as these specs are below the average on the Steam Survey.

• OS: Windows 10 x64 20H2
• Processor: Intel i5-3570 / AMD FX-8350
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: GeForce GTX 1050Ti or AMD Radeon RX 570 Video Memory 4GB
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 50 GB available space

The recommended specs are as follows. Once again, these are honestly pretty light specs for just about any game now. When I played the game during technical tests, I found it ran quite smoothly with very little hitching or stuttering, so hopefully, that holds up. But if you feel like your PC just isn’t up to snuff, The First Descendant is available on most platforms. Or you can just play solo and save your system the stress.

• OS: Windows 10 x64 20H2
• Processor: Intel i7-7700K / AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: GeForce RTX 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 5600XT
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 50 GB available space

The First Descendant is available now.