Destiny 2 PC Graphics Settings Guide, Benchmark, And How To Boost FPS

Since the beta and leading up to launch, we kept hearing about how well Destiny 2 runs on PC. Now we have the full release of the game and have been playing plenty of it, so it's a chance to get the final word on how it performs on PC with different video cards. Here, we provide some benchmark numbers and give tips on how to boost framerate.

Graphics Settings Explained

Before we get into actual performance metrics, let's run through some of the important graphics settings in the options menu. We evaluated many of these during the beta period, but things have slightly changed since.

Field of View (FOV) will widen your viewing angle, allowing you to see more in your peripheral vision. We recommend going with the max at 105, as we did with all our tests. This does affect framerate, since more of the game world is rendered on screen at once.

We have two Anti-aliasing options; FXAA tends to make the overall image a little blurry and less effective in getting rid of jaggies, as opposed to SMAA which does a better job, but taxes your machine a bit more. In addition, Render Resolution (supersampling) provides the cleanest overall image, but it'll significantly impact performance when set to high percentages. You should only use this if you have plenty of FPS to spare.

Texture Anisotropy (anisotropic filtering) makes textures and surfaces seen at an angle and at a distance more detailed. It hardly impacts framerate, so we recommend setting this to 16x.

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion darkens areas that should be blocked from light sources to add a richer look to the game. HDAO does a fine job adding depth to the image in exchange for a few FPS, while 3D takes this a step further it'll cost additional FPS.

Texture Quality should be set to Highest since it won't impact performance as long as you have enough video memory on your graphics card. The menu shows a bar to see how much VRAM is being consumed, so you'll know.

Shadow Quality affects the resolution at which shadows from the sun and spotlights are rendered. This will noticeably affect framerate the higher it's set. While Foliage Shadow Distance doesn't affect performance all that much, Foliage Detail Distance is a big ticket item if you need higher framerates.

Wind Impulse is a neat effect that makes foliage react realistically to the action in game and it doesn't really impact FPS. Light Shafts affects the quality of ray casting through the environment, but doesn't ask much of your system if it's turned up.

Methodology

Destiny 2 doesn't allow you to use third-party performance monitoring applications, which means we couldn't use FRAPS to read our framerates. An in-game benchmark tool is also absent, though we do get a built-in FPS counter. By going off of that, we were able to track FPS at any given moment during a sequence we repeated to get our results.

We went to Earth's European Dead Zone (EDZ) but got away from the Trostland church outpost to make sure we had a controlled environment. We walked down the path to the Outskirts where the scenery opens up and pushes a system's ability to render Destiny's 2 vast environments. We then got in a quick firefight with some dregs to capture some action. And we monitored the framerate throughout this sequence.

The system we used had an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU at 4.2GHz and 16 GB of RAM. We tested Destiny 2 with three resolutions using the latest video cards from Nvidia and AMD that best fit each resolution:

• 4K (3840x2160)
  • Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
  • Nvidia GTX 1080
  • AMD RX Vega 64
• 1440p (2560x1440)
  • Nvidia GTX 1070
  • RX Vega 56
• 1080p (1920x1080)
  • Nvidia GTX 1060
  • Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti
  • AMD RX 580
  • AMD RX 570

Nvidia cards were tested using version 388.00 of the GeForce driver and AMD cards were tested with version 17.10.2 of the Radeon ReLive software.

Benchmark Results

4K

Let's start with our 4K tests. It was ideal to test 4K with everything maxed out on one card; the GTX 1080 Ti. And based on our test sequence, the card produced 51 to 60 FPS.

For a more reasonable 4K scenario, we tweaked the settings and used HDAO, Shadow Quality on High, and turned off anti-aliasing. We saw a noticeable boost as the GTX 1080 Ti produced 70 to 96 FPS. The GTX 1080 was able to maintain frame rates between 58 and 79 FPS, and AMD's RX Vega 64 gave us 54 to 73 FPS.

1440p

For our tests at 2560x1440 we pitted the GTX 1070 and RX Vega 56 against each other. With every setting maxed, the 1070 produced between 60 and 88 FPS, while the Vega 56 managed 54 to 77 FPS.

Bringing things down a bit by using HDAO and High shadows, the GTX 1070 improved to 69 to 95 FPS, and the Vega 56 bumped up to 61 to 87 FPS.

1080p

I know we've been throwing around a lot of numbers, but hang in there, we're almost done. For our 1080p max test, we matched the GTX 1060 and RX 580. They're pretty much neck-and-neck; Nvidia's card gave us 65 to 92 FPS and AMD's card put out 64 to 89 FPS.

By turning settings down to High and using HDAO, we can get great framerates on budget level cards. We threw in the GTX 1060 again and got between 76 and 101 FPS. But the cheaper RX 570 yielded 63 to 90 FPS, and the even cheaper GTX 1050 Ti netted 50 to 72 FPS.

Tips To Boost Performance

By doing tests on both Highest and High settings, we see how much of a boost in FPS you can get from some simple tweaks. However, there are four important options to turn down when looking for better framerates:

• Ambient Occlusion: Using HDAO instead of 3D adds approximately 8% more FPS.
• Shadow Quality: Using High shadow settings gives about 8% more FPS, and Medium about 14% compared to Highest.
• Foliage Detail Distance: Using Medium boost FPS by about 5% compared to High. Low adds around 12% FPS compared to High.
• Depth of Field: Compared to Highest, High adds about 5% more FPS and Low adds about 9% FPS.

Turning FOV down from 105 to 95 also boosts FPS by about 4%, but we recommend testing this out to see if the narrower viewing angle is a worthy trade-off to you. Every other graphics option is pretty much icing on the cake. Taking these down a notch contributed significantly to getting better performance in our tests. So look to these settings if your system is struggling.

Be sure to check out our wealth of guides and walkthroughs for the game if you're just getting started. And read or watch our full review of Destiny 2 if you're still deciding on whether or not to jump in.