While 007 First Light is the first actually good James Bond game in quite some time, developer IO Interactive has been making well-optimized PC games for years. It’s not surprising, then, that 007 First Light runs extremely well, at least once you clear its somewhat steep system requirements.
The game requires just an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or a GeForce GTX 1660 to run, but its recommended spec is an RTX 3060 Ti or a 6700 XT. That’s quite a difference, but I will say that after testing the 3060 Ti at 1080p, it runs incredibly well, although the low VRAM means you’ll probably want to turn down the texture quality a bit, even at that lower resolution.
In fact, the textures in this game are like a little sponge for video memory, and if you want to max it out at any resolution, you’re going to want to make sure you’re packing a GPU with at least 12GB of the stuff. And, at higher resolutions, you’re probably going to want to bump that requirement up to 16GB if you really want to avoid any stuttering.
No Presets
Unlike a lot of PC games these days, 007 First Light doesn’t have graphics presets. There is a button in the settings menu that’ll set everything to default, but at least on the pre-release build I was testing, this just set everything down to its minimum setting.
While this isn’t a huge deal for anyone that’s going to be tinkering with the settings anyways, it does mean you can’t just pick an option and start playing right out of the gate. Or at least you can’t if you don’t want to be staring at aliased handrails for 20 hours (or however long this game is, I didn’t finish it yet).
There really aren’t that many individual settings to tweak, though, so finding the sweet spot for your PC shouldn’t take too much time. And, for most people who meet the recommended setting, it mostly comes down to setting most things to high and then just deciding if you want to prioritize frame rate or a higher base resolution.
The Settings
Just like with Forza Horizon 6’s PC settings, I set out to make 007 First Light run as quickly as possible on the RTX 5070 at 4K. Unlike Forza, though, getting to 60 fps at a native 4K in First Light with the RTX 5070 is basically impossible. Even with everything set to low, I got around 40-45 fps. That might be enough for some people, but this is one of those games where I’d recommend upscaling for pretty much everyone. The game looks incredible with higher quality settings, and as long as you have some kind of upscaling, a GPU like the RTX 5070 or the Radeon 9070 can easily run at 60-70 fps.
Even the much-weaker RTX 3060 Ti can easily hit a high frame rate at 1080p, just as long as you use DLSS at the Quality preset. The 3060 Ti can even stretch up to 1440p, but it will be much harder to maintain 60 fps. Just get ready to turn things down a bit if you want to move up to a higher resolution.
007 First LIght will run on the Steam Deck, too, but I wouldn’t really recommend it. You can get the game running at around 30 fps most of the time, but it comes with some pretty severe stuttering problems, especially when you’re playing it on battery power. More powerful handhelds like the Xbox Ally X will fare a bit better, but this is a game that is definitely intended more for fully-fledged gaming PCs than handhelds.
While 007 First Light does run well on modern hardware, you’re going to want to dial in the settings to find the perfect balance between image quality and performance. And, well, I went ahead and found that sweet spot for both the RTX 5070 and the RTX 3060 Ti.
Transfer Function: This just affects how image data is encoded for your monitor. For most people, I’d recommend setting it to 2.2 and forgetting about it. If you run into visual glitches, you can set it to sRGB to troubleshoot, but you’ll get lighter blacks. And since this is a stealth game, you’ll be looking at dark scenes a lot. Mid-Range PC and Handheld: 2.2
Resolution Scaling: These are just upscaling methods. As of right now only two are selected, DLSS and FSR. For Nvidia users, use DLSS, everyone else should use FSR. Hopefully IO Interactive adds XeSS sometime soon.
DLSS Super Resolution and AMD FSR Upscaling resolution: This is simply the upscaling factor for whichever method you’re using. As a general rule of thumb, I’d recommend Performance for 4K, Balanced for 1440p and Quality for 1080p. However, if you have enough breathing room, you can turn it up to make the game look a bit nicer.
DLSS Frame Generation: It seems like the only type of frame gen that’s supported here is Nvidia’s version of the tech. Whether or not you use it is entirely up to you, but it can unlock extremely high frame rates at the cost of latency and some minor visual artifacts. Luckily, 007 First Light supports Dynamic Multi Frame Generation right out of the box, so you won’t even need to mess with the Nvidia app to use it.
Texture Quality: Texture Quality changes the resolution of all the textures in the game. In my testing, this is by far the biggest impact on VRAM. If you’re running up against the limit, and luckily there’s a handy little bar in the lower right corner of the screen that’ll tell you that, I’d lower this setting first. But for the most part, you’re probably going to be GPU limited before you’re VRAM limited. Mid-Range PC: Ultra, Handheld: Low
Texture Filter: No matter what game I’m playing, texture filtering is one of the last things I touch. Even maxing this out won’t affect performance that much, and the game will start looking very flat once you start turning it down. Mid-Range PC: 16x, Handheld: 4x
Level of Detail: This affects model resolution, and in 007 First Light IO Interactive has worked some kind of magic to make this setting barely affect performance. Going from Low to Ultra barely touches the VRAM meter, and only made for a difference of 2 fps on the RTX 5070. Mid-Range PC: Ultra, Handheld: Medium
Terrain Quality: 007 First Light is full of beautiful environments, and this setting mostly affects how good the ground looks at any time. This will affect some scenes more than others, but I will say that there are plenty of driving scenes in this game where having this setting cranked up really improves how the game looks. And because it barely impacts VRAM or your GPU performance, just leave this cranked until you’re running into performance issues. Mid-Range PC: Ultra Handheld: Low
Shadow Quality: The lighting engine in 007 First Light is where most people are going to run into performance issues. Shadows are ray traced, and maxing them out will have a huge impact on both your performance and your VRAM consumption. I’d leave this at high for the most part, but if you’re on a weaker GPU, this (along with the next few settings) are the first things I’d cut. Mid-Range PC: High Handheld: Low
Volumetric Fog Quality: This makes fog thicker and more realistic, but it can impact performance quite a bit in particularly foggy scenes – like the opening mission. Volumetric Fog makes certain scenes look incredible, but this should be one of the first things you cut if you’re falling short of 60 fps, especially if there are a lot of atmospheric effects going on when your fps drops. Mid-Range PC: High Handheld: Low
Volumetric Effects Quality: You’d think that Volumetric Fog would be a Volumetric Effect, but it's separate for some reason. Instead, this mostly affects volumetric lighting and smoke. This does look great maxed out, what with all the explosions in the game, but it does come with a pretty high performance cost. Mid-Range PC: High, Handheld: Low
Reflection Quality: This is just me, but one of my favorite ray traced effects is reflections. Even 7 years after I first saw the noisy reflections in Battlefield 5, I’m still blown away by really nice reflections. And 007 First Light has some absolutely gorgeous reflections. This is one of the last lighting effects I’d turn down from a purely aesthetic perspective, but it does come with a high enough performance cost that I’d recommend turning it down a bit anyways. Mid-Range PC: High (Ultra if you’re adventurous) Handheld: Low
What follows all of these is a bunch of toggles for post-processing effects, and none of them really impact performance all that much. In the descriptions for some of them, developer IO Interactive warns that turning off fullscreen blur effects and radial blur effects will make certain gameplay states harder to distinguish. I’ve spent about 8 hours with this game, and all this means is that it’ll be harder to tell when you’re low on life. That’s enough for me to keep these settings on but if you really hate the effect, you can at least turn it off.
Out of all the games I’ve tested so far this year, 007 First Light is probably the most demanding. That’s not to say that it’s not well optimised, though. Even on the RTX 5070, you can get an average of around 63-70 fps throughout most of the game following these settings, and that number will only go up if you use frame generation – though that will come with a bit of a bump to latency.
As long as you have a recent graphics card, you should have no problem running at high settings with a decent frame rate. But unlike games like Crimson Desert and Resident Evil Requiem, upscaling is a necessity for 4K, unless you’re packing something like an RTX 5080 or a Radeon RX 9070 XT.
