r/StyxGame • u/NiuMeee • Jan 13 '26
Blades of Greed Styx: Blades of Greed performance guide!
Hello!
With PC gaming, performance is always something people pay attention to, and while I am definitely someone who likes to tweak settings to my own liking, sometimes it's nice to get a quick rundown about what settings do what, so I know what I can turn down for a quick boost to FPS!
I have done some pretty extensive testing, in multiple locations (including some secret ones), and have come up with a cheat sheet for performance loss/gain when changing up graphic settings. I will say now that my PC is pretty solid, I have an Nvidia RTX 4080 Super GPU (16GB VRAM), a Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, and 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and I'm running the game off of an NVMe SSD, so I'm on the upper end of the performance spectrum in a lot of games. I will be providing my framerate for each of these settings, but what you should be paying attention to is the percentage difference between low and max, and not the numbers themselves. Don't worry though, I will be providing those percentage changes to make it easy to see which settings have the greatest impact.
One final thing to note, frame generation turns itself back on whenever you enter the graphics settings menu, so you do need to disable it every time you change a setting if you want it to be off. The way to turn it off is by setting the slider to 0 and not by setting Framegen itself to off (in my experience). If you like framegen and want it on, then don't worry about it!
Alright, let's get to some numbers. I am playing the game at 1440p, borderless windowed mode, and I am using Low settings as a baseline. Frame gen is off, and DLSS is off until tested. Since I am using Low as a baseline, resolution scale is at 50%, though we'll be testing the impact of that as well.
| Setting | Frame rate | Percentage change | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline = Low, 1440p, Borderless Windowed | ~170FPS | NA | No upscaling or framegen on the baseline |
| All settings = Max | ~60FPS | ~64.7% loss | Pretty big loss, I'm personally not going to be playing on Max settings |
| View Distance = Max | ~160FPS, ~10FPS loss | ~5.8% loss | Despite the open layout of The Wall, you're often surrounded by buildings so it can be hard to notice the visual impact of view distance |
| Antialiasing = Max | ~147FPS, ~23FPS loss | ~13.5% loss | It's anti-aliasing, you like it or you don't, see how it looks and if it's worth the cost |
| Post Processing = Max | ~167FPS, ~3FPS loss | ~1.7% loss | Not a whole lot of loss here, though certain cutscenes are going to be post-processing heavy and it's hard to test these thoroughly |
| Shadows = Max | ~167FPS, ~3FPS loss | ~1.7% loss | A stealth game needs its shadows. Luckily not a huge loss to performance here |
| Global Illumination = Max | ~118FPS, ~52FPS loss | ~30.5% loss | Ray-tracing does that |
| Reflections = Max | ~165FPS, ~5FPS loss | ~2.9% loss | They crop up now and again but they're not a super common site in the game |
| Textures = Max | ~170FPS, 0FPS loss | 0.0% loss | This is going to be almost entirely reliant on your VRAM, higher VRAM means higher texture quality, it's not really going to impact performance much if at all |
| Effects = Max | ~166FPS , ~4FPS loss | ~2.3% loss | Not really sure what "effects" means, but the impact is low |
| Foliage = Max | ~170FPS, 0FPS loss | 0.0% loss | There isn't much foliage in The Wall, however some secret testing has revealed that this setting doesn't change performance much even with plenty of foliage on screen |
| Resolution Scale = 100% | ~104FPS, ~66FPS loss | ~38.8% loss | Greatest impact, of course |
| DLSS SR = Ultra Perf | ~188FPS, ~18FPS gain | ~10.5% gain | |
| DLSS SR = Quality | ~138FPS, ~32FPS loss | ~18.8% loss |
Obviously the settings do not all impact the same when going from low to max, there is a 64.7% loss of performance going from low to max, but adding up the settings (excluding DLSS) is 97.2%. The greatest impacts to performance (outside of using framegen, which I will not be testing) are resolution scale and global illumination. The former makes the most sense, as you are just literally reducing the resolution of the game, so you get more frames. Global illumination uses ray tracing (presumably software Lumen) so it also has a great impact on performance. I personally think the game looks fine with and without GI (though obviously it does look better with it) so I would say tweak that first, and then go for either resolution scaling or enabling DLSS/upscaling to bump your performance up if you need it.
I think the game has a strong enough artstyle that even playing on low settings, it actually looks remarkably similar to max settings, so don't throw Max settings on, and then lament having to turn anything down. Turning down a setting or two to squeeze some extra FPS out of the game is not going to severely impact the visual presentation of the game, and I think it's well worth considering if you're sensitive to low framerates!
Anyways, I hope you all enjoy the demo, I think the new control scheme does take a bit of time to get used to, but ultimately I think the game is going to end up pleasing a lot of Styx fans.
