This guide is based on my own testing and multiple guides. The goal is to find the best visual to performance tradeoff, especially if you're hard pressed for performance but still want the game to look as good as possible.

These are based on my own testing. I cap at 30 FPS to get a stable 60 FPS with frame generation.

On Low, the shadows look absolutely fine in my opinion. The key difference is how far away they get cast and how close to you they start animating, like tree branches or fires. Generally, that's a very low concern. The only case for Medium is that fire brazier shadows get disabled completely on Low. That's a minor concern though, since they're mostly in cities, and you'll only really notice it once you start looking for the absent shadows. If you need the performance, disable them. It'll help you in the rest of the world, especially around nature.

The bounced lighting in this game is subtle for the most part, but costly. Unfortunately, this also controls how far away you can see light sources like torches, braziers, and lamps. From Ultra down to Low, it step by step reduces the view distance of those.

This setting also seems to change the lighting of some scenes entirely. Probably a bug, since a lot of graphics options malfunction in various ways under specific circumstances. Generally, Medium looks alright, all the reflections are there, but on High they're in a more optimal solution. It might just cost you too much FPS to justify it. Judge it for yourself.

Only relevant for dialogue scenes, but the game has various glitches with reliably blurring the background during those, except on Ultra, but it's more costly and doesn't even look that great either, because there are sometimes ominous shadows and glows on things. I also find it looking more pleasant on High, where the depth of field sometimes drops out and the background is only blurred in half the scenes during the entire conversation. This way it often provides a nice switch up of shots between scenery visible and focused face to face shots. Looks more cinematic to me that way, instead of constant blur in the background at all times.

Especially the texture setting will make your game stutter and perform a lot worse if you set it too high. For me, the in game benchmark determined Medium for an 8GB card, but it clearly was not running well on that.

This is one of the big settings in this game, it controls how fires and particle effects look, but also how close to you and how many tree branches are being moved by the wind. This is especially relevant because if you have more animated tree branches and foliage, you have more animated shadows. So if you turn this up, it's a compounding effect. Normally I'd like it a little higher, but on Medium this setting keeps malfunctioning for me, some torches just not burning after I fast travel somewhere. On Low they just burn normally at all times.

There are circumstances in which Ultra can cause frame drops in interiors of buildings. Otherwise, it seems like a nonissue having it on Ultra.

For me, foliage is a big immersion provider in this game. If you can keep this at High, I'd see that as optimal, and it doesn't seem to be all that costly if you have shadows and effects on Low alongside it.

High seems fine until you get to icy terrain or into towns with lots of buildings and people. So Medium overall is the safer option. To be completely honest, I can't say I've noticed it one way or another. I've played for a while on High, then Medium again, and it's really not obvious for me to recognize what it does.

Only because Ultra can cause frame drops when looking directly upward at the sky.

DLSS Quality is the lowest I'd go, but it really depends on your frame rate and what resolution.

If you're playing as low as I do 1080p at 30 FPS before frame generation, then even DLSS Ultra Quality can and will look somewhat worse than a lower resolution like 1600x900 with a higher preset like DLAA. Theoretically, the image on 1080p Quality should be better reconstructed, and it does if you stay still, but there's less ghosting and blur in motion on 900p with DLAA.

It's really dependent on your GPU, DLSS version, resolution, and FPS target. I feel like playing DLSS Quality on anything lower than 1440p doesn't look good anymore. Try it out for yourself, but I think dropping down the resolution to use DLAA seems necessary with this engine below 1440p.

You can download DLSS Enabler from Nexus Mods.

Rename it to dxgi.dll

Drop the file into this directory: D:\Programs\Steam\steamapps\common\The Blood of Dawnwalker\Dawnwalker\Binaries\Win64

You now have emulated DLSS as an in game option under graphics settings, even if you don't have an NVIDIA card. It's that easy. It looks cleaner than FSR for the same FPS.

You now also have Optiscaler, which can inject and overrule what the game is running on.

Press the INSERT key to open the Optiscaler overlay menu for additional tweaks if you want them, but you don't have to, you can leave it at default.

If you wish to just use Optiscaler without the DLSS Enabler, you can find it on GitHub.

Important note: If you start using frame generation with this mod, the game can react very sensitively to not being the main task and easily crash or timeout if you use Alt+Tab. So you've got to refrain from doing that and all is fine. The game is fully stable otherwise all the way through, just don't Alt+Tab when using DLSS Enabler together with Frame Generation at the same time. You can still use the Steam overlay.

Many games often ship with dated versions of DLSS, FSR, or XeSS, or they're not well integrated into the game. Injecting and swapping them through Optiscaler works better in a lot of cases than their default in graphics options, giving more FPS and smoother frametimes, provided that you always have the graphics options set in accordance with what you're trying to swap. So if you want FSR, set FSR in the in game graphics options and replace FSR as upscaler in the Optiscaler overlay, etc.

If you're on an older card like me and need the most performance, it helps a lot injecting FSR 3.1.6 Frame Generation for better performance than the game's default version. It seems to give more FPS and run smoother with less delay.

For the best visual quality with the most FPS, I use DLSS in game with FSR Frame Generation. Then open the Optiscaler menu and replace just the Frame Generation with FSR 3.1.6 FG. Then click Active and Allow Async. Under fakevapi, click force LatencyFlex and choose Reflex ID. It should perform better now than the default. So even 30 FPS is playable for me with FG latency.

Click Save Settings at the bottom so the adjustments carry over for when you open the game next time.

NOTE: Don't use them together. It can quickly be forgotten, because one is used as a mod file in the game directory, while the other is under app user data.

ALSO NOTE: I've read and personally experienced that some of these optimized engine files can still be too much for certain PCs and even increase stuttering for some people. So if you do encounter a choppier game than before, don't use them and maybe put together your own engine.ini edit that you want, in which you only apply some additional things you feel like you want to change. It would probably be best to tailor certain settings in there according to your hardware, like GPU VRAM limits for shader compilation size and all that. But I just opted for choosing between two of the most popular optimized engine.ini mods on Nexus Mods and calling it a day.

Here you can create a text file and call it engine.ini. This file applies modifications to the engine. If there is none, it runs at default.

This can be really easy or a bit of a rabbit hole to get into with everything there is to potentially change in the UE5 engine and how that will affect the visuals and performance of the game for you.

NOTE: The game will still have some occasional traversal loading stutters, regardless of what you do. This is just a UE5 reality, as far as I know, no matter your hardware. So if you've got enough VRAM and are using the engine.ini uploaded by P40L0X, this is about as good as it gets, in my opinion.

If the Nexus Mods engine files seem to be causing you problems and you just want to keep it minimal, for example, disabling blur, film grain, making anti aliasing look better, and forcing cleanest textures, you can use these lines:

There are a ton of things you could modify if you look up commands of the engine and what they mean.

If you've done all this but are still hard pressed for frames, you should probably disable Lumen, but it's going to make reflections and lighting look different.

Completely eliminate Lumen, but retain reflections:

If you've got one of the optimized engine.ini files, find these lines and change them. Don't blindly just add them so they might be twice in there, contradicting each other. 

Use CTRL+F to search the text file in that case and modify or add:

This gives you:

Screen Space Reflections

Reflection Captures and other non global reflection mechanisms where the game uses them

But SSR is not equivalent to Lumen Reflections. UE5 describes SSR as a low cost, screen space only technique. It can only reflect information that is available within the current view, so things outside the screen or behind the camera cannot be properly represented. Lumen Reflections can trace beyond the screen.

Clearing the cache itself can temporarily exacerate stuttering. After you delete it, the game has to compile shaders again. Depending on the game, this can happen during a dedicated shader compilation step or while you're actually playing. The latter can produce noticeable hitches the first time you encounter new effects, areas, materials, etc.

If you've got an AMD Vega GPU of any kind, you can allocate system RAM as VRAM. It works wonders in this game, since it eats VRAM for breakfast and starts stuttering easily if there's no headroom.

Enable HBCC in AMD Adrenaline Driver. 

You can find it in the Gaming tab > Graphics > scroll down to Advanced.

Enable it for as much of your RAM as you can safely spare. If you've got 64GB like me, I just allocate 16GB with no worries. It allows me to crank textures to Ultra with no additional issues or stuttering so far.