What are the best Path of Exile 2 settings? If you can’t wait to start your great adventure from Wraeclast to Oliath, but aren’t sure how best to set up the game to make it look great and run smoothly, we’ve got the guide for you.
Right out the gate, you can rest assured that, as a top-down RPG, the frame rate required to get a great experience isn’t anywhere near as high as in a typical first-person shooter or racing game, for instance. A frame rate of 60fps is ample for a great time while playing Path of Exile 2. So, if you don’t have the very latest and best graphics card in your system, you should still be able to have a great time. In fact, you can check here for the Path of Exile 2 system requirements, which aren’t overly demanding.
Best Path of Exile 2 graphics settings
Display settings
- Display mode: Fullscreen
- Resolution: 1,920 x 1,080, or the resolution of your display
- Upscaling: Off or Nvidia DLSS
- Renderer: DirectX 12
- V-Sync: On
- Foreground FPS cap: Disabled
- Background FPS cap: Disabled
Detail settings
- Antialiasing quality: High
- Lighting: Shadows and global illumination
- Shadow + GI quality: High
- Sun shadow quality: High
- Number of lights: High
- Bloom: On
- Depth of field: On
- Incursion effect: On
- Water detail level: High
- Texture quality: High
- Texture filtering: High
Advanced settings
- Dynamic culling: Disabled
- Dynamic resolution: Disabled
- Target frame rate: 60fps
- Engine multithreading: Enabled
Thanks to it being a top-down RPG, the graphical intensity of Path of Exile 2 isn’t too extreme, plus you only need to get around 60fps for a smooth experience. As such, you stand a good chance of being able to crank up most graphics settings if you have a mid-range graphics card that’s under four years old.
With our Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 test system running the game at 1080p, the game achieved an average frame rate of 117fps using the above settings, with the 1% low frame rate sitting at 92fps. That means you not only get a very smooth feel, thanks to the high average rate, but you don’t get regular or major stutters or drops in frame rate either.
Cranking up the resolution to 1440p saw the frame rate drop to 72fps with a 64fps 1% low, again making for a great-looking and smooth experience with the above settings. Meanwhile, moving all the way up to running at 4K resulted in our average frame rate still hitting 59fps, with a 1% low of 53fps. For a game of this type, that’s still ample.
If you are struggling to get the frame rate you want, though, there are a few key settings with which you can experiment. The first is Shadow + GI Quality. Dropping this from Ultra to Low does reduce the sophistication of some shadow effects, but the game still looks great and we jumped from 117fps to 135fps at 1080p just by altering this setting.
Another setting to consider is changing Lighting from Shadows and Global Illumination to just Shadows. Like the above, this slightly reduces the detail of some lighting effects, but the change is subtle and we went from 117fps to 137fps while still keeping the Shadow detail set to Ultra.
Outside of these tweaks, most of the graphical settings don’t have a huge impact on performance. Instead, you’ll be relying on changing resolution or using upscaling to get a better balance of frame rate and visual quality.
The game’s default upscaling system is NIS or Nvidia Image Scaling. Enabling this feature, and setting the scaling to 67% (which scales from 1440p to 4K), resulted in our 4K frame rate going from 59fps to 67fps. However, image quality was noticeably not great. Instead, we’d recommend using Nvidia DLSS if it’s available on your graphics card. Setting DLSS to Quality mode resulted in a 72fps frame rate, and the image quality was noticeably sharper than with NIS.
AMD FSR is also available, as is Intel XESS. However, the FSR version appears to be FSR 1, as image quality isn’t very good, though it’s better than just running the game at a lower resolution and relying on your monitor to scale the image.
Path of Exile 2 currently doesn’t support any kind of frame generation technology for boosting frame rate, whether that’s AMD FSR 3 or Nvidia DLSS 3.
How we test Path of Exile 2
At PCGamesN, we use dedicated gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. The test rig we used for Path of Exile 2 includes the following components: Intel Core i7 11700F CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 12GB GPU, 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM, and an MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Windows 11 64-bit.
We always run our testing first at 1,920 x 1,080 to identify the best settings in the most commonly played resolution, then again at 2,560 x 1,440 and even 4K using the same setup to gauge the difference in performance. We use CapFrameX to capture frame data and compare testing sessions.
How to monitor performance in Path of Exile 2
If you want to keep an eye on performance in Path of Exile 2, you can follow these instructions to find an easy method that works whether you’re using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.
For Nvidia cards, ensure you have GeForce Experience or the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled. Then hit Alt + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + O.
Alternatively, you can download free software such as CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView to get a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking tool that works with any graphics card.
If you need to upgrade your hardware to start playing Path of Exile 2, follow our handy guide on how to build a gaming PC, which takes you through the process step by step from start to finish.
And that concludes our best Path of Exile 2 settings guide. If you’re looking to find out more about the game, check out our Path of Exile 2 support gems guide or find out about specific classes in the game with our guide to the Path of Exile 2 ranger class or Path of Exile 2 witch class, among others.