Wildlight Entertainment’s free-to-play PvP raid shooter, Highguard, is now available for PC, and we’ve put together the best settings for getting optimized performance on mid-end system specs and the Steam Deck.
Before we delve into the best settings for the PC version of Highguard, make sure you’ve updated your GPU drivers and Windows to their latest respective versions. Additionally, disable or close any unnecessary background applications in order to reduce the CPU overhead as much as possible. The settings detailed ahead should provide a more optimized balance between graphics and frame rate compared to the presets available in-game.
Highguard Best Settings
The settings below are there to serve as a broad starting point for further optimization based on your specific hardware specs. As a result, you may need to further tweak some settings until you find a sweet spot based on your display’s refresh rate and the overall performance you seek.
VIDEO
- Windowed Mode: Windowed Fullscreen
- Resolution: as per the max resolution of your display or preference
- Vertical Sync: Off
- Max FPS: as per the max refresh rate of your display or preference
- Internal Resolution: 67%
- Anti-Aliasing Mode: NVIDIA DLSS on supported GPUs, TSR otherwise
- Shadow Quality: Low
- Global Illumination Quality: Medium
- Reflection Quality: Low
- Anti-aliasing Quality: Low
- Texture Quality: High
- Effects Quality: Low
- Post-Processing Quality: High
- Foliage Quality: Low
- Shading Quality: Medium
How Does Highguard Run On Steam Deck Via Dual Boot On Windows 11?
VIDEO
- Windowed Mode: Windowed Fullscreen
- Resolution: 1280 x 800
- Vertical Sync: Off
- Max FPS: 60
- Internal Resolution: 35%
- Anti-Aliasing Mode: NVIDIA DLSS on supported GPUs, TSR otherwise
- Shadow Quality: Low
- Global Illumination Quality: Low
- Reflection Quality: Low
- Anti-aliasing Quality: Low
- Texture Quality: Low
- Effects Quality: Low
- Post-Processing Quality: Low
- Foliage Quality: Low
- Shading Quality: Low
As seen in the above video, Highguard’s frame rate tends to stay above 30 fps on the Steam Deck using the lowest possible graphical settings, running Windows 11 via dual boot. However, it causes the handheld to completely crash after 20 minutes of playing, making it impossible to complete most matches. The game doesn’t run natively on SteamOS, as the latter doesn’t support kernel-level anti-cheat systems. As such, we don’t consider the game playable on Valve’s handheld device.
