Returnal Best Settings Guide For PC

PlayStation and Housemarque’s rogue-like bullet hell shooter, Returnal, is now available on PC, and we’ve put together the best settings for getting optimized performance on low-to-mid end system specs.

Before we delve into the best settings for the PC version of Returnal, 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.

Returnal 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 tweak some settings until you find a sweet spot based on your display’s refresh rate and the overall performance you seek.

DISPLAY SETTINGS

• Display Mode: Fullscreen
• Aspect Ratio: as per the aspect ratio of your display
• Screen Resolution: max resolution of your display

GRAPHICS SETTINGS

• General:
  • VSync: Off on a VRR/G-Sync supported display, On otherwise
  • Screen Optimizations: Nvidia DLSS on Nvidia GPUs that support it, else FSR
• Lighting:
  • Lighting Quality: High
  • Shadow Quality: Medium
  • Ambient Occlusion: High
  • Ray-Traced Shadows: Off (or On and set to Medium or High if RTX GPU with available performance headroom)
  • Screen-Space Reflections: On
  • Ray-Traced Reflections: Off (or On and set to Medium or High if RTX GPU with available performance headroom)
• Environment:
  • Model Quality: High
  • Texture Quality: High (or Epic on GPUs with 10 GB or higher VRAM)
  • Volumetric Fog: High
  • Particle Quality: High
• Post-Processing:
  • Depth of Field: On

For the uninitiated, Returnal puts players in the role of Selene Vassos, an astronaut who landed on the planet Atropos in quest of the enigmatic “White Shadow” signal and becomes imprisoned in a temporal loop. It was released for the PS5 on April 30, 2021, and for PC on February 15, 2023.