Directive 8020 PC Performance Guide: Best Settings for Smoother FPS Without Ruining Visuals
PC games are getting more demanding every year, and Unreal Engine 5 titles are often at the center of that conversation. Directive 8020 is no different. Supermassive Games’ sci-fi horror adventure can look impressive, especially during close-up cinematic scenes, but its default High graphics preset can be surprisingly heavy on the GPU, even when ray tracing and path tracing are turned off.
For players trying to find the best Directive 8020 PC settings, the goal is simple: keep the game atmospheric and visually sharp while improving frame rate, reducing GPU load, and avoiding unnecessary performance drops. This guide gives you a clear overview of how Directive 8020 performs on PC, what kind of hardware it needs, and why some players may want to adjust settings instead of simply choosing the highest preset.
Directive 8020 is built for cinematic tension. Like earlier entries in The Dark Pictures Anthology, it focuses on player choice, branching storylines, quick-time events, dialogue decisions, and life-or-death consequences. Every decision can change the story, and every mistake can cost a character their life.
This new entry takes the series into deep space. Earth is dying, and humanity’s future depends on the colony ship Cassiopeia, which is sent toward Tau Ceti f, a planet around 12 light-years away. What begins as a mission of survival quickly turns into a nightmare when the ship crash-lands and the crew encounters an alien organism capable of mimicking its victims.
That premise gives Directive 8020 a strong survival horror identity. While it still keeps the interactive movie-style storytelling Supermassive Games is known for, it also introduces more direct horror gameplay elements, including real-time alien threats, stealth sections, improvised weapons, and greater player control than some previous titles from the studio.
From a technical perspective, Directive 8020 is a modern Unreal Engine 5 game. It uses several advanced rendering features associated with the engine, including Nanite, Lumen global illumination and reflections, and Virtual Shadow Maps. These technologies can create convincing lighting, detailed geometry, and strong cinematic presentation, but they also come with a performance cost.
That cost is noticeable. Directive 8020 can be more GPU-heavy than expected for a mostly linear, narrative-focused horror game. While the character models often look excellent and facial detail is one of the game’s strongest visual elements, the environments are more inconsistent. They can look good, but not always impressive enough to fully justify how demanding the game becomes at higher settings.
The official PC requirements also make it clear that Directive 8020 is not a lightweight release.
For minimum settings, the game asks for an Intel Core i5-8500 or AMD Ryzen 5 3500, paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 5700. It also requires 16 GB of RAM and 40 GB of available storage space, with an SSD recommended.
For the recommended experience, the game lists an Intel Core i5-12400F or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, along with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6800. The memory requirement remains 16 GB of RAM, and storage remains 40 GB.
The CPU requirements are reasonable, which makes sense for this type of game. Directive 8020 is not an open-world title with massive simulations, hundreds of NPCs, complex destruction systems, or large-scale physics-heavy gameplay. It is a controlled cinematic horror experience, so the processor is not usually the main bottleneck.
The GPU requirement is much more important. Even the minimum tier starts with RTX 2060 or RX 5700-class hardware, while the recommended tier moves into RTX 3070 Ti or RX 6800 territory. That tells players one thing immediately: Directive 8020 is primarily GPU-limited, especially at higher resolutions or when using demanding visual presets.
The good news is that the game handles shader compilation better than many Unreal Engine 5 releases. Directive 8020 includes a pre-gameplay shader compilation process, which helps reduce shader compilation stutter during actual gameplay. In testing, major just-in-time shader stutters were not a big issue, which is a welcome improvement compared to many modern PC releases.
There is one odd behavior, however. The game appears to compile shaders every time it launches. The first compilation pass is the longest, while later ones are faster, but it is still unusual to see the process repeat on every launch. Thankfully, the wait is not extreme on a strong modern CPU.
Traversal stutter is also less of a problem than expected. Many Unreal Engine 5 games suffer from noticeable hitches when loading new areas or streaming assets, but Directive 8020 generally avoids severe traversal stutters. That does not mean performance is perfect, but it does mean the game feels smoother and more stable than some other UE5 titles in this area.
CPU performance is one of the strongest parts of the PC version. A decent six-core processor from the last several years should be more than enough for a good experience. Players using modern CPUs running at 4 GHz or higher should not expect major CPU-related limitations. In most cases, the graphics card will determine performance far more than the processor.
Because of this, the most important optimization work should focus on graphics settings. Running Directive 8020 at the maximum High preset may not be the best option for most players. The visual difference between maxed-out settings and carefully optimized settings may be smaller than expected, while the performance improvement can be much more meaningful.
Players should be especially careful with features tied to heavy Unreal Engine 5 rendering, such as advanced lighting, reflections, shadows, and high-quality global illumination. These settings often have a large impact on GPU usage. Lowering them slightly can improve FPS without making the game look dramatically worse, especially because Directive 8020 relies heavily on atmosphere, framing, and character scenes rather than huge open environments.
Character rendering is one of the game’s visual highlights. Faces, expressions, and close-up performances often look polished and detailed, which is important in a story-driven horror game. Since much of the tension comes from dialogue, fear, suspicion, and emotional reactions, strong character presentation helps sell the experience.
The environments are less consistent. Some areas deliver the dark sci-fi horror mood well, but others feel less visually rich than expected considering the GPU load. This is where optimized settings can help. If you can maintain the game’s strong character detail and atmospheric lighting while reducing expensive background effects, you can achieve a much better balance between visuals and performance.
Directive 8020 also supports HDR, though its implementation appears fairly basic. It works, but it may not stand out as one of the game’s best visual features. Players with HDR displays can still try it, but expectations should be moderate. Depending on your monitor or TV, SDR may sometimes look more consistent if the HDR presentation feels too flat or uneven.
Upscaling support is much stronger. Directive 8020 includes multiple modern upscaling options, making it easier to improve performance without dropping native resolution too aggressively. The game supports Unreal Engine 5’s Temporal Super Resolution, NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FSR upscaling, and Intel XeSS Super Resolution. These options are especially useful at 1440p and 4K, where native rendering can become very demanding.
Traditional TAA does not appear to be offered as a separate option, so players will likely rely on one of the available upscaling or temporal reconstruction methods for anti-aliasing. For NVIDIA RTX users, DLSS is usually the best first choice. AMD and other GPU users can try FSR or XeSS depending on image quality and performance results on their hardware.
Frame generation support is another major advantage. Directive 8020 supports NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation and Multi Frame Generation on compatible hardware. Intel Xe Frame Generation and Multi Frame Generation may also be available through driver-level options on supported Intel Arc GPUs. These technologies can make gameplay feel much smoother, especially when the base frame rate is already stable.
However, frame generation should not be treated as a complete fix for poor performance. For the best results, players should first optimize settings until the game runs at a decent native or upscaled frame rate, then enable frame generation to improve perceived smoothness. If the base frame rate is too low, input latency and uneven pacing may still be noticeable.
Overall, Directive 8020 is a demanding but manageable PC release. It avoids some of the worst Unreal Engine 5 problems, such as heavy shader compilation stutter and constant traversal hitches, but it still places a surprisingly high load on the GPU. The game’s cinematic horror style, strong character rendering, and deep-space atmosphere make it visually appealing, but the High preset is not necessarily the smartest choice for every system.
For the best Directive 8020 PC performance, players should focus on GPU-heavy settings, use DLSS, FSR, XeSS, or TSR where appropriate, and consider frame generation if supported. A balanced setup can deliver smoother FPS while preserving the game’s dark sci-fi mood, detailed characters, and tense survival horror presentation.
Directive 8020 may not be the easiest Unreal Engine 5 game to run, but with the right graphics settings, it can still offer a polished, atmospheric, and engaging horror experience on PC.Directive 8020 PC Graphics Settings Guide: Best Options for Performance and Visual Quality
Directive 8020 gives PC players a solid range of graphics options, including modern upscaling technologies, ray tracing, and path tracing. However, not every feature works equally well, and some settings carry a heavy performance cost without delivering a worthwhile visual upgrade.
Based on testing, the game offers strong visual presentation, efficient VRAM usage, and a useful Unreal Engine 5-style graphics menu. Still, players looking for the best balance between image quality and frame rate will want to fine-tune several settings rather than simply choosing the highest preset.
One key thing to note is that FSR Frame Generation does not appear to be available. The game does support upscaling options such as TSR, DLSS Super Resolution, FSR, and XeSS Super Resolution, but there are some important caveats.
XeSS Super Resolution may not work correctly on all systems. During testing on a GeForce RTX 4090 system, enabling XeSS resulted in a black screen where only the user interface remained visible. Intel Arc users may still want to try XeSS on their own hardware, but based on this test setup, it was not usable.
Ray tracing and path tracing are also included, though both require a game restart after being enabled. Ray tracing appears to add hardware-based Lumen ray tracing for diffuse indirect lighting, also known as global illumination, along with specular indirect lighting for ray-traced reflections.
Path tracing goes further by adding advanced path-traced indirect diffuse and specular lighting using NVIDIA ReSTIR GI. The settings menu also suggests that direct lighting and shadow quality may be affected when path tracing is enabled.
Unfortunately, path tracing is difficult to recommend in its current state. Even with DLSS Ray Reconstruction forced on in Quality mode, the image can appear noisy, blurry, and filled with artifacts. Performance also drops dramatically, with frame rates falling into the low 40s during testing. Even on a very powerful PC, path tracing does not currently feel worth enabling in Directive 8020.
Directive 8020 graphics menu overview
Directive 8020 features a fairly standard Unreal Engine 5 graphics menu, but it includes several welcome additions that PC players will appreciate. The menu displays render and output resolution, CPU and GPU timing metrics, hardware and driver information, current frame rate, frame time, and a useful settings preview feature.
The settings preview option is especially helpful because it allows players to better understand how certain graphics options affect the game before committing to changes. The game also includes detailed descriptions for each graphics setting, which makes optimization much easier.
Another positive point is that Directive 8020 allows players to separately disable chromatic aberration and film grain. This should be standard in modern PC games, but many titles still hide these effects behind general post-processing presets. Giving players individual control is a smart and welcome choice.
VRAM usage and performance expectations
Directive 8020 is fairly efficient with video memory, especially for an Unreal Engine 5 game. Without ray tracing or path tracing enabled, 8 GB to 10 GB of VRAM is enough to run the game at native 1440p using TSR on the High preset.
That is encouraging, especially compared to many recent PC releases that struggle with high VRAM demands. However, ray tracing and path tracing increase memory usage significantly, so players with lower-VRAM GPUs should be cautious when enabling those features.
Test system used for graphics analysis
The graphics settings were tested using a high-end PC configuration:
CPU: Intel Core i7-14700K
RAM: 32 GB DDR5-7000 CL34
Storage: 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Operating system: Windows 11 25H2
All firmware, drivers, BIOS updates, and operating system updates were applied before testing.
Testing was performed at 2560×1440 under GPU-limited conditions. TSR Native was used as the main temporal upscaling and anti-aliasing solution. Motion blur, chromatic aberration, and film grain were disabled to avoid interfering with the visual comparison of other settings.
Unless stated otherwise, the High preset was used as the baseline, with ray tracing and path tracing disabled.
Best upscaling and anti-aliasing method in Directive 8020
Directive 8020 does not appear to offer traditional TAA as a separate anti-aliasing option. Instead, players can choose between TSR, DLSS Super Resolution, FSR upscaling, and XeSS Super Resolution.
The best choice depends on your GPU.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX users should choose DLSS Super Resolution. It delivers the best image quality, strongest temporal stability, and usually the cleanest image overall.
AMD RDNA 4 users should use FSR 4 or FSR 4.1 through the AMD Adrenalin Software driver override if available.
Other AMD GPU users should use the game’s built-in FSR 3.1 upscaling option.
Intel Arc users can try XeSS Super Resolution, though it may not work properly on every system. If XeSS causes issues, FSR 3.1 is the safer fallback option.
For image quality comparisons, the tested upscalers were set to the Quality preset, which renders the game at 67% of the output resolution on each axis. Sharpness was set to 0 across all upscalers to avoid extra sharpening artifacts.
Best recommendation:
NVIDIA RTX GPUs: DLSS Super Resolution
AMD RDNA 4 GPUs: FSR 4 or FSR 4.1 through driver override if available
Other AMD GPUs: FSR 3.1
Intel Arc GPUs: Try XeSS, but use FSR 3.1 if XeSS is broken
Antialiasing Quality
The Antialiasing Quality setting controls the quality of TSR. This means it only matters if you are using TSR as your upscaling or anti-aliasing method.
Lowering this setting to Low provides a noticeable performance improvement without causing a major loss in image quality. Since Directive 8020 can be demanding on the GPU, this is one of the easiest settings to reduce if you want better frame rates.
Players using TSR Native or more aggressive TSR upscaling modes should especially consider lowering this option.
Recommended setting: Low
Shadow Quality
Shadow Quality controls the quality of dynamic shadows and volumetric fog shadows. This is an important setting in Directive 8020 because the game’s dark sci-fi horror atmosphere relies heavily on lighting, shadows, and environmental mood.
As with many Unreal Engine 5 games, higher shadow settings can be expensive. However, lowering this setting too much can noticeably affect the look of the game, especially in scenes with fog, strong contrast, or dramatic lighting.
High offers the best balance between visual quality and performance. It keeps shadows sharp and atmospheric without the heavier cost of the highest setting.
Recommended setting: High
Global Illumination Quality
Global Illumination Quality controls the quality of the game’s Lumen diffuse indirect lighting. When hardware ray tracing is disabled, this lighting system relies on software ray tracing and signed distance field-based geometry proxies.
This is one of the most important settings in Directive 8020 because it affects how light bounces around the environment and how naturally scenes are illuminated. It has a major impact on mood, depth, and realism.
However, the High and Epic settings can be expensive, and the visual improvement is not always large enough to justify the performance hit.
Medium provides the best balance. It preserves the overall lighting style of the higher settings while freeing up a meaningful amount of GPU performance.
Recommended setting: Medium
Reflection Quality
Reflection Quality affects the quality of reflections throughout the game. This can include screen-space reflections and other reflection techniques used by Unreal Engine 5, depending on the scene and whether ray tracing is enabled.
In a sci-fi horror game like Directive 8020, reflections can play an important role in making metallic surfaces, dark corridors, glass, and polished materials feel more believable. However, reflection settings can also become costly, especially when combined with ray tracing.
For most players, keeping reflections at a moderate-to-high setting should provide a good visual experience without wasting too much performance. If you are struggling to maintain a stable frame rate, this is a setting worth lowering after reducing Global Illumination Quality and Antialiasing Quality.
Recommended setting: Medium or High, depending on performance
Should you enable ray tracing in Directive 8020?
Ray tracing can improve the game’s lighting and reflections, especially in scenes with strong indirect light or reflective surfaces. However, it comes with a performance cost and requires a restart after being enabled.
Players with high-end GPUs may want to experiment with ray tracing to see if the visual upgrade is worth the frame rate loss. For mid-range and lower-end systems, it is usually better to leave ray tracing disabled and focus on optimized rasterized settings instead.
Recommended setting for most players: Off
Recommended setting for high-end GPUs: Optional
Should you enable path tracing in Directive 8020?
Path tracing is not recommended right now. Although it sounds impressive on paper, the current implementation produces too many visual issues. The image can look noisy, soft, unstable, and artifact-heavy even with DLSS Ray Reconstruction enabled.
The performance cost is also extremely high. Dropping into the low 40 FPS range on a top-tier graphics card shows that this mode is not practical for normal gameplay.
Unless future updates improve image quality and performance, path tracing should be left disabled.
Recommended setting: Off
Optimized graphics settings for Directive 8020
For the best balance of visuals and performance, these settings are recommended:
Upscaling method:
NVIDIA RTX: DLSS Super Resolution
AMD: FSR 3.1 or FSR 4/4.1 through driver override if available
Intel Arc: XeSS if working, otherwise FSR 3.1
Upscaling quality: Quality
Sharpness: 0 or personal preference
Antialiasing Quality: Low
Shadow Quality: High
Global Illumination Quality: Medium
Reflection Quality: Medium or High
Ray Tracing: Off for most players
Path Tracing: Off
Motion Blur: Off, unless preferred
Chromatic Aberration: Off
Film Grain: Off
Final thoughts
Directive 8020 offers a strong PC graphics menu with useful technical readouts, clear setting descriptions, and a helpful preview feature. It is also reasonably efficient with VRAM at 1440p when ray tracing and path tracing are disabled.
The best experience comes from using the right upscaler for your GPU and carefully adjusting the most demanding settings. DLSS is the best choice for NVIDIA RTX users, while FSR remains the most practical option for most AMD users. Intel Arc players can try XeSS, but may need to fall back to FSR if compatibility issues appear.
Ray tracing can be worth testing on powerful systems, but path tracing should be avoided for now due to poor image quality and very low performance.
For most players, the ideal setup is DLSS or FSR Quality mode, Antialiasing Quality set to Low, Shadows set to High, Global Illumination set to Medium, and path tracing disabled. This configuration keeps Directive 8020 looking atmospheric and visually impressive while delivering a much smoother gameplay experience.Directive 8020 PC optimized graphics settings: best performance without ruining visuals
Directive 8020 is a demanding Unreal Engine 5 game on PC, especially if you start enabling ray tracing or path tracing. The good news is that you can recover a solid amount of performance with the right graphics settings while keeping the game’s cinematic look largely intact.
After testing the main graphics options, the best approach is not simply to push everything to High or Ultra. Some settings cost more performance than they are worth, while others should stay high because lowering them creates noticeable visual issues. Here are the recommended settings for a smoother Directive 8020 PC experience.
Reflection Quality: Low
Reflection Quality controls the game’s Lumen software/SDF ray-traced specular indirect lighting, which is essentially the reflection system.
Surprisingly, Low is often the best-looking option in real gameplay. At Low, Directive 8020 appears to disable Lumen reflections and fall back to screen-space reflections. While screen-space reflections have limitations because they can only reflect objects currently visible on the screen, they often look cleaner and more defined in this game than the noisier software Lumen reflections used at higher settings.
Because the higher reflection options can introduce visible noise without delivering a major visual upgrade, Low is the most sensible choice for both image quality and performance.
Recommended setting: Low
Post-Processing Quality: Low
Post-Processing Quality controls visual effects such as bloom, depth of field, lens flares, motion blur, and other screen-space cinematic effects.
This setting is partly personal preference. Some players like a heavier cinematic image, while others prefer a cleaner presentation. From a performance and image-quality perspective, Low is the best choice. It improves frame rates without seriously harming the overall look of the game.
Directive 8020 also lets players disable individual effects such as motion blur, chromatic aberration, and film grain, which makes it easier to fine-tune the image to personal taste.
Recommended setting: Low
Effects Quality: High
Effects Quality affects elements such as subsurface scattering, sky atmosphere, particles, and other visual effects.
This is one setting you should not reduce too aggressively. Dropping it to Low can remove important visual details, such as visible water droplets on the hypersleep pod. That kind of change can make scenes look flatter and less atmospheric.
High is the best balance. It preserves the intended presentation of the game’s effects without wasting performance by maxing everything out unnecessarily.
Recommended setting: High
Texture Quality: High
Texture Quality is slightly misleading in Directive 8020. Instead of dramatically changing texture resolution, it seems to affect the texture streaming pool and texture filtering quality.
Testing showed no major VRAM usage difference between the available settings, but lowering Texture Quality can reduce filtering quality. Since Directive 8020 is reasonably efficient with video memory when ray tracing and path tracing are disabled, most players with a capable GPU should leave this at High.
Recommended setting: High
Ray Tracing: Off
Ray tracing in Directive 8020 enables hardware Lumen ray tracing for diffuse global illumination and ray-traced reflections. In theory, this should improve lighting and reflection accuracy. In practice, the performance cost is too high for most systems.
The game is already GPU-heavy without ray tracing. Turning RT on can make performance much harder to manage, especially at higher resolutions. Players with very powerful graphics cards may want to experiment, but most users are better off keeping it disabled.
Ray tracing is only worth considering if you have a high-end GPU, such as an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, AMD Radeon RX 9070, or something faster, and you are comfortable using upscaling or frame generation to recover performance.
Recommended setting: Off
Path Tracing: Off
Path tracing is the most demanding graphics option in Directive 8020, and unfortunately, it is not worth using in its current state.
It carries a massive performance cost and can produce an image that looks noisy, blurry, unstable, and filled with artifacts. Even on very powerful hardware, performance can fall hard, making the setting impractical for normal play.
Path tracing is supposed to be the premium rendering mode, but in Directive 8020 it currently feels too unstable and too expensive to recommend.
Recommended setting: Off
DLSS Ray Reconstruction: Off for most players
DLSS Ray Reconstruction can work with path tracing and, in some cases, with Lumen ray tracing. When functioning properly, it can improve ray-traced lighting and reflections by reducing noise and increasing stability.
However, it also comes with a noticeable performance hit. Since Directive 8020 is already demanding, this is not a setting most players should enable by default.
If you are using a high-end GeForce RTX 40 or RTX 50 Series GPU and are specifically playing with ray tracing enabled, it may be worth testing. For optimized performance settings, leave it off.
Recommended setting: Off, unless using hardware ray tracing and prioritizing ray-traced image quality over performance
Best optimized graphics settings for Directive 8020 on PC
For the best balance between performance and visuals, use the following settings:
Upscaling / Anti-Aliasing Method: Depends on your GPU
Antialiasing Quality: Low
Shadow Quality: High
Global Illumination Quality: Medium
Reflection Quality: Low
Post-Processing Quality: Low
Effects Quality: High
Texture Quality: High
Ray Tracing: Off
DLSS Ray Reconstruction: Off, unless specifically using hardware ray tracing for better ray-traced image quality
Path Tracing: Off
For upscaling, NVIDIA GeForce RTX users should use DLSS Super Resolution. AMD users should use the best available FSR option for their GPU, while Intel Arc users can try XeSS Super Resolution if it works properly on their system. Other modern GPU users should use FSR 3.1 when available.
Performance improvement with optimized settings
Using the optimized settings provides a meaningful performance boost compared to the High preset, with ray tracing and path tracing disabled in both cases.
On the tested system, the High preset delivered an average of 143 FPS, with 1% lows of 124 FPS and 0.1% lows of 119 FPS.
With the optimized graphics settings, average performance increased to 176 FPS, with 1% lows reaching 143 FPS and 0.1% lows improving to 138 FPS.
That means the optimized settings improved average FPS by around 23%. The 1% lows improved by about 15%, and the 0.1% lows improved by around 16%. This is a strong uplift, especially because the game was already GPU-bound at native 1440p.
Even so, these results also show that Directive 8020 is heavier than expected. The game still demands a lot from the GPU relative to its visual output, particularly with ray tracing and path tracing turned off.
Final thoughts
Directive 8020 is a mixed PC release from a technical perspective. On the positive side, it has an effective shader compilation process, rare traversal stutters, strong CPU performance, broad upscaling and frame generation support, and a useful graphics menu with clear descriptions. It also gives players separate toggles for effects like chromatic aberration and film grain, which is always welcome.
The downside is that the game is more GPU-demanding than it should be. Character models can look excellent, and the cinematic direction is strong, but the environments and overall visual complexity do not always justify the performance cost.
Ray tracing can improve some scenes, but it is too expensive for most players. Path tracing is even harder to recommend because it hurts performance heavily while producing a noisy and unstable image.
Fortunately, Directive 8020 avoids many of the stuttering problems often associated with Unreal Engine 5 games. With the right settings, it can run much smoother without losing the core visual identity of the game.
For most PC players, the best Directive 8020 settings are simple: keep Shadows, Effects, and Textures high, lower Reflections and Post-Processing, use a suitable upscaler, and leave ray tracing and path tracing turned off.
