The Sinking City 2 PC Performance Guide: Best Settings, System Requirements, and Unreal Engine 5 Features
Pushing every graphics option to Ultra is not always the smartest way to play a modern Unreal Engine 5 game, and The Sinking City 2 proves that very clearly. Frogwares’ return to its eerie Lovecraftian universe brings impressive lighting, dense atmosphere, and a haunting flooded city to explore, but the PC version can be extremely demanding on the GPU.
The Ultra preset is especially heavy, and the visual upgrade it provides often does not justify the performance cost. Even more interesting is that many individual graphics options barely change image quality or frame rate, meaning players need to be careful about which settings they adjust.
That said, The Sinking City 2 is not a broken PC release. In several important areas, it performs better than many Unreal Engine 5 titles. Shader compilation stutter, one of the biggest problems associated with UE5 games, is handled surprisingly well here. Traversal through Arkham is also generally smooth, though the game’s CPU behavior can be inconsistent, and its GPU requirements are undeniably high.
The Sinking City 2 gameplay and setting
The Sinking City 2 launched on August 18, 2026, for PC through Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Developed and published by Frogwares, it is a third-person survival horror game set in a flooded version of 1920s Arkham.
Unlike the first game, which focused heavily on detective work and investigation, the sequel moves much deeper into survival horror territory. Players must manage limited resources, fight terrifying enemies, solve puzzles, upgrade weapons, and explore dangerous environments filled with supernatural threats. Optional investigations still exist, but the overall experience is darker, more combat-focused, and more intense.
The story follows Calvin Rafferty, an occult adventurer searching for a way to save his girlfriend, Faye, after a ritual leaves her trapped in a mysterious sleep. Arkham itself is one of the game’s biggest stars. Its drowned streets, abandoned vehicles, decaying interiors, and early-20th-century buildings create a strong sense of place. Boats are essential for moving through many areas, and players frequently shift between exploring on foot and navigating the city’s waterways.
As new paths, shortcuts, and routes become available, previously visited locations can be revisited, giving the world a more interconnected survival horror structure.
Unreal Engine 5.8 features in The Sinking City 2
The Sinking City 2 runs on Unreal Engine 5.8 and uses several of the engine’s major rendering technologies. These include hardware Lumen ray-traced global illumination and reflections, Nanite virtualized geometry, MegaLights, and Virtual Shadow Maps.
Medium settings and above use hardware Lumen for both global illumination and reflections. This is important because the Low modes for these settings can look noticeably worse and, in some cases, visually incomplete. Players trying to gain performance by dropping these options too far may end up with an image that feels broken rather than simply less detailed.
When the game looks good, it can look very good. The wet streets, gloomy interiors, foggy atmosphere, and decaying architecture benefit from Unreal Engine 5’s lighting and geometry systems. Arkham has a heavy, oppressive mood that fits the Lovecraftian horror theme well.
However, The Sinking City 2 is not one of the most visually stunning Unreal Engine 5 showcases. Considering how demanding it is, the final image quality does not always feel equal to the GPU power required. This is especially true when using the Ultra preset, which can cost a lot of performance without delivering a dramatic visual improvement over more reasonable settings.
Shader compilation stutter is handled well
One of the most positive technical aspects of The Sinking City 2 is its shader compilation behavior. Many Unreal Engine 5 PC games suffer from shader stutter, where the game briefly freezes or hitches when new effects, areas, or objects appear. The Sinking City 2 largely avoids this issue.
The game does not include a traditional dedicated shader pre-compilation screen. Instead, it compiles shaders during the initial boot process when the shader cache is cold or empty. If the player attempts to load a save before this is finished, compilation continues during the loading screen. The save file will not open until the required shaders are processed.
This approach is unusual, but it works well. In testing, obvious shader compilation stutters were rare. Traversal hitches were also uncommon, although some occasional spikes appeared while moving quickly through Arkham by boat. These brief frame-time jumps can reach the 20 to 30 millisecond range, but on a capable PC with a variable refresh rate display, they should not ruin the experience.
Players with weaker CPUs, slower storage, or limited system memory may notice these hitches more often. Still, compared with many other Unreal Engine 5 releases, The Sinking City 2 does a good job of preventing shader stutter from becoming a major problem.
Missing PC features
The PC version does have some disappointing omissions. HDR is not supported, which is unfortunate for a horror game with so many dark interiors, moody lighting setups, and high-contrast scenes. A good HDR implementation could have made Arkham’s atmosphere even more striking.
The graphics menu also lacks a field-of-view slider. This is a noticeable issue because the default camera can feel too narrow, especially during exploration and combat. A field-of-view option would make the game more comfortable for many PC players.
Upscaling support is also uneven. The game includes DLSS Super Resolution and Unreal Engine 5’s TSR, but there is no DLAA option. AMD FSR is listed in the menu, but it was not functional at launch. Frogwares has explained that FSR support was unavailable because the required Unreal Engine 5.8 plugin or patch had not yet been released. The studio plans to add FSR once the needed support becomes available.
Intel XeSS Super Resolution is also missing. At the moment, this leaves non-NVIDIA users with fewer high-quality upscaling choices.
For GeForce RTX owners, DLSS Super Resolution is clearly the best option. It provides better image quality and better performance than the game’s native-resolution TSR implementation. In comparisons, TSR looked noticeably worse than DLSS Quality mode while also running slower, suggesting that TSR may not be working as effectively as it should.
Frame generation support is similarly limited. DLSS Frame Generation and Multi Frame Generation are the only native frame generation options currently available. Compatible NVIDIA hardware can also access newer DLSS features through the NVIDIA app. AMD and Intel GPU owners do not currently have a native frame generation alternative in the game.
Future updates would benefit greatly from proper FSR upscaling, FSR frame generation, XeSS Super Resolution, XeSS frame generation, DLAA, HDR, and a field-of-view slider. Right now, GeForce RTX players receive a much stronger feature set than everyone else.
The Sinking City 2 PC system requirements
The official PC requirements confirm that The Sinking City 2 is a demanding game.
Minimum requirements target 1080p at 30 FPS using the Low preset. The listed CPU options are an Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X. The listed GPUs are an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 with 8 GB of VRAM. The game also requires 16 GB of RAM, 70 GB of SSD storage, Windows 11 64-bit, and DirectX 12. The target is tested with TSR or similar reconstruction technologies.
Recommended requirements target 1440p at 60 FPS using the Medium preset. The recommended CPUs are an Intel Core i5-14600K or AMD Ryzen 5 7600X. The recommended GPUs are an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT with 12 GB of VRAM. The recommended memory requirement rises to 32 GB of RAM, with the same 70 GB SSD storage requirement, Windows 11 64-bit, and DirectX 12 support.
These requirements are high, especially for a 1440p 60 FPS target at only Medium settings. The fact that this target uses TSR or similar upscaling also means the internal rendering resolution is likely lower than native 1440p, though the exact quality mode is not specified.
The jump from 16 GB to 32 GB of RAM is also notable. While 16 GB may be enough to run the game at lower settings, 32 GB is clearly the safer choice for smoother performance, especially in a large Unreal Engine 5 environment.
The recommended GPU list also shows how demanding the game can be. An RTX 4070 Ti or RX 7900 XT for Medium settings at 1440p is a serious requirement, and players aiming for higher resolutions, higher presets, or ray-traced lighting at better frame rates will need powerful hardware.
Best graphics settings approach for The Sinking City 2
The most important advice is simple: avoid blindly using the Ultra preset. Ultra is very expensive and does not provide a large enough visual upgrade to make it worthwhile for most players.
A better strategy is to start from the Medium or High preset, then adjust from there. Because many settings do not meaningfully improve performance when lowered, players should focus on the options that have the biggest impact and avoid reducing settings that damage the image too much.
Global illumination and reflections should be handled carefully. Since Medium and higher settings activate hardware Lumen, dropping these too low can make the game look noticeably worse. Low modes may create visual issues rather than a clean performance-friendly presentation. For most players, Medium is likely the better minimum target for these lighting-related settings.
GeForce RTX users should use DLSS Super Resolution instead of TSR whenever possible. DLSS Quality mode is a strong choice at 1440p and 4K, while Balanced or Performance modes can help weaker GPUs or higher-resolution displays. Based on image quality and performance, DLSS is currently the best upscaler available in the game.
Players using AMD or Intel GPUs may need to rely on TSR until more upscaling options are added. However, TSR appears less efficient and less clean than DLSS in this game, so non-NVIDIA users may need to be more conservative with resolution and graphics settings.
If frame generation is available on your NVIDIA GPU, it can help smooth out the experience, especially in GPU-limited scenarios. However, it should not be used as a replacement for good base performance. For the best results, try to maintain a stable native or upscaled frame rate first, then enable frame generation if input latency remains acceptable.
Suggested optimized settings
For a balanced experience, players should consider using High or Medium settings instead of Ultra, with particular caution around Lumen-related options. Keep global illumination and reflections at Medium or higher if possible, use DLSS Quality on supported NVIDIA GPUs, and lower resolution scaling before sacrificing core lighting quality too aggressively.
For 1080p, start with the Medium preset and use TSR or DLSS Quality if needed. If performance is still low, reduce non-essential visual options first before lowering lighting settings to Low.
For 1440p, use DLSS Quality on RTX GPUs and target a mix of Medium and High settings. Avoid Ultra unless you have a very powerful GPU and enough headroom.
For 4K, DLSS is strongly recommended on NVIDIA hardware. Balanced mode may provide a better performance-to-image-quality ratio than native rendering or TSR. Ultra settings are likely too costly for most systems.
For handheld PCs and lower-end GPUs, The Sinking City 2 may be difficult to run smoothly due to its heavy GPU demands and Unreal Engine 5 feature set. Lower resolutions, TSR, and Medium or Low settings may be required, though lowering some Lumen-related options too far can hurt visual quality significantly.
Overall PC performance impressions
The Sinking City 2 is a technically interesting PC release. It is not perfectly optimized, and its GPU requirements are steep, but it avoids some of the most frustrating Unreal Engine 5 problems. Shader compilation is handled better than expected, traversal is mostly smooth, and the game can look atmospheric and immersive in the right conditions.
At the same time, the Ultra preset is difficult to recommend. The performance cost is too high for the visual improvement it offers, and many individual settings do not scale as effectively as players might hope. The lack of HDR, no field-of-view slider, limited upscaling support, and NVIDIA-focused frame generation options also make the PC version feel incomplete in some areas.
For the best experience, players should use optimized settings rather than maxing everything out. The Sinking City 2 benefits from a careful balance of Medium and High options, smart use of upscaling, and realistic expectations about Unreal Engine 5’s hardware demands.
With future updates, the game could become a much stronger PC release. Adding proper FSR support, XeSS, DLAA, HDR, and an FoV slider would improve accessibility and image quality for a wider range of players. For now, The Sinking City 2 is a demanding but playable survival horror title that rewards thoughtful graphics tuning more than brute-force Ultra settings.The Sinking City 2 PC Performance Analysis: CPU Benchmarks, Graphics Settings, DLSS, TSR, and Best Settings
The Sinking City 2 is a demanding Unreal Engine 5 horror adventure, and early PC performance testing suggests that players using hardware close to the minimum specifications should be ready to depend heavily on temporal upscaling. The graphics menu offers several familiar options, but most of them provide very little real-world performance scaling below the Ultra preset.
That means lowering traditional settings may not deliver the large frame-rate gains many PC players expect. Instead, the biggest performance improvements come from upscaling technologies such as DLSS Super Resolution or TSR, depending on your GPU.
CPU performance in The Sinking City 2
To evaluate CPU performance, we tested a traversal-heavy section rather than a static scene. The Sinking City 2 does not rely on massive crowds or complex physics systems in the same way some open-world games do, so standing still in one location would not provide a useful look at CPU behavior.
Instead, the benchmark focused on rapid asset streaming. The test involved driving Calvin’s boat at high speed through the canals in the center of the flooded city. This type of movement forces the game to constantly load geometry, textures, lighting data, and world assets, making it a better test for CPU, memory, and storage performance.
The benchmark was captured using CapFrameX under CPU-limited conditions.
The test system used an Intel Core i7-14700K, 32 GB of DDR5-7000 CL34 memory, a 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB, and Windows 11 25H2. All firmware, BIOS, driver, and operating system updates were installed before testing.
The results were mixed. Average frame rates were strong, but the 1% lows and especially the 0.1% lows were lower than expected. Frame-time data showed occasional spikes in the 20 to 25 millisecond range, which dragged down those low-percentile numbers.
In actual gameplay, however, the experience was smoother than the chart might suggest. The worst spikes were only mildly noticeable on a good variable refresh rate display. Still, these results are worth noting because weaker CPUs, slower system memory, or slower storage devices may show more obvious stutters during fast traversal.
Another interesting issue appeared during testing: occasional periods of unusually high CPU usage with no clear visual or gameplay cause. These spikes sometimes happened repeatedly in the same area, even when no new effects or assets were obviously appearing. That makes background shader compilation seem less likely as the only explanation.
On the Core i7-14700K, the impact was not severe, but lower-end processors could be affected more noticeably. This is something the developer may need to investigate further through optimization updates.
The Sinking City 2 also appears to use many CPU cores, but at very high frame rates, the limiting factor may not be core count alone. Like many modern games, performance may depend heavily on the CPU memory subsystem, including cache performance, memory latency, and memory bandwidth.
That means AMD Ryzen X3D processors and well-tuned Intel Core 12th Gen or newer systems with fast DDR5 memory could perform especially well in CPU-limited scenarios.
Graphics settings in The Sinking City 2
The graphics settings were tested under GPU-limited conditions at 2560×1440 using the Ultra preset as the baseline. TSR was set to native resolution, and motion blur was disabled to make visual comparisons clearer.
The game does not include a field-of-view slider, so all testing used the default gameplay and camera field of view. The same test area was used where possible, while GPU usage, frame rate, frame time, and dedicated GPU memory usage were monitored through a CapFrameX and RTSS overlay.
The graphics menu is functional but basic. It includes descriptions for the main visual options, but it does not offer a live comparison preview, real-time frame-rate display, CPU or GPU frame-time readout, system information, or VRAM and system RAM estimates.
Those features would be especially helpful because The Sinking City 2 is highly demanding on the GPU and does not offer much performance recovery through normal quality settings.
The biggest issue is scalability. Most graphics options produced little to no measurable change in image quality or frame rate. As a result, players with high-end systems cannot push visuals far beyond the default presentation, while players with lower-end GPUs cannot gain much performance by simply lowering standard settings.
Because of this, temporal upscaling is the main path to better performance. Frame generation can also help perceived smoothness on supported GeForce RTX graphics cards, but it works best when the base frame rate is already high enough to keep latency and image stability under control.
Anti-aliasing and temporal upscaling
The Sinking City 2 supports DLSS Super Resolution and Unreal Engine 5’s TSR. AMD FSR appeared in the menu during testing but could not be enabled, while Intel XeSS was not available.
For GeForce RTX users, DLSS Super Resolution is clearly the best option. It delivered better image quality and better performance than TSR in testing. At 1440p and 4K, DLSS Quality mode should be the first setting to try. DLSS Balanced or Performance should only be used if extra performance is truly needed.
AMD Radeon and Intel Arc users currently need to rely on TSR unless they use an external workaround.
Best choice: DLSS Super Resolution for GeForce RTX GPUs. TSR for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc GPUs.
View Distance
View Distance controls how far objects are rendered into the scene. In a game with flooded streets, open spaces, and boat traversal, this setting should theoretically matter, especially when distant objects and geometry are constantly entering the frame.
In practice, lowering View Distance produced no meaningful performance gain and no worthwhile visual trade-off. Since reducing it does not appear to help frame rate, leaving it at Ultra makes the most sense.
Best setting: Ultra
Anti-Aliasing quality
The Anti-Aliasing setting affects the quality of Unreal Engine 5’s TSR. It does not choose the upscaling method itself. Instead, it influences temporal reconstruction quality when TSR is being used.
Medium offered the best balance during testing. Low reduced image stability, while High and Ultra did not improve TSR enough to justify the extra GPU cost. This setting does not matter if DLSS Super Resolution is enabled.
Best setting: Medium when using TSR
Post-Processing
Post-Processing affects effects such as bloom, vignette, motion blur, depth of field, and similar image treatments. Some of these are subjective, especially motion blur, which was disabled for testing.
Changing the overall Post-Processing quality level did not produce a meaningful performance or image-quality difference in the tested scenes. Because of that, Ultra is the safest recommendation, while individual effects should be adjusted based on personal preference if the game allows it.
Best setting: Ultra
Textures
The Textures setting should control texture detail and streaming quality, but testing showed no obvious difference in texture fidelity or dedicated VRAM usage between the available levels. It is possible that differences only appear on specific assets or after longer play sessions, but during comparison testing, the setting behaved almost as if it had little effect.
Based on measured VRAM behavior, an 8 GB graphics card should be suitable for 1440p with Ultra textures. For 1080p, 6 GB appears reasonable, while 4K users should ideally have 10 GB or more.
These are not absolute guarantees. Output resolution, upscaling mode, background applications, driver behavior, and future patches can all affect VRAM usage.
There is currently little reason to lower Textures unless your GPU is clearly running out of video memory. If you experience heavy stuttering, delayed texture loading, or VRAM-related performance drops, then reducing texture quality may help.
Best setting: Ultra, unless your GPU has limited VRAM
Overall best settings for The Sinking City 2
The Sinking City 2 is not a game where lowering every setting dramatically improves performance. The visual options are limited in practical impact, and many settings show little measurable difference between quality levels.
For most players, the best approach is to keep many options near Ultra and focus on the upscaling mode instead.
GeForce RTX users should start with DLSS Quality at 1440p or 4K. If performance is still too low, move to DLSS Balanced. DLSS Performance should be saved for more demanding resolutions or weaker GPUs.
Radeon and Intel Arc users should use TSR, though its image quality and performance are not as strong as DLSS in the current version.
View Distance can remain on Ultra. Post-Processing can remain on Ultra. Textures can also stay on Ultra if your GPU has enough VRAM. TSR Anti-Aliasing should be set to Medium if DLSS is not being used.
Final thoughts
The Sinking City 2 delivers a visually dense, atmospheric horror experience, but its PC performance profile is unusual. The game can achieve high average frame rates on powerful hardware, yet traversal-related frame-time spikes and occasional CPU usage surges suggest that optimization could still improve.
The bigger concern is GPU scalability. The graphics menu does not currently offer enough meaningful options for players trying to tune performance manually. Most traditional settings have little effect, which means temporal upscaling is almost mandatory for many systems.
For high-end PCs, The Sinking City 2 can run smoothly with the right settings. For lower-end systems, especially those close to the minimum requirements, aggressive use of upscaling will likely be necessary. Future patches could improve CPU behavior, expand upscaling support, and make the graphics settings more useful, but in its current state, DLSS and TSR are the most important performance tools available.The Sinking City 2 Optimized PC Settings: Best Graphics Options for Higher FPS
The Sinking City 2 is a visually heavy Unreal Engine 5 survival horror game, and its PC version can push modern GPUs hard. While the Ultra preset delivers the full visual package, it is not always the smartest choice for smooth gameplay. Some settings barely affect performance, while others cost a noticeable amount of FPS without adding much to the experience during normal play.
After testing the main graphics options, the best approach is to keep the settings that preserve the game’s dark, atmospheric presentation at higher levels, while lowering only the options that provide meaningful performance gains. With the right combination, The Sinking City 2 can run noticeably smoother without losing the eerie mood, detailed environments, and cinematic lighting that define its horror style.
Best optimized graphics settings for The Sinking City 2
For the best balance between image quality and performance, use the following settings:
Anti-Aliasing / Upscaling Method: DLSS Super Resolution for GeForce RTX GPUs; TSR for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc GPUs
View Distance: Ultra
Anti-Aliasing: Medium
Post-Processing: Ultra
Textures: Ultra
Effects: Medium
Foliage: Ultra
Reflections: High
Global Illumination: Medium
Shading: High
Hair: High
This optimized preset keeps the game looking close to Ultra while reducing the settings that place the biggest unnecessary load on the GPU. View Distance, Post-Processing, Textures, and Foliage can safely stay at Ultra because lowering them did not provide worthwhile performance improvements in testing.
GeForce RTX users should use DLSS Super Resolution whenever possible, as it provides better image quality and performance than TSR in this game. If the base frame rate is already stable and the monitor has enough refresh-rate headroom, DLSS Frame Generation or Multi Frame Generation can also improve perceived smoothness. AMD Radeon and Intel Arc users currently have to rely on TSR, which is less ideal due to its image quality and performance limitations.
Effects: Best setting is Medium
Effects controls the quality of visual elements such as particles, supernatural combat effects, environmental atmosphere, weather, and other scene-enhancing details. In a survival horror game like The Sinking City 2, these effects matter because they help sell the tension, mystery, and otherworldly tone of the world.
That said, Ultra is not always necessary. Medium offers the best compromise because it improves performance while keeping the game’s combat and environmental effects visually convincing. Dropping it too low can make busy encounters feel flatter and less atmospheric, so Medium is the recommended setting for most players.
Recommended setting: Medium
Foliage: Best setting is Ultra
Foliage changes the quality of vegetation, but The Sinking City 2 is mostly set in a dense urban environment rather than a plant-heavy open world. Because of that, this setting has a smaller impact than it would in a game with forests, fields, or large natural landscapes.
Testing showed no meaningful visual or performance difference between the available foliage settings. Since lowering it does not deliver a useful FPS boost, there is no reason to reduce it.
Recommended setting: Ultra
Reflections: Best setting is High
Reflections is one of the more important settings in The Sinking City 2 because Medium and higher levels use hardware Lumen ray-traced reflections. This means the setting affects more than just basic reflection resolution; it plays a major role in how believable wet surfaces, dark interiors, and reflective materials appear.
The Low option should be avoided because reflections can look noticeably broken. High is the best choice because it keeps the intended Lumen-based look while cutting some of the extra cost of Ultra. In regular gameplay, the difference between High and Ultra is hard to notice, making High the smarter option.
Recommended setting: High
Global Illumination: Best setting is Medium
Global Illumination controls indirect lighting and ambient occlusion, both of which are crucial for the game’s horror atmosphere. Like reflections, Medium and higher settings use hardware Lumen ray tracing.
Low is not recommended because it can severely damage the lighting presentation and make scenes look visually incorrect. Medium keeps hardware Lumen enabled and preserves the overall mood of the game without paying the heavier performance cost of High or Ultra. The higher settings can look slightly better in certain scenes, but the improvement is not significant enough to justify the FPS loss for most players.
Recommended setting: Medium
Shading: Best setting is High
Shading affects the quality of shadows, lighting, and reflections. Its description overlaps somewhat with other graphics options, which makes its exact impact harder to isolate. However, in testing, High delivered the best overall balance.
High looks very close to Ultra while helping improve performance as part of the optimized settings profile. Going lower did not offer an appealing enough visual trade-off, so High is the ideal setting for players who want strong image quality and better FPS.
Recommended setting: High
Hair: Best setting is High
Hair controls the quality of character hair rendering. Ultra enables real-time hair strands, which look impressive but are more demanding on the GPU.
For actual gameplay, High is the better choice. It avoids the heavier Ultra hair-strand rendering while still keeping character hair believable at normal camera distances. Unless you are focusing heavily on close-up character detail, High offers the best balance.
Recommended setting: High
Textures: Best setting is Ultra
Textures should remain at Ultra if your graphics card has enough VRAM. Lowering texture quality usually does not provide a major performance boost unless the GPU is running out of memory. If you are not seeing clear VRAM-related problems such as hitching, stuttering, or slow texture loading, Ultra is the best option.
Recommended setting: Ultra
Post-Processing: Best setting is Ultra
Post-processing contributes to the game’s cinematic presentation, including effects that shape the final image. Since lowering this option does not bring a meaningful performance improvement, it is best left at Ultra to preserve the intended visual style.
Recommended setting: Ultra
View Distance: Best setting is Ultra
View Distance determines how far objects and details are rendered in the environment. In The Sinking City 2, lowering this setting did not provide a worthwhile performance gain during testing. Keeping it at Ultra helps maintain scene detail and prevents unnecessary visual cutbacks.
Recommended setting: Ultra
Anti-Aliasing: Best setting is Medium
Anti-Aliasing affects edge smoothness and image stability. Medium provides a good balance between visual quality and performance. It helps reduce jagged edges without adding unnecessary GPU cost.
Recommended setting: Medium
Ultra preset vs optimized settings
To measure the benefit of these optimized graphics settings, performance was compared against the Ultra preset in a GPU-limited 1440p test scene with TSR enabled at native resolution.
The results were:
Ultra Preset
Average FPS: 102
1% Low FPS: 87
0.1% Low FPS: 76
Optimized Settings
Average FPS: 120
1% Low FPS: 98
0.1% Low FPS: 86
Performance improvement
Average FPS: 18% higher
1% lows: 13% higher
0.1% lows: 13% higher
The optimized settings raised average performance from 102 FPS to 120 FPS, which is an 18% improvement. The 1% lows increased from 87 FPS to 98 FPS, while the 0.1% lows improved from 76 FPS to 86 FPS. Both percentile results improved by 13%, meaning gameplay should feel smoother and more consistent.
This is a useful performance gain, though not a dramatic transformation. The reason is simple: The Sinking City 2 does not scale very well across many of its graphics settings. Several options barely affect performance at all, leaving Anti-Aliasing, Effects, Reflections, Global Illumination, Shading, and Hair as the main settings that can produce meaningful gains.
The good news is that the visual downgrade is small during normal gameplay. Because hardware Lumen remains enabled for reflections and global illumination, the game keeps its moody lighting, reflective surfaces, and atmospheric horror presentation.
What to do if you still need more FPS
If the optimized settings are not enough, the next step is to lower internal resolution using DLSS Super Resolution or TSR. Lowering traditional graphics settings further may not help much because many of them offer limited scalability.
For GeForce RTX users, DLSS Super Resolution is the best option. It can improve performance while maintaining better image quality than TSR. Frame Generation can also help smoothness if your base FPS is already acceptable.
For AMD Radeon and Intel Arc users, TSR is currently the main option. Unfortunately, it does not deliver the same quality or performance as stronger upscaling alternatives, so players on those GPUs may have fewer tools for improving frame rate without reducing image quality.
PC performance overview
The Sinking City 2 is a demanding Unreal Engine 5 game, especially on the GPU side. However, it handles shader compilation better than many other games using the same engine. Obvious shader stutter was rare in testing, and traversal hitches were not frequent enough to ruin the experience, especially on a VRR display.
CPU performance is less predictable. Average FPS can be high, but occasional frame-time spikes may appear during fast boat traversal. These spikes can reduce 1% and 0.1% lows, making the game feel less consistent in certain moments. There are also occasional bursts of heavy CPU activity that may affect players with lower-end processors.
The PC version would also benefit from more features. A demanding modern release like this should ideally include proper FSR and XeSS support, HDR, DLAA, and a field-of-view slider. The lack of stronger upscaling options for AMD and Intel users is especially disappointing because TSR does not look or perform as well as it should.
Final thoughts
The Sinking City 2 is visually atmospheric but demanding, and its Ultra preset is not the most efficient way to play. Many settings offer little to no performance benefit when lowered, but a few key adjustments can make a real difference.
Using the optimized settings listed above improves average FPS by 18% and raises 1% and 0.1% lows by 13%, all while keeping the game’s dark, unsettling visual identity intact. Reflections and global illumination still use hardware Lumen, textures remain sharp, and the overall presentation stays close to Ultra.
For the best experience, use DLSS Super Resolution on a GeForce RTX GPU. If you are playing on AMD Radeon or Intel Arc hardware, TSR is currently the available fallback. With these optimized graphics settings, The Sinking City 2 becomes smoother, more balanced, and better suited for extended PC gameplay without sacrificing the horror atmosphere that makes the game stand out.
