Devil May Cry 5: Graphics Options and Settings

Devil May Cry 5’s graphics options include a list of many varying features. Included are your regular settings such as Texture Quality and Shadow Quality while also including other extra settings that you can tune, some even to personal preference! Available settings are:

Setting explanations here will be separated into different sections, but settings will also be collected into one section if it fits. Texture related settings are going to be in the same section, while shadow and effects related settings would be separated.

Screen Resolution allows you to decide how many pixels are visible on the screen display. When it’s down to image quality, higher screen resolutions is better. In the reverse, lowering screen resolution will reduce image quality but will provide better performance. However, you may find that going beyond a certain resolution will be too demanding your system to manage. This is where you do some testing to see what your systems can handle.

Smaller screen resolutions require less graphics card memory (VRAM) while larger screen resolutions require more graphics card memory.

On minimum hardware specifications, the suggested resolution setting is 1920×1080 @ Lowest settings. On recommended hardware specifications, the suggested resolution is 1920×1080 @ High/Ultra settings.

Console Resolution Comparisons:

• PlayStation 4: 1920×1080 – 1080p (Native)
• PlayStation 4 Pro: 3200 x 1800 – 1800p (Reconstructed)
• Xbox One: 1920×1080 – 1080p (Reconstructed)
• Xbox One X: 3840×2160 – 2160p (Native – Interlacing enabled)

Refresh Rate allows you to adjust the refresh rate of your monitor while you’re playing the game. It is suggested you turn this up to the highest number your monitor can provide or the highest the game will let you set. For many players, this number will be 60.00 Hz.

It is suggested you attempt to have your framerate match this number or exceed it for the smoothest experience.

Adjusting the display mode will allow you to choose between your preferred viewing for the game application. Fullscreen mode has a higher chance of offering better performance while Borderless Fullscreen and Window mode are suitable for those who may want to alt-tab quicker or would just prefer these modes of viewing.

Available Options

• Fullscreen
• Borderless Fullscreen
• Window

Adjusting the Frame Rate setting will allow you to choose between ’60’ and ‘Variable’. Setting this to 60 will limit your framerate to 60 frames per second while selecting ‘Variable’ will not set a framerate limit and will allow the game to display at as many frames as your PC is capable of putting out.

Available Options

• 60
• Variable

Selecting 60 may be viable for those who have fluctuating frame rates and would like a more consistent experience over pure higher framerate. Devil May Cry 5 is designed around 60 frames per second, so do not fret about setting this option to 60 if you want to.

V-Sync stands for Vertical Synchronisation. This setting limits your framerate to your monitors refresh rate, which is more often than not around 60 Hz which would mean 60 FPS is the maximum your monitor can display for a more stable experience and to reduce screen tearing. Players in search of performance should disable this setting and players in search of reduced screen tearing should enable this setting.

Available Options

• On
• Off

Using the Enhanced Sync option alongside FreeSync for AMD GPU players should provide an even smoother experience with this setting enabled.

Adjusting this setting will allow you to choose between Progressive (labelled ‘Normal’ in-game) and Interlaced rendering methods. It is suggested that for clear image quality and not too much of a performance impact on resolutions below 2560×1440, ‘Normal’ is utilised.

For those trying to aim for higher resolutions but cannot sustain stable or desired framerate on such resolutions, try using Interlaced rendering. You will see a reduction in image quality, however at a much less reduction than that of lowering Screen Resolution or the Resolution Scaling option.

Available Options

• Normal
• Interlaced

This setting when set to Interlaced may reduce VRAM usage slightly.

Adjusting resolution scaling is a great way to play at a resolution you would like while also offloading the cost of such a resolution to some extent. You can use this to increase image quality or degrade image quality and achieve higher framerates.

3840 x 2160 @ 100% Resolution Scaling = 2160p / True 4K
3840 x 2160 @ 50% Resolution Scaling = 1080p (will still suffer a bit of a performance loss over 1080p though! So keep this in mind)

Available Options

• 50%
• 60%
• 70%
• 80%
• 90%
• 100% (default)
• 110%
• 120%
• 130%
• 140%
• 150%
• 160%
• 170%
• 180%
• 190%
• 200%

Increasing this option will increase VRAM consumption while decreasing this option will decrease VRAM consumption.

Adjusting the texture quality of a model will adjust the resolution of textures applied to all models in the game. Increasing the quality of textures will increase VRAM consumption greatly, while decreasing the quality of textures will decrease VRAM consumption greatly.

Ensure your GPU has enough VRAM to use the settings you’re playing at, or the game will begin to stutter and may even crash over a certain period of time!

Available Options

• Minimum
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Ultra

RE Engine tries its best to keep your graphics card within its VRAM limitations and as such you may be able to attempt higher texture quality. Same VRAM utilisation can be reported on an RTX 2080 Ti between Low and Ultra, suggesting that texture quality between these settings is the same while the cache set aside to prevent texture pop-in and stuttering is increased the higher the setting. Minimum texture quality will see a drop in texture quality alongside VRAM consumption.

It is suggested that players attempt each and every setting if they are unsure about it and if you notice extra stuttering, turn down the setting a notch. If you notice extra texture pop-in and have the VRAM to spare, turn the setting up a notch.

Adjusting the texture filtering quality will allow you to adjust texture sharpness and how clear textures look at a distance and at oblique angles. Texture filtering on most systems has a negligible performance impact and should be set to High or Ultra as a result. Performance impact is often between 1-4 FPS.

Adjusting the mesh quality setting will allow you to change the quality of the meshes used on models in-game. It should be noted that there is not much of a performance impact to this setting and the differences between Low and High are very difficult to tell in many cases, including performance and as a result you should try setting this to High.

Available Options

• Minimum
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Ultra

Ultra quality does have a noticeable impact on image quality but not much impact on performance also. Xbox One X utilises mesh quality identical to that of High.

Adjusting shadow quality in this game will adjust the resolution of shadows and how far shadows can be rendered at. Shadows in this game can be reasonably demanding and as such you should test what setting is suitable for your system. It should be noted in some areas, shadow distance is relatively short even on Ultra, so you should not worry about this if you notice it.

Available Options

• Minimum
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Ultra

Xbox One X utilises a setting near identical to the High quality option. High shadow quality is the sweet spot between quality and performance.

Enabling the shadow cache will improve your performance, however will increase VRAM consumption. It is suggested you enable this setting, however if you begin to notice more stuttering when enabled, set this setting to off.

Available Options

• On
• Off

There is no graphical impact when enabling or disabling the setting.

Ambient occlusion is the setting that allows shadows to be cast by indirect lighting and will add depth to cutscenes and the game overall when enabled. You have three different ambient occlusion methods available and a disabled option.

Available Options

• Off
• SSAO (Variable)
• HDAO (Variable)
• HBAO+ (Variable)

It should be noted that in actual gameplay, ambient occlusion is disabled if you select SSAO (Variable) and uses fake shadow drops in some areas instead. SSAO (Variable) will have ambient occlusion enabled in cutscenes at all times, however. Meanwhile, HDAO (Variable) and HBAO+ (Variable) do have ambient occlusion enabled in gameplay, although still to a relatively small degree and fully enabled in cutscenes.

Xbox One X utilises the SSAO (Variable) setting.

Contact shadows are high-resolution shadows utilised in cutscenes but not in gameplay. These shadows when enabled in gameplay will cast more shadows from things such as hair or clothing, however because they are not meant to be utilised in gameplay, they are low resolution instead and sometimes buggy.

Performance impact is minor in most cases, although you can expect up to 10 FPS+ drops in certain circumstances. This graphical edit may cause unintentional shadowing on some objects, as seen below. This doesn’t happen on most objects, but should be noted that it can occur.

To enable these contact shadows, enter your game installation folder and open up dmc5config.ini in a text editor. If you want to see the difference before trying these out yourself, try viewing [url-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJkVqM45qKE]this video[/url] by GPUnity to see the differences.

Find the setting named ContactShadowSetting=CUSTOM and set CUSTOM to ON and then save the file. To disable these, revert this back to CUSTOM and do not set this to OFF.

Anti-aliasing is a technique used in order to smooth out the edges of a model in-game. Devil May Cry 5does not allow you to disable Anti-aliasing completely and as a result you must use one of two of its Anti-aliasing options.

Available Options

• TAA
• TAA+FXAA

The suggested setting is TAA+FXAA however, as Anti-aliasing does not impact performance massively. Those in search of performance should try lowering other settings first.

Xbox One X utilises the TAA+FXAA setting.

Adjusting the effects quality will allow you to adjust the quality of effects shown on screen when they are needed, such as when an Overture Devil Breaker uses its electrical effects. These effects can be very intensive and are often the cause of most framerate drops.

Available Options

• Low
• Medium
• High

You may see more consistent or higher framerate if you lower the setting quality, without much visual quality loss.

Allows you to enable or disable motion blur in-game cutscenes. Motion Blur’s “On” option is labelled as “Variable” and Variable means disabled in gameplay but on for cutscenes when it’s down to most graphics options. Personal preference setting, although will impact performance in cutscenes.

Available Options

• Variable
• Off

Xbox One X utilises the On (Variable) setting.

Bloom’s setting allows you to enable or disable a feature that will brighten up lighting similar to how it works in a realistic setting. This setting brightening up lights may cause some people to not like the look and as such it is a personal preference setting. The setting will hardly harm performance when enabled and as a result disabling them will not improve performance much.

Available Options

• On
• Off

Lens flare’s setting allows you to enable or disable a feature that will add lens flare to very bright lights such as car lights. Similar to bloom, these may not be to your liking and you can disable them. The setting will hardly harm performance when enabled and as a result disabling them will not improve performance much.

Available Options

• On
• Off

This setting controls whether or not chromatic aberration is enabled or disabled. The effect will slightly adjust the camera focal to simulate that of viewing the game from a camera, resulting in a less clearer image. The setting, like Bloom and Lens Flare is personal preference and will not harm performance much when enabled. Likewise, it will not improve performance much when disabled.

Available Options

• On
• Off

Allows you to adjust the colour ranges. This setting will not harm performance nor will it improve performance. This setting is down to personal preference or down to how your monitor handles colouring.

Available Options

• sRGB
• BT.709

Volumetric lighting quality is adjusted by this setting. Devil May Cry 5 makes sparse usage of volumetric lighting, however it is used sometimes.

You will find that the Low setting is the sweetspot for performance and quality, as the amount if volumetric lights is not affected by the setting when enabled. If set to High, the amount of aliasing on the volumetric lights is reduced/non-existent, which is expensive to maintain in most games although not too expensive here.

Available Options

• None
• Low
• High

You can disable the effect for maximum performance at the cost of image quality reduction. Xbox One X utilises this setting at a match for Low quality.

Screen space reflections are enabled in cutscenes when this setting is enabled. Otherwise, this setting is not enabled in gameplay and as a result cubemaps in gameplay are used for reflection handling instead. It is unknown if these can be enabled in gameplay via config file editing.

Available Options

• Variable
• Off

You will see no performance gain or drop from enabling or disabling this setting in gameplay and only see these gains or drops in cutscenes. Xbox One X utilises the On (Variable) setting.

Subsurface scattering is a setting that simulates light passing through the skin. This setting, similar to screen space reflections is only enabled in cutscenes and is not enabled in gameplay.

Available Options

• Variable
• Off

You will see no performance gain or drop from enabling or disabling this setting in gameplay and only see these gains or drops in cutscenes. Xbox One X utilises the On (Variable) setting.