Glory to the Heroes Graphics Settings: Best Options for High FPS

Glory to the Heroes requires manual configuration in the graphics menu before jumping into your first deployment. Running the game on default or mismatched presets causes heavy framerate drops, input lag, visual artifacts, and even startup crashes. Developer Deaf Tone Games explicitly warns against using Cinematic presets or hardware ray tracing for real-time matches, highlighting Lumen global illumination and reflections as the primary performance drains. Lowering Lumen to Light Propagation Volumes (LPV) and enabling upscalers like DLSS, FSR, or XeSS stabilizes framerates across both mid-range and high-end systems.

Developer Warnings and Major Performance Bottlenecks

Upon launching an early build or fresh installation, the game displays an explicit notice stating that graphic settings must match your system hardware. Cinematic presets and hardware ray tracing are not designed for fluid combat, and enabling either without high-tier tuning severely degrades gameplay performance.

The biggest visual culprits affecting framerates include:

• Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections: Lumen is the most computationally demanding feature in the engine. While it delivers accurate bounced lighting across war-torn environments like Chasiv Yar and Krynky, high settings drag frame delivery down significantly.
• Hardware Ray Tracing: Setting hardware ray tracing active forces recursive reflection bounces and distance field tracing, which overburdens even high-end graphics cards.
• Motion Blur and Post-Processing: Motion blur defaults to off as of Patch 0.1.1. Heavy bloom, lens flare, and chromatic aberration add visual clutter that obscures enemy silhouettes at long range without improving game stability.
• Resolution Scaling: Running native 1440p or 4K without temporal upscaling leads to severe GPU load in dense combat zones with active smoke and foliage.

Day One Patch 0.1.1 addressed several backend graphics problems, resolving an issue where Low and Medium global illumination remained stuck on higher quality buckets. Low and Medium GI now properly fall back to LPV (Light Propagation Volumes), significantly lowering rendering strain.

Best Graphics Settings Configurations

Because Glory to the Heroes blends photogrammetry scans with intensive combined-arms combat, settings should balance target acquisition with framerate stability.

Setting Explanations for Tactical Play

• Global Illumination & Reflections: Keep GI set to Low or Medium so the engine relies on LPV instead of full Lumen bounces. Avoid enabling secondary reflection bounces or hit lighting under ray-traced reflections, as multi-bounce tracing scales down GPU efficiency rapidly.
• Screen Traces: Setting reflection methods to trace against the screen first before falling back to other methods reduces GPU cost while keeping wet streets and puddles visually grounded.
• Foliage and View Distance: Keep View Distance on High or Ultra whenever possible. In tactical engagements across rural fields or forested trenches, rendering enemy silhouettes before they enter effective firing range is vital for target identification.
• Post-Processing (Blur, Grain, Flare): Turn Motion Blur down to zero. Turn off Film Grain and Lens Flare. These cinematic filters darken screen edges and add optical distortion, which impedes spotting camouflaged soldiers and faction armbands in low-light environments.
• Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS): If you experience micro-stuttering or drops below 60 FPS at native resolution, turn on DLSS, FSR, or Intel XeSS in Quality or Balanced mode. Testers using frame generation reported jumps to a steady 60 FPS, though ensure your game is updated past Patch 0.1.1 to avoid a startup GPU hang linked to initial frame-generation setups.

Official PC System Requirements

The hardware specifications below reflect the demands of the Early Access and demo versions of the game as confirmed by Deaf Tone Games:

The recommended specification calls for 32 GB of RAM because large-scale tactical simulations with dynamic destruction, multi-squad engagements, and photogrammetry map assets generate heavy asset caching loads. Installing the game on a high-speed SSD or NVMe drive is strongly advised to eliminate asset pop-in while transitioning between open rural zones and dense urban districts.

Troubleshooting Performance Issues, Stutters, and Crashes

Players in community discussions and testing footage have reported encountering severe hitching or menu instability when testing early builds. If your game runs poorly or fails to boot properly, use the following troubleshooting steps:

1. Avoid Extreme or Cinematic Presets on Top-Tier Cards: Video testing conducted on an RTX 5090 with 128 GB of RAM still experienced sluggish menu responses and drops to 54–63 FPS when forced onto Epic and experimental settings. High and Epic presets fully uncap internal visual features that are not yet optimized for regular gameplay.
2. Recovering From Black Screens and Crashes: If changing graphics settings individually causes a black screen or crash on startup, use the Steam startup option -safemode to force baseline video parameters. Patch 0.1.1 updated the "Restore Defaults" and fresh install behaviors to automatically select graphical quality tiers based on available VRAM and native display resolution.
3. Menu Sluggishness vs. In-Game FPS: Some players reported that opening the tactical deployment menu or stash screens drops UI responsiveness significantly even when in-game combat runs above 80 FPS. If the spawn menu hitches, wait for the squad list to synchronize before clicking deploy points.
4. 4K HUD and Scaling Quirks: Community members playing at 4K resolutions observed that the in-game HUD and inventory item descriptions appear extremely small. If text scaling options in the menu do not adjust properly on your monitor, dropping display resolution to 1440p can restore legible inventory interfaces until further UI scaling updates arrive.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Glory to the Heroes support DLSS, FSR, and XeSS?

Yes. The official in-game graphics interface includes upscaling support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS to help maintain playable frame rates at higher resolutions with minimal impact on visual clarity.

Why is ray tracing not recommended?

The developers specifically state that hardware ray tracing severely impacts performance across most PC configurations. Enabling hardware ray tracing turns on mesh sign distance fields and multiple reflection bounces, causing massive framerate drops in combat zones.

How do I stop the game from stuttering during matches?

Lower Global Illumination to Medium or Low to engage the lighter LPV method, turn off hardware ray tracing, disable motion blur, and verify that your system is updated to Patch 0.1.1 or later. The patch resolved recurring hitches caused by character animation costs, accumulated battlefield corpses, and clustered AI spawn waves.