Firebreak’s official PC specs include a Core i5-7600K or a Ryzen 5 1600X for a baseline 60 FPS at low-quality settings. Medium quality ramps it up to a Core i5-8500 or a Ryzen 5 2600. Playing at 1080p “Low” requires a GeForce GTX 1070 or a Radeon RX 5600 XT for a 30 FPS experience. Medium and higher presets require an RTX 3060 or an RX 6600 XT.
FBC: Firebreak Optimization Brief
- Most PCs shouldn’t have trouble hitting 60 FPS at high-quality using upscaling and 144 FPS with frame generation.
- If you’re experiencing low frame rates:
- Screen Space Reflections should be reduced to Medium or Low. Completely disabling them should be a last resort.
- Global Reflections should be reduced to Medium. The low-quality option should be avoided as it can drastically reduce the lighting quality.
- Ray-tracing requires a higher-end RTX 30 series or newer GPU. On AMD’s side, a similar Radeon RX 7000 part should suffice.
- We recommend the RT Low preset for AMD Radeon 7000 and the RT Medium preset for RTX 30 series GPUs.
- Path tracing is mainly for the RTX 40 and RTX 50 GPUs and the Radeon RX 9070 lineup.
Resolution Scaling & Graphics Presets
FBC: Firebreak scales well across resolutions, averaging 68 FPS at 4K, 121 FPS at 1440p, and 168 FPS at 1080p using the maximum quality graphics settings (minus ray-tracing).
- High: Ray Tracing Off
- 4K: 69 FPS
- 1440p: 121 FPS (+78%).
- 1080p: 168 FPS (+147%).
Firebreak’s graphics presets produce ample performance scaling, averaging 69 FPS at high, 81 FPS at medium, and 95 FPS at the low preset at 4K.
Ray Tracing & Path Tracing
The performance deficit between the three resolutions increases drastically with ray-tracing and path-tracing. However
- RT High (Path Tracing)
- 4K: 30 FPS (0%).
- 1440p: 62 FPS (+105%).
- 1080p: 95 FPS (+216%).
- RT Medium
- 4K: 37 FPS (0%).
- 1440p: 73 FPS (+97%).
- 1080p: 110 FPS (+197%).
- RT Low
- 4K: 52.5 FPS (0%).
- 1440p: 99 FPS (+88%).
- 1080p: 139.6 FPS (+165%).
Ray Tracing “High” enables path-traced reflections, global illumination, and shadows.
- It’s roughly 15% slower than medium, and 40% slower than rasterization (RT Off).
- It looks similar to high, but enhances indirect lighting, reflections, and ambient shadow detail.
Ray Tracing “Medium” leverages ray-traced reflections, shadows, and direct lighting.
- It’s 5% slower than low, and ~30% slower than rasterization (RT Off).
- It drops diffuse lighting and the associated ambient shadows.
Ray Tracing “Low” disables uses lower-quality reflections and disables shadows.
- It’s 25% slower than rasterization (RT Off).
- It falls back to raster shadows and reduces the reflection quality.
DLSS Ray Reconstruction
DLSS Ray Reconstruction improves the denoising quality when ray-tracing is enabled. It caches ray lighting data across frames (temporally), compounding high-quality pixels and filtering out the rest. This drastically improves the ray-traced lighting detail, much like supersampling.
Ray Reconstruction is 10-13% faster than the base denoisers at the RT Medium and High quality presets, but falls behind (by ~10%) at the low quality setting. We reckon it’s most efficient at high ray counts, while the hand-tuned spatio-temporal denoisers perform better at low counts.
FSR 3 and DLSS use the same denoisers (without RR), producing similar lighting quality. However, the former is 4-6% faster, making it the better option for older and lower-end PCs.
Shadow Resolution & Filtering
Shadow Resolution sets the detail of rasterized shadow maps. However, its visual and performance impacts are hardly felt.
Shadow Filtering improves shadow detail by reducing aliasing and the silhouette edge quality. It also doesn’t noticeably impact the quality or performance.
Texture Filtering & Far Object Detail
Texture Filtering improves texture clarity by continuously sampling mipmaps. Reducing its quality grants nominal FPS gains at the cost of blurrier horizontal (perpendicular to the screen) textures.
Far Object Detail adjusts the shading LOD, reducing certain lighting detail off distant surfaces at the lower setting. Hardly impacts the performance.
SSAO & Screen Space Reflections
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion enables ambient shadows along surface edges, crevices, boundaries, and intersections. Disabling it grants a 4-5% performance gain at the cost of missing shadows.
Screen Space Reflections enable on-screen reflections. They are the most taxing rasterized setting, reducing frame rates by over 20% at the highest quality.
- The medium and low quality settings look marginally worse and deliver much higher frame rates.
Effects, Global Illumination & Reflections
Effects Quality adjusts the detail of special effects, including distortions, particle lighting, embers, etc. It hardly affects the game’s quality or performance.
Global Reflections adjust the quality of off-screen reflections, primarily light bounces off smooth and semi-smooth surfaces. It improves lighting quality, color bleeding, etc. However, it’s quite taxing, reducing frame rates by 20% at high.
- Opt for medium for similar quality at higher FPS.
- Low drastically reduces the lighting quality.
Global Illumination uses rasterization to implement indirect lighting. However, it hardly affects the game’s visuals or performance.
Fog & Volumetrics
Volumetric Lighting sets the detail and density of light shafts and the dispersion of light by smoke and explosions. It mainly adjusts the intensity and brightness of volumetric light rays, with ultra quality being 4-7% slower than high and medium.
Fog adjusts the resolution of volumetric fog and smoke. High quality reduces pixelation artifacts without any notable performance costs.
Upscaling & Frame Generation
Upscaling is crucial for attaining playable frame rates with ray and path tracing in Firebreak. The game includes NVIDIA DLSS 4 and AMD FSR 3 upscaling technologies. Upscaling grants massive performance boosts over native, ranging from 2x to nearly 3x when paired with path tracing at 4K.
Upscaling comes with a lofty performance overhead in Firebreak. We assumed the hit was due to denoisers, but it persists even with rasterization. For example, performance upscaling is 80-90% faster than native 4K, but 20-30% slower than 1080p (internal resolution used):
- Generally, the base resolution and upscaled performance are within 5-10%.
- This indicates the use of heavy post-processing.
- Or perhaps a lousy implementation.
Frame Generation is instrumental for a high frame-rate experience with path tracing. Depending on the upscaling preset, it boosts performance by 60-80% at 4K.
FBC: Firebreak VRAM Usage
- Firebreak uses up to 12 GB of graphics memory at 4K, increasing to over 14 GB with path tracing.
- QHD or 1440p uses almost 11 GB with path tracing, and 10 GB without it.
- 1080p tops out under 9.5 GB with path tracing, and 9 GB without it.
Reducing the texture quality or any other graphics setting hardly reduces the VRAM consumption, with the low preset using 10.5-11 GB at 4K.
FBC: Firebreak PC Optimized Settings
| High-end | Midrange | Low-end PC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 4K | 1440p | 1080p |
| FPS Target | 60 FPS|120 FPS | 90 FPS|144 FPS | 75 FPS|120 FPS |
| Frame Generation | Off|On | Off|On | Off|On |
| Post Processing | High | High | High |
| Shadow Resolution | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Shadow Filtering | High | High | High |
| Texture Resolution | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Texture Filtering | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Far Object Detail | High | High | High |
| SSAO | On | On | On |
| SSR | High | High | High |
| Effect Quality | High | High | High |
| GI Quality | High | High | High |
| Global Reflections | High | High | High |
| Fog Quality | High | High | High |
| Volumetric Lighting | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Volumetric Spot | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra |
| Shadow Detail | High | High | High |
| Ray Tracing Preset | High | Medium | Low |
| Ray Reconstruction | On | On | Off |
| Upscaling | Performance | Balanced | Balanced |
| High-end (4K) | Mid-range (1440p) | Low-end (1080p) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Core i7-13700K|Ryzen 7 7700X | Core i5-12600K|Ryzen 5 7600 | Core i5-12400 AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| GPU | GeForce RTX 5080|RTX 4090 | GeForce RTX 4070 Super|RTX 5070 | RTX 3060|RTX 4060 |
| Memory | 32GB (dual-channel) | 16GB (dual-channel) | Less than: 16GB (dual-channel) |
