Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 PC Optimized Settings & Performance

Expedition 33 runs well on most midrange and entry-level PCs. You can get away with an immersive 1080p 60 FPS experience even with the 4.5 year old GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB:

• The RTX 3060 averages 50 FPS at 1080p “Epic” quality with DLSS upscaling.
• The RTX 4060 Ti is 42% faster with an average frame rate of 71 FPS and 55.5 FPS lows.
• The RTX 4070 holds a ~30% lead over the 4060 Ti, averaging 92 FPS with 72.5 FPS lows.

The GeForce RTX 3060 is eliminated from the race at 1440p, making the RTX 4060 Ti the slowest part on the chart:

• The RTX 4060 Ti averages 61 FPS at 1440p “Epic” with DLSS upscaling.
• The RTX 4070 makes it to 80 FPS with 60 FPS lows.
• The RTX 4070 Ti yields 88 FPS on average with 71 FPS lows.
• The RTX 5070 Ti pushes 100 FPS with 80.5 FPS lows.

4K UHD requires a GeForce RTX 4070 or higher for playable frame rates, including performance mode upscaling:

• The RTX 4070 averages 58 FPS with 45 FPS lows.
• The RTX 4070 Ti is 14% faster, averaging 66 FPS and 52.5 FPS lows.
• The RTX 5070 Ti and the RTX 4080 Super average over 80 FPS with 64-66 FPS lows.
• The RTX 4090 sits at the top with 95 FPS average and 75 FPS lows.

The Graphics Presets exhibit sufficient scaling across the four quality options. The Epic quality preset averaged 53 FPS at 4K (DLAA) on our setup. Lowering it produced the following performance gains:

• High: 70 FPS (+32%).
• Medium: 84 FPS (+58%).
• Low: 90 FPS (+70%).

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 uses UE5’s Virtual Shadows to render contact-hardened soft shadows. The result is suboptimal, often producing noisy shadows prone to artifacting and aliasing. Regardless, they’re quite the performance hogs:

• Epic quality renders the best shadows, lowering frame rates by up to 15%.
• High slightly reduces the shadow map resolution (-8%).
• Medium drastically lowers shadow and penumbra quality (-3%).
• Low reduces the shadows to blurry blobs.

Expedition 33 leverages Lumen GI (software). Lowering the quality yields minor performance gains at the cost of reduced shadowing detail.

• Epic produces the best lighting with detailed ambient shadows. It’s 4% slower than the rest.
• High reduces the distance field LOD, removing shadows from finer geometry like foliage, cracks, and crannies.
• Medium reduces the GI intensity and range.
• Low seems to disable Lumen in favor of distance field ambient occlusion.

Post Processing enables several shaders, including motion blur, depth of field, aberration, vignette, tonemapper, bloom, lens flare, adaptation, and ambient occlusion. The first four can be disabled for a slight FPS gain. It reduces frame rates by up to 6%.

• High disables tonemapping and high-quality bloom.
• Medium reduces ambient occlusion and disables lens flare.
• Low disables adaptation, ambient occlusion, and most other shaders.

Effects Quality adjusts the detail of particle lighting and other special effects used in combat and player interactions. Lowering it can grant a 10-15% performance boost.

• Switching to high grants the largest FPS gain. Apart from particle effects, atmospheric light scattering is disabled.

Shading Quality adjusts the quality of certain lighting shaders, which affects how light interacts with different surfaces. In practice, it seems to set the degree of light permeability (and GI?) through dense foliage.

• The Epic quality option is 4-6% slower than the rest.