The First Descendant: NVIDIA RTX 4060 Laptop GPU Settings for 60 FPS

The First Descendant has maintained its position among the most-played games on Steam with over 115K concurrent players (daily). Our optimization guide provides a closer look at the game’s performance, highlighting the most taxing graphics settings from the mix. Running the game at 1080p “Ultra” is relatively straightforward on an RTX 4060 or higher. Anything lower will require some tweaks to achieve 60 FPS. Here’s how “The First Descendant” performs on a GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU.

The RTX 4060 laptop GPU averages less than 40 FPS at 1200p Ultra, with ray tracing disabled. DLSS “Quality” pushes the framerates to 51.5 FPS with 1% lows of 41.5 FPS. Further enabling frame generation grants a 53% FPS uplift, propelling the averages to 79 FPS.

We used the Alienware x14 (2023) for this benchmark. The laptop is powered by a Core i7-13620H processor, a GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU, and 32 GB (8GB x4) DDR5-4800 memory. It offers a “Silent” mode for gaming at lower quality, and an “Overdrive” mode that boosts CPU and GPU performance (by overclocking) a notch.

Enabling “Ray-tracing Ultra” sets you back in the vicinity of 60 FPS with 1% lows of 43 FPS. The “Ray Tracing High” and “RT Medium” presets yield roughly the same performance, averaging slightly over 60 FPS. This indicates a hard GPU bottleneck as frame generation is already enabled.

To conclude, you can either run “The First Descendant” at 79 FPS using the ultra-quality preset and DLSS Frame Generation or at 64 FPS using the ultra-quality preset with “Ray Tracing” and Frame Generation. If you’d rather avoid frame generation, you are left with the ultra-quality preset with DLSS “Quality” or “Balanced.”

1600p is also doable, but you’ll need to disable ray-tracing, and set DLSS Frame Generation to the “Balanced” quality preset. This yields an average of over 60 FPS with lows of 40.1 FPS. The frametimes were acceptable varying by ~15ms through the course of the benchmark.