Pragmata is Capcom’s second RE Engine-based game in just a few months, and while the gameplay feels like it was ripped straight out of the Xbox 360 era, the game looks much better. And, because it’s a relatively small game built on the engine Capcom built for Resident Evil, it runs extremely well across a wide range of hardware. Hell, it even looks pretty good on the Nintendo Switch 2.
Most gaming PCs should be able to run Pragmata with little issue, but just like with any PC game, the trick is finding that perfect middle ground between image quality and performance. For anyone with a high-end machine packing something like an RTX 5080, this will just mean cranking up all the settings, turning path tracing and frame generation on and just going wild, but for most people, some light tweaking can go a long way here.
The Ray Tracing Problem
Pragmata largely takes place on a giant space station on the moon or something – I don’t know, I didn’t really pay much attention to the story. Because of this setting, there are a ton of reflective surfaces and cool lighting effects that really lend themselves to ray tracing. And, well, yeah, ray tracing does make the game look much better, but only if you’re lucky enough to have a high-end Nvidia card.
There are basically two types of ray tracing effects on offer in Pragmata, a ‘ray tracing’ toggle which will enable RT Global Illumination and Reflections, and Path Tracing, which completely replaces the rasterized lighting engine with ray tracing. You’d think that in a game with so many shiny surfaces, the regular ray traced reflections would go a long way to enhancing the look of the game, but in some places it actually makes the game worse.
This is very apparent in the Hideout, the Firelink Shrine in space that you return to whenever you die or have to make some upgrades. The metallic floors have a dark gray reflective sheen to them, which looks awesome when combined with the path traced lighting. But on the lower ray traced settings, the reflections from the indirect lighting are incredibly noisy.
There’s one hallway I found a couple hours into the game where this setting makes it look like there are raindrops falling on the floor, even though we’re indoors… in space. Curiously, this type of floor looks better with no ray tracing at all, which is excellent news for anyone that wants to maximise performance anyway.
It’s a shame, though, because when you’re in an environment with a lot of more transparent reflective surfaces, the ray tracing genuinely looks fantastic. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s worth the trade off of noisy, static-y floors. A solution for this, at least for Nvidia graphics cards, would be the DLSS Ray Reconstruction setting, but that’s conveniently grayed out unless you’re using path tracing.
That’s likely because it does come with a performance cost, but it would go a long way to making the baseline ray tracing look better, especially when combined with upscaling.
However, if you have a mid-to-high-end Nvidia graphics card, I’d recommend at least trying the path tracing, because it looks incredible. Unfortunately, you can’t even turn it on with an AMD graphics card, even with FSR.
Pragmata Recommended Graphics Settings
With how easy it is to run Pragmata, most people are going to be able to run the game at high settings, even with modest graphics cards. For instance, with the RTX 3060 Ti at 1080p, you can get a good 97 fps with ray tracing enabled, and with no DLSS upscaling. It does struggle a bit when you try to turn on path tracing, with the frame rate dropping down to 44 fps, especially since that card is a bit too old to support frame generation.
Instead, the question comes down to what your performance goals for pragmata actually are. If you’re good with 60 fps, most people will be able to reach that by just turning the preset to “Quality” or “Balanced” and calling it a day. But PC gaming is, at its core, all about tweaking things to get it running just right, and you can tune Pragmata to give you close to the “Balanced” preset when it comes to performance, while looking extremely similar to the “Quality Preset.”
In the interest of time, it’s best to start with the “Balanced” preset and tweak it from there. Luckily, the settings menu has a little preview image that shows you roughly what each setting is changing, along with the impact to your VRAM and the GPU itself. My goal here is to keep image quality as good as possible, particularly in combat, while maximising the frame rate.
Global Illumination Quality: Medium
In most modern games, lighting is one of the biggest drags on GPU performance. There are three different settings, and the Balanced preset sets the global illumination quality to high. However, while this does make a big difference to atmospheric lighting and really enhances reflections, it is quite heavy on your performance.
By my measurements, moving from the high setting to medium will save you a solid 11% performance. That will give you a bit of a hit to image quality, to be sure, but with the RTX 5080 it took me from 101 fps with max lighting to 113 fps at 4K. That’s worth it.
Hair Quality: Medium
For some reason, modern developers keep trying to work some version of fancy hair technology into games, and every time it comes with a huge cost to performance. The same is true here, too. The worst part is that there’s only really hair on one character, so it feels completely unnecessary.
My gut tells me that most people should turn this setting down to low, but it genuinely looks bad when turned all the way down. I’d pick the middle ground here, and set it to medium. Or, if you just care about maximising frame rate, and especially if you’re on a handheld, just turn this all the way down.
Texture Quality: It Depends
When you select the “Balanced” preset, it’s going to default to the “High: 2GB” setting for textures. That’s fine if you have a low-end card, but my advice would be to crank this setting all the way up and only lower it if your game starts stuttering. Texture Quality only affects game performance if you’re running out of VRAM, so the right setting really depends on what kind of GPU you’re using.
If you have at least 8GB of VRAM, just leave it maxed out, unless you’re playing at 4K. And, really, if you’re playing at 4K, you should have a GPU with more than 8GB anyway.
Texture Filtering: It Also Depends
Just like with Texture Quality, Texture Filtering only really affects your performance if you’re running out of VRAM. Turn it all the way up if you have the VRAM budget for it, and only turn it down if you start stuttering.
Mesh Quality: Max
Mesh Quality is another VRAM budget question. It changes how 3D models are rendered, and I prefer to keep character models looking as high-end as possible. Especially with all the weird robots that you’ll be going against in Pragmata. Max out mesh quality, and then turn it down to “High” if you’re over your VRAM budget.
Shadow Quality: High
Ok, hear me out. The Balanced preset sets shadow quality to medium, which does save quite a bit of performance. But with the way that the lighting is set up in this game, there are shadows all over the place, and moving it up to high just goes that extra little way to making it look better, especially since we turned down Global Illumination earlier.
Bumping up the shadows like this hardly touches the actual processing load of the game, and only slightly increases the VRAM demand. So, if you’re right up against your VRAM limit, absolutely keep shadows at medium. For everyone else though, you probably won’t notice the performance hit of High Shadows.
Shadow Cache: On
The shadow cache is simply a toggle that lets the game store shadow information in your VRAM. If you have the spare VRAM, this will greatly improve performance, because the game has less to dig for whenever it’s drawing a scene. For most people that aren’t VRAM-limited, turning this off will basically just shave 10% off of your fps. Nobody wants that. Leave this on unless you’ve already turned everything else off and you still need VRAM.
Contact Shadows: On
This is another toggle, and it changes the way shadows are cast on 3D objects. Turning it off makes basically no impact on your performance, so I’d just leave it on. The game looks a tiny bit better with them enabled, and unless you’re really scraping by with low-end hardware, it’s going to run fine.
Effects Quality: Max
This is largely why I turned down the global illumination earlier. Listen, after you fight basically any enemy, it explodes into a mass of fire, metal and some kind of blue goo. It looks really freaking cool. You can save a bit of performance by lowering the effects quality, but you’d really be missing out.
This is definitely one of those things that come down to personal preference, though. So, if you care more about environmental lighting than explosions, then turn up Global Illumination instead. I, for one, wouldn’t trade these robot explosions for the world.
Video Quality: It Depends on What Resolution You’re Playing At
There are only two options for Video Quality, and it only affects cutscenes. If you’re playing at 1080p, keep the video quality at 1080p. And, then, if you’re playing at 4K, turn it up, it’s that simple.
Of course, turning up the cutscene quality will lower your frame rate in cutscenes a bit, but it’s a cutscene, it doesn’t need to be running at 120 fps. I said it.
Anti-Aliasing: FXAA+TAA
The right setting for anti-aliasing is going to depend entirely on whether or not you’re using upscaling. If you’re turning on DLSS or FSR, then you don’t really need the game’s built-in Anti-Aliasing. However, if you’re intent on playing the game at native resolution, just enable FXAA+TAA or turn Anti-Aliasing off if you’re really struggling with performance.
Ambient Occlusion – SSAO
Ambient Occlusion is one of the most obvious places to cut in order to save performance. By turning it off, you’ll get around 5% more frames, but the game will lose a lot of subtle detail in various objects. I prefer to keep it on, but this is one of the first things you should turn off if you’re having trouble hitting 60 fps.
Bloom: Personal Preference
Bloom doesn’t really affect your performance, so keep it on or turn it off depending on how much you like the effect.
Screen Space Reflections: On
Because of the sheer amount of reflective surfaces in Pragmata, Screen Space Reflections make a huge impact on how the game looks. There are so many glass panels and shiny floors that look really cool with this enabled. That said, turning it off will probably improve your frame rate by 10%, so it makes a lot of sense to disable it if you’re trying to maximise frame rate at all costs.
Subsurface Scattering: Off
Subsurface Scattering changes the way that light interacts with skin, making it look much more realistic. This was a huge deal in something like Resident Evil: Requiem, because everything was human or human-adjacent. In Pragmata, though? It really only affects Diana, and you’ll be spending most of the time looking at the back of her head as she rides on your shoulder hacking robots. It doesn’t affect performance that much, but it’s still not really worth the performance cost.
Motion Blur, Lens Flare, Lens Distortion and Depth of Field
All of these are post-processing effects that hardly impact game performance. They do change the overall presentation, but it’s really down to your personal taste here. I despise motion blur, so I turn that off in every game that’ll let me, but really it’s up to you.
How Do These Settings Affect Performance?
To test my settings for Pragmata, I found a section relatively early on, with a bunch of lasers and glass surfaces, along with a little combat encounter at the end to give me a good idea how well it would perform.
I then tested the game at three separate resolutions, with three different graphics cards to get a rough idea of how the game would perform. I ran the game with an RTX 3060 Ti at 1080p, an AMD Radeon RX 9070 at 1440p and an RTX 5080 at 4K.
I was most surprised by how well the RTX 3060 Ti held up. That graphics card is getting quite old at this point, but with my tweaked settings, it was able to get around 100 to 110 fps in this section. The GPU was even able to stretch up to 1440p, getting around 60-70 fps at that resolution.
Then, the Radeon RX 9070 absolutely soars at 1440p, able to get between 130 and 140 fps with my recommended settings.This GPU was also able to stretch up to 4K, getting around 70 to 80 fps.
At 4K, the RTX 5080 is able to swing between 100 and 110 fps with the recommended settings, with plenty of space left over for ray or path tracing if you really want to make the game look better. Though, with the latter, I’d suggest setting DLSS to the Performance setting.
To test each of the presets themselves, though, I tossed in an RTX 5090 and set the resolution to 4K to see how much of an impact each change would have on the massive second boss battle. This is a scene with a lot of complicated effects and lighting, so the differences are really going to show themselves. It’s important to keep in mind though, that every time I did this boss fight was slightly different, so there’s some wiggle room in these results.
The minimum preset is what you’d be playing on a handheld, and it’s no surprise that the RTX 5090 was able to get a solid 195 fps, but the game looks incredibly flat and lifeless. That’s kind of fitting for a game about 3D printed robots, though.
The balanced preset brings the average frame rate down to around 126 fps, but it already looks much better. The reflections in the little puddles around Times Square make the game pop, and the boss’s attack effects actually have some meat to them.
What’s interesting, though, is that my recommended settings, even though I turned up effects settings and shadows, the frame rate actually goes up to an average of 129 fps. That’s not a huge difference by any means, but it does make all the little explosions look much better, without having too much of an impact on the ambient details of the scene.
Then, of course as we start turning up the settings the frame rate starts to drop. Bringing it to the Quality preset enables ray tracing, and the frame rate drops all the way down to 115 fps. That’s still a very solid frame rate, and you can always enable DLSS to bring the performance up a bit higher.
Finally, maxing out every setting with path tracing comes with a pretty massive performance hit. However, the game won’t actually let you turn on path tracing without DLSS, so that softens the blow a little bit. But, even with DLSS set to balanced and without frame generation, the RTX 5090 only gets an average of 59 fps here. So, you should really only turn this setting on if you’re going to set DLSS to performance, and even then you might need to turn on frame generation to fully saturate your monitor.
At the end of the day, Pragmata runs extremely well no matter what hardware you’re running it on. Even on the RTX 3060 Ti, which is almost six years old at this point, you’re able to get nearly 120 fps at 1080p, which is going to be more than enough for most people.
But even though the game is extremely accessible for lower-end hardware, it still has plenty of room to scale up, so that even the most high-end gaming rigs can stretch their legs a bit. Tuning Pragmata really does come down to what you want out of the game, I’m just glad that it’s scalable enough to actually let people make meaningful choices about its performance.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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