Marvel Rivals is built on Unreal Engine 5, and it ships with some of the engine’s heaviest features turned on in the higher presets. Lumen lighting and Lumen reflections look great in screenshots. In a 6v6 team fight with twelve ultimates going off at once, they are also the main reason a decent PC that feels smooth in the spawn room starts to drop frames when it matters.
The good news is that the settings eating your frames are mostly not the ones that help you play. The values below cut the expensive lighting, keep enemies and ability effects readable, and get input lag as low as the game allows. Turn on the FPS display in the settings while you tune, and test in a real match, not the practice range.
Why Marvel Rivals drops FPS in team fights
Most of the time the game is GPU limited. Global illumination, reflections and shadows are all calculated per frame, and every ability that fills the screen with particles adds to that. When six heroes stack abilities in one spot, the effects load spikes and your 1% lows fall hard, even if the average FPS still looks fine.
Older processors make it worse. Team fights are also busy for the CPU, and on a four-core chip or an older six-core you can lose a big chunk of your frame rate in exactly the moments that decide the round. If lowering graphics settings barely changes your FPS, the processor is the limit and our guide on fixing a CPU bottleneck is the better place to start.
Frame rate also affects how the game feels beyond smoothness. Around launch, players posted tests showing some heroes’ movement and damage behaving differently at low FPS. Whether or not every case has been patched, a stable, high frame rate is the safest place to be.
Best Marvel Rivals graphics settings
Set Graphics Quality to Custom, then change these individually. Leave Texture Detail where your VRAM allows; it costs memory, not much speed.
| Setting | Recommended Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Global Illumination | SSGI – Low Quality | Lumen GI is the most expensive option in the game. SSGI Low keeps basic lighting for a fraction of the cost. |
| Reflection Quality | Screen Space Reflections | Lumen reflections add a heavy GPU load and give nothing in a fight. |
| Ray Tracing | Off | Stacks on top of Lumen and can cost a quarter or more of your frame rate. |
| Shadow Detail | Low or Medium | Medium keeps shadows that can give away a flanker. Use Low if you need the frames. |
| Effects Detail | Low | Ability effects cause the biggest dips during team fights. |
| Model Detail | Low | Fewer polygons on distant objects with no effect on hero readability. |
| Post-Processing | Low | Cuts bloom and screen effects that wash out the image. |
| Foliage Quality | Low | Less clutter on maps with plants, and a few extra frames. |
| Texture Detail | Medium (High with 8 GB+ VRAM) | Only lower it if you run out of VRAM and get stutter. |
| Motion Blur | Off | Blur smears targets while you track them and adds a small cost. |
The two lighting settings at the top matter more than the rest of the table combined. Estimates for how much Lumen costs vary a lot between guides and between GPUs, from under ten percent to dozens of frames on mid-range cards. That spread is the reason to test it yourself: switch Global Illumination between Lumen and SSGI Low in the same spot and watch the counter. On most systems the difference is obvious within seconds.
Effects Detail on Low does not hide abilities. Telegraphs and hitboxes stay the same; you just get fewer extra particles around them, which arguably makes fights easier to read.
Display, upscaling and latency settings
These settings decide how responsive the game feels. Get them right before you chase higher numbers on the counter.
| Setting | Recommended Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Display Mode | Fullscreen | Exclusive fullscreen gives the most direct path to the screen and the most consistent frame pacing. |
| Resolution | Native | Lower resolutions are a last resort. Use upscaling instead. |
| V-Sync | Off | V-Sync holds frames back and adds input lag you can feel in aim duels. |
| Frame Rate Limit | 3 to 5 below your refresh rate | Keeps G-Sync/FreeSync active and stops the GPU from maxing out, which lowers latency. |
| NVIDIA Reflex | On + Boost (AMD: Anti-Lag On) | Cuts the render queue so your inputs reach the screen sooner. |
| Super Resolution Type | DLSS on RTX, FSR on AMD, XeSS on Arc, TSR on older cards | Use the upscaler made for your GPU; only one can be active. |
| Super Resolution Mode | Quality (Balanced if needed) | Quality looks close to native. Performance mode gets blurry at 1080p. |
| Super-Resolution Sharpening | Around 70 to 80 | Brings back detail that upscaling softens. |
| Frame Generation | Off | Adds latency and shows frames that do not respond to your input. |
Frame generation is worth a closer look because the game advertises it. It doubles the number on your FPS counter, but the generated frames are guesses between real ones, and the latency stays tied to your real frame rate (plus some extra). In a slower single-player game that trade can be fine. In a hero shooter where you are tracking Spider-Man or Black Panther, it makes aim feel floaty. If your real frame rate is already above 120, you gain nothing you can use.
If you have a strong GPU and you sit at your frame cap with room to spare, switch upscaling off or use DLAA for a sharper image. Extra frames above the cap do nothing, so spend the headroom on clarity.
Stutter after patches: let shaders compile
Unreal Engine 5 games compile shaders for your specific GPU and driver. Marvel Rivals does part of this on first launch, but after a game patch or a driver update you will often get hitches in your first matches as new shaders build.
After a patch or a new GPU driver, play a Quick Match or a few minutes in the practice range before queuing Competitive. The first stutters are shader compilation and they fade as the cache fills.
If the stutter is still there after several matches, the cache may be corrupted. Clearing it forces a clean rebuild; our guide on how to clear shader cache covers NVIDIA, AMD and the DirectX cache. For stutter that is not tied to updates, see how to fix stuttering in games.
You may see guides recommending Engine.ini edits for Marvel Rivals. We’d skip them. Patches can overwrite config edits, a broken file is hard to troubleshoot, and the in-game options above already cover the settings that matter.
What hardware you need for high FPS
The listed minimum is a GTX 1060, RX 580 or Arc A380 with a Core i5-6600K or Ryzen 5 1600X. The recommended tier is an RTX 2060 Super, RX 5700 XT or Arc A750 with a Core i5-10400 or Ryzen 5 5600X and 16 GB of RAM. Both tiers are aimed at roughly 60 FPS, not at a 144 Hz or 240 Hz monitor.
With the settings in this guide, a current mid-range GPU and a modern six- or eight-core CPU should hold well above 120 FPS at 1080p in most fights. RAM also matters more than people expect. Running two sticks in dual channel with XMP or EXPO enabled improves 1% lows, which is what you feel in team fights.
See what your PC should manage before you start tweaking:
Profile Picker
Build your first FPS profile
Rock-Solid 60 FPS
Prioritize frame consistency over raw throughput. Best for competitive titles where 1% lows matter more than peaks.
- Limit background CPU usage to ≤5%
- Disable Windows Game Mode interference
- Set process priority to High for your game
- Enable Interrupt Affinity for GPU
Windows and driver settings for Marvel Rivals
A few changes outside the game help with stutter and frame pacing:
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Keep your GPU driver current. New drivers often include fixes for popular UE5 games. Expect a short shader rebuild after each one.
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Set the GPU power mode to maximum performance in the NVIDIA Control Panel or check the AMD Radeon settings if you are on a Radeon card.
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On laptops, make sure Windows runs the game on the dedicated GPU (Settings, System, Display, Graphics).
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Keep Game Mode on in most cases; our guide to Windows Game Mode on or off explains when it helps.
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Close overlays you don’t need. Keep one FPS counter and turn off the rest.
For the Windows side, FPSTweak can apply the power plan, background service and CPU core parking changes in one go, and every tweak can be reverted. In-game settings still have to be set by hand.
If you want to go further on latency, read how to reduce input lag in Windows 11. Playing other shooters too? Our Apex Legends settings and Valorant settings use the same approach.